Tipos de programas de autoría

“Citizenship,” as noted by Shafir, “has been a central axis of Western political philosophy”

(1998:2).²⁰ Prevailing in political science and political philosophy literature (e.g. Oldfield 1998;

Pocock 1998; Rawls 1998), the “formalist” (termed by Holston and Appadurai 1999) or

“normative” (termed by Bellamy 2008) approach analyzes citizenship in its narrowest, ideal sense, succinctly defining it as a political and juridico-legal term. In this approach, citizenship points to, for instance, the civic status or legal membership in a political community, “a mechanism for allocating rights and claims through political membership” (Brysk and Shafir 2004), and “a condition of civic equality” (Bellamy 2008). Although the nature and substance of citizenship have changed over time and across space throughout the Western history, scholars have identified two dominant discourses defining the concept of citizenship, namely the “civic republican” tradition and the “liberal” tradition (Bellamy 2008; Heater 1999; Shafir 1998).²¹ In general, the evolution of different Western definitions of citizenship has led to the concept that

20 Due to space limitations, discussions of citizenship in this review are based on Western English-language scholarship and focus on Western models of citizenship. The rationale for primarily discussing Western models of citizenship is based on hitherto “widespread aspiration” around the world “to move towards the western model of citizenship” (Castles and Davidson 2000:1-2).

21 The civic republican model of citizenship is based on the premise of “a symbiotic relationship” between citizens and the state, stressing citizens’ duty of active political participation for public good and disinterest in private pursuits, so as to maintain the proper functioning of the state and foster a sense of community and “concord” among fellow citizens (Heater 1999). The “liberal” tradition, on the other hand, focuses on citizens’ rights and the pursuit of one’s private life. In particular, it is the liberal model which reached its most developed form with the rise of the nation-states in late-eighteenth century Western Europe and North America, making it eventually dominant worldwide (ibid.).

includes four different dimensions: (political) participation, legal status, rights, and a sense of belonging (Bloemraad 2000; Bosniak 2000).

Citizenship and citizenship law are almost inseparable, as law defines the legitimacy and nature of people’s legal status in a political community. However, the operation of law in everyday life is constructed and reconstructed over time according to the circumstance and the time in which it is used (Hayden, personal conversations, April 4, 2014). Furthermore, as Constable argues, “laws, policies, and practices are not always consistent” (2013:1019). This is largely because “although law often serves as a tool of the state” to protect local citizens’ and class interests, “it can also provide some protection to others,” such as non-citizens and migrants, as a result of their “effective use of legal tactics” (ibid.:1020). Indeed, since the 1980s, closely tied to the development of more practice-based theoretical and analytical approaches in anthropology (Ortner 1984), scholars of legal anthropology have stressed the role of humans as actors in “go[ing] about with [the] law” (de Hart, van Rossum, and Sportel 2013) and negotiating law. Law is seen as a “process” (Moore 1978), in which laws are enforced to control social behavior, but such control is only partial and subject to negotiation. Other scholars further argue that people’s negotiation with law “is necessarily couched in terms of, and significantly shaped by, the normative order” (Abel 1983:135). Likewise, Hayden argues that “normative rules may set the parameters of social action and at the same time be subject to negotiation, such that the rule set itself changes” (1984:475). Thus, “rules” and “processes” must be considered together;

an approach that gives priority to one or the other is inherently problematic (ibid.; Comaroff and Roberts 1981). Taken together, a more appropriate approach to citizenship is one that considers citizenship as governed by laws yet is highly negotiable.

Diverse global and transnational processes, the decline of social welfare states, and the rise of human rights ideology in recent decades have increasingly altered the state-centered and state-controlled conditions for traditional Western citizenship definitions (Ong 2006b; Sassen 2005). Ong argues that the different traditional elements of citizenship (such as the state, territoriality, rights, and entitlements), “once assumed to go together, are becoming disarticulated from one another, and re-articulated” with “diverse universalizing norms defined by markets, neoliberal values, or human rights” (2006b:499-500). Scholars increasingly argue against the narrow, formal treatment of citizenship that confines the concept to a conventional, political relationship between individuals and the state. Instead, they argue for more encompassing, holistic approaches to understand citizenship (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005). Sociologists and anthropologists employ a “substantive” (termed by Holston and Appadurai 1999) or “empirical” (termed by Bellamy 2008) approach to conceptualize citizenship as a set of integrative political, economic, social, and cultural processes (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; B. Turner 2001, 2008), practices (Heyman 2002; B. Turner 1993), and relationships (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005). In this more process- and practice-oriented approach, citizenship is conceived of as a sociological as well as a cultural concept.

