In the eyes of the law,in the eyes of society: A citizenship tradition in west Mexico

Abstract

Citizenship has been in the last thirty years a significant concern of anthropologists, not least because it has been in the same period a concern of people around the world. At least, the term “citizenship” has been used widely, if not always in quite the same way as anthropologists have used it, especially those anthropologists who have paid less attention to their informants’ understandings of it. During fieldwork in west Mexico in 2007–2010, I found that my informants did not reduce being a citizen to having a relationship with the state or government. Many of them said that being a citizen was ultimately about “living in society”. Their use of the term “citizen” reminds us that many different things have been called “citizenship” over the centuries, and that some things now called “citizenship”, such as claiming rights on states, have not always been referred to as such. However, I prefer to focus on the concepts that my informants sometimes labeled “citizenship” rather than on their choice of the word itself, and to be more precise I use the term civil sociality to gloss their sense of living in society, ideally in a civil way. I focus on how civil sociality stands in relation to law as well as to rights-bearing, especially in two sets of events in which people pitched their claims in terms of both civil sociality and law. Throughout, I draw out the methodological, historical, ethnographic, theoretical, and normative implications of the way in which my informants juxtapose civil sociality and law or rights-bearing. I end the article by comparing my informants’ notions with those of anthropologists, noting not just the differences but a striking similarity. Anthropologists, like my informants, treat “society” as a ground that lies beyond institutions such as law.