Studying citizenship as a product of social practice, requires us to examine how individuals participate in the ongoing production, maintenance, contestation, and renewal of democracy, and how they do so by engaging in practices that both impact and are affected by constantly changing relationships between social movements and the state. Both the state and social movements have received wide attention from anthropologists and other social researchers in the last decades. Scholars have studied how the state deploys its “capacities,” (Centeno and Ferraro 2014), “effects,” (Trouillot 2001), or “systems of legibility” (Scott 1998; Silverblatt 2011) over the populations it governs. They have also examined how the state deploys “governmentality” devices (Foucault 1997[1978]; Rose 1999) in order to constitute the population as its object of action (Flores 2013; Friedrich 2010; Hale 2005; Paley 2001). Anthropologists have also illustrated how social movements engage with states and at times attempt to challenge or disrupt them. Indigenous movements in Latin America, for example, have operationalized indigenous identity as a political opportunity structure, in order to resist the governmentality devices deployed against them (Jackson and Warren 2005). In Mexico and Brazil, social movements against political corruption have appropriated and reframed cultural artifacts such as monuments and stadiums in order to reduce the state’s symbolic capacity (Fenollosa and Johnston 2015).
Relationships between social movements and the state vary from one context to another, and need to be studied in their specificity. In Latin America some social movements have attempted to access state institutions or have been coopted by them (Cerruti and Grimson 2013;
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Fernandes 2010; Wickham-Crowley and Eckstein 2015). Others, like the Chilean Student Movement, have remained distrustful of the state while trying to redefine the sphere of its action (von Bulow and Bidegain Ponte 2015). Relationships between social movements and the state can also be contradictory: Risør’s (2015) study of La Clausura in El Alto, Bolivia, showed how violent collective actions led by secondary students against illegal bars functioned
simultaneously as a means for these youths to take political action, as a process of state- enhancement, and as a renegotiation of state-citizens’ relationships.
Like the state and social movements, democracy has also received wider attention from scholars recently. Anthropologists, particularly, heeded Paley’s (2002) claim that democracy is far from an uncontested term and that meanings associated with it are several and sometimes even contradictory. Political anthropologists have focused on how liberal notions of democracy are appropriated and resignified through local political traditions (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Ellison 2015) and how different social actors strategically deploy terms such as “Democracy,” “Participation,” and “Citizenship” (Dagnino 2007; Paley 2001). Further, they have examined the complicated, sometimes symbiotic relationships between democracy and violence, particularly in contexts of democratic transitions after authoritarian regimes (Humphrey and Valverde 2007). These works have in common that they are underpinned by a concept of democracy as a set of interconnected ongoing practices in constant tension and redefinition, rather than a stable political system.
In order to understand how citizenship is produced and enacted by Chilean high school students who interact with both the state and social movements, while also striving to achieve a more democratic social order, my study is informed by two main theoretical approaches. The first one is Timothy Mitchell’s understanding of the state as a “structural effect” (Mitchell
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2006[1999]). Recognizing the paradox that exists in the “network of institutional arrangement and political practice that forms the material substance of the state” being “diffuse and
ambiguously defined at its edges, whereas the public imagery of the state as an ideological construct is more coherent" (169), Mitchell’s theory proposed to study the material and ideological forms of the state (the “state-system” and the “state-idea”) not as separate phenomena but as two related products of the same historical process. In his words:
To be more precise, the phenomenon we name “the state” arises from techniques that enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract nonmaterial form. Any attempt to distinguish the abstract or ideal appearance of the state from its material reality, in taking for granted this distinction, will fail to understand it. The task of a theory of the state is not to clarify such distinctions but to historicize them. (Mitchell 2006[1999], 170)
Drawing on Foucault, Mitchell proposed that the new techniques of disciplinary organization that we usually associate with the birth of the modern state were not its products. Rather, he asserted that the same techniques of coordination and distribution of time, space, and bodies that produced modern and disciplined subjects (Ferguson and Gupta 2002) also served to trace new boundaries that distinguished and separated the domain of the state from that of civil society. “The line between state and society is not the perimeter of an intrinsic entity that can be thought of as a freestanding object or actor,” Mitchell warned us, “It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained” (175).
Mitchell’s theory has important implications for the way in which citizenship can be understood, since it highlights how different social practices trace, blur, and rewrite the
boundaries between the state and civil society. By enacting their citizenship, human beings are constantly participating in this process of state-production. Further, social practices can trace new internal frontiers and constitute novel social domains, as Mitchell proves for the case of the
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economy. A similar process was illustrated by Fernandes (2010) in a studying of the production of “civil” and “uncivil” society in Venezuela. By showing how urban social movements resist a process imposed to them and attempt to break down the symbolic and material barriers between the civil and the uncivil society, Fernandes also provided us with an illustrative example of how social movements can disrupt political cultures (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998) and, in doing so, blur and redefine the boundaries between the state, the population, and the economy.
The second theoretical approach that informs my political understanding of citizenship is Jacques Rancière’s work on democracy. According to Rancière, democracy is not a particular type of government or a sociopolitical system, but is a process by which those who are outside the perceptual coordinates of the “distribution of the sensible” – a concept defining a given social order in a particular historical momentx – interrupt this distribution through the staging of a scene of dissensus:
A dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions, or values; it is a division put in the ‘common sense’: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given (…) A political subject, as I understand it, is a capacity for staging such scenes of dissensus. (Rancière 2004b, 3004).
The literature on Latin American social movements has illustrated how democracy is constantly being enacted through social practice, producing new and unexpected forms in the process, and even changing how social actors and movements conceive and practice democracy itself (Ansell 2015; Lazar 2015). Through this work, it is possible to see “alternative
democracies” in their process of becoming. For example, Lazar’s (2008) study of political life in El Alto, Bolivia illustrated how indigenous people enact a democratic way of life that does not exactly resemble Western liberal democracies: citizenship is multi-tiered, and the relations between the individual and the state are always mediated by collective organizations. Through these organizations, Alteños stage scenes of dissensus, presenting themselves as political
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subjects with the right to be heard as legitimate interlocutors (Rancière 2004b). Social
movements in the region have not only affected state actors’ actions and redrawn the boundaries between civil society and the state, but have also challenged the “distribution of the sensible” through democratic enactment of their own citizenship (for other examples see also Stephen 2013; Risør 2015). During the last decade, high school students have challenged the distribution of the sensible in Chile too. In order to understand how they did it, it is important to also
examine citizenship from an educational perspective.