Citizenship is not only a “social construct” as a result of complicated interactions between

“individuals and groups in the state, market, family and community” (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006:11-12), but it also is understood “as a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging” (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005:4). In particular, anthropologists emphasize people’s experiences and interpretations of their own political, cultural, and economic positions

“as critical for reformulating citizenship, suggesting that the framework of cultural studies of

citizenship holds great promise for new approaches to studying immigrant lives and the politics of diversity in contemporary societies” (Coll 2010:8). In general, two broad anthropological approaches to citizenship exist.

The first approach focuses on identity politics of heterogeneous marginalized groups who emerge as “new citizens” (Hall and Held 1991) to struggle and demand their right to retain and realize unique qualities, needs, interests, and histories (Biolsi 2005; Castle 2008; Petryna 2003;

Rosaldo 1994, 1997). In particular, writing on Latino minority groups’ struggles for full membership and belonging in the U.S. while retaining their own cultural identities, Rosaldo uses the term “cultural citizenship” to refer to “the right to be different and to belong in a participatory democratic sense” (1994:402). For Rosaldo, “the right to be different” does not mean ethnic groups’ separation or detachment from the mainstream society. As Flores elaborates:

[Cultural citizenship] can be thought of as a broad range of activities of everyday life through which Latinos and other groups claim space in society, define their communities, and claim rights. It involves the right to retain difference, while also attaining membership in society. It also involves self-definition, affirmation, and empowerment.

(1997:262)

The second approach concerns the diffuse nature of state power in the process of citizen-subject formation, in which individuals internalize the power of the state to regulate their attitudes and behavior in relation to belonging to a particular state. Differing from other disciplinary vantage points on the state as it is associated with “governmental sites” and

“national institutions,” anthropologists view the power of the state as a social process, penetrating the lives of citizens in diverse ways and also relying on multiple institutions and individuals for the exercise of its power over citizens (Trouillot 2001). Works by Coutin (2003a and b, 2007), Heyman (2002, 2004), and Ong (1996, 2003) show (im)migrants’ experiences of citizenship in everyday life not only in relation to nation-states and the transnational processes,

but also through diverse social practices beyond the state that in myriad ways define racial relationships and norms of belonging. Diffuse control is evident in direct state governance (Feldman 2005), civic institutions (Chalfin 2008; Horton 2004), and in practices such as the issuance of identification documents (Gordillo 2006).

Comparing the different experiences of normalization between rich and poor Asian immigrants in the United States, Ong (1996) examines the concept of “cultural citizenship.” Like Rosaldo, Ong examines complex interactions that take place between immigrants and the American citizens with whom they interact in everyday life. Nonetheless, Ong argues that Rosaldo’s theorizing “attends to only one side of a set of unequal relationship,” giving “an erroneous impression” that social actors are free from state power and other forms of regulation (1996:738). In contrast to Rosaldo, Ong regards cultural citizenship as “a cultural process of

‘subject-ification,’ in the Foucauldian sense of self-making and being-made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration”

(ibid.:737).

While the two broad anthropological approaches to citizenship—i.e. identity politics as well as the diffuse nature of state power in producing citizen-subjects—are seemingly contradictory, I argue that they reflect two different aspects (or processes) of citizenship which are inextricably tied to complex power relations. When taking into consideration the notion of law as determinative yet negotiable, citizenship should be best understood as a process that is negotiated through efforts of individuals and collective groups to redefine its terms and conditions, but such negotiation is shaped by larger socio-political conditions. The institution and practices of Hong Kong citizenship have evolved historically according to the specific social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of Hong Kong and China. While the government,

constituted largely by people from the elite class, remains the sole institution to formally administer citizenship, my research on political practices and subjective experiences of TWP migrant wives and their marginalized citizen husbands shows that activism is a key arena that demonstrates people’s individual and collective agency in developing their own definitions of citizenship, belonging, duties, and entitlement to rights, and trying to push the state to accommodate their demands. A dynamic notion of citizenship with an emphasis on agency and subjectivity reflects that citizenship in practice is an emergent and contested process far more complex than a narrow, juridico-legal definition.