Risks of Citizenship and Fault Lines of Survival

Abstract

This article probes the contradictions and unacknowledged risks inherent in the notion of citizenship today. We explore the possible fault lines that citizenship places on the notion of universality, namely the anthropology of contexts in which citizenship and biological self-preservation are being radically decoupled as well as the policies, techniques, and media (biological, health, juridical) through which such decoupling takes place. What concepts have anthropologists brought to the fore to address the emerging "fault lines of survival" embodied in the term citizenship? How have these concepts been taken up, becoming vehicles for resisting, or at least assessing, what has become of citizenship? Moving beyond narrowly conceptualized policy problems and calculations, this article also considers alternative pathways through which the "political" is being mobilized and through which a new politics of rescue appears. ©