Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Community

Gifts

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:47:55 +0000

University of California, Los Angeles

Initially published 7 Jul 2020

Abstract:

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. This entry starts with the distinction between individual gifts and collective gifts which explains some cross-cultural misunderstandings, and moves on to review the two basic theoretical models on the engine of gifting—the spirit of the gift and the principle of reciprocity. While revealing that the highly diversified patterns of gift exchange derive from different perceptions of the relationship between culturally-constructed notions of personhood and material objects in the larger social setting, the anthropology of the gift also unpacks the nuances of social life by examining patterns of gift-giving behaviour all over the world.

Introduction

When Europeans first arrived in North America and received presents from the Native Americans they encountered, they could not understand why an equivalent return was expected by their hosts. Many Europeans believed they owed nothing in return, because a gift should be free and with no strings attached. They also assumed the Native Americans were merely pretending to be generous; hence the expression of ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ for objects and people given merely in hopes of future returns (Wilton 2009: 166-7). The famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, for example, often suspected such motivations to be guiding their Native hosts when being presented with gifts. They even rudely refused to accept them, referring to the Native Americans as impertinent and thievish in their journals (see Slaughter 2004). Yet the Native Americans considered gifts to be initiating cycles of social exchange. They felt insulted by the Europeans who either refused to accept gifts in the first place, or who did accept them but did not want to reciprocate. In their eyes, both stances proved their unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Thanks to the anthropological study of gifts and gift-giving, we can now see clearly that beneath the racist expression ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ lies the European settlers’ imposition of a culturally specific understanding of gifts onto Native Americans, who saw their function and meaning in a quite different light. To somewhat simplify the matter for the sake of clarity, I hereafter refer to the former as the individual gift that is imagined as a token of a person’s affection with no strings attached, and to the latter as the collective gift that is part and parcel of a series of collective actions with wider and profound social implications. At surface level, they represent two different prototypes of gifts and two different systems of social exchange, which are often diametrically opposed to each other. The individual gift emerged in the modern West along with the rise of individualism and the expansion of the capitalist market economy, while the collective gift has been a major system of social exchange all over the world that creates sociality through a sense of indebtedness (see Graeber 2011) and can be found in various forms in different cultures. At a deeper level, their differences are actually more rhetorical than behavioural, and more in degree than in kind. Behind the discourse of the individualised pure gift in modern times, there are still rules of gifting, expectations of returning gifts, and the social function of strengthening social ties through gift-giving, all of which are similar to their counterparts in systems of traditional collective gifts. Yet, without knowing the cross-cultural differences and similarities between the two basic types, we may be biased to place one against the other, or to misunderstand both of them.

In the following pages, this entry briefly introduces two well-known examples of the traditional and collective gift—the Kula ring and yam exchange, which both occur in the Trobriand Islands—highlighting their features in contrast to the widely-held assumption of modern individual gifts. It then introduces two major theoretical models—the spirit of the gift and the reciprocity principle—that emerged out of scholarly efforts to better understand the origin and driving force of gift exchange. The scholarship shows the main commonalities between the two basic types of gifts, as well as some important differences which in turn lead our inquiry to a deeper level: the cultural understanding between persons and things. In the last section, the entry demonstrates the richness and complexity of the world of gifts that has been explored by scholars from different academic disciplines in recent decades.

Obligatory gifts

A striking feature of collective gifts is their obligatory circulation among the same group of givers and recipients, as illustrated in the Kula ring and yam exchange in Melanesian society. Kula is a ritualised form of intertribal exchange of red shells necklaces (soulava) and white shells armbands (mwali) carried out among men of influence in the Trobriand Islands, a region now part of Papua New Guinea. Predefined partners exchange these gifts in a closed circle across several islands, and they always circulate the gifts of necklaces clockwise and exchange armbands in the opposite direction. These gifts are made for exchange only and have their own names, identities, and histories. The exchange relationship is a lifelong one, but the gifts of necklaces and armbands always flow among fixed partners. Kula exchange voyages from one island to another customarily take place twice a year, and it will take one or two years for a given Kula object to return to its original owner. More importantly, each Kula voyage is highlighted by the interisland trade of many other objects, and in this sense the Kula ring also reflects the economic system in this region (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Leach & Leach 1983).

An equally important form of collective gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands involves yams. Trobriand men spend a great deal of time and energy cultivating yams, but local people normally eat other fresh produce