Anthropology and the theorisation of citizenship

In this paper I argue for the importance of theorising citizenship as an independent axis of social inequality in the contemporary world. As a foil, I take two intertwined tendencies within anthropological writings on migration. First is the historical trend of anthropology as a discipline to theorise against the grain of the nation-state. Second is the tendency within anthropological studies of transnationalism and migration to theorise their subject in terms of Marxian understandings of class and exploitation or in terms of the intersecting dimensions of race, class and gender (but not citizenship). The result of these approaches is to elide the role of national boundaries and citizenship as significant theoretical objects in themselves. To build my approach, I contrast the production of migrant ‘illegality’ in three national contexts: the United States, China and Australia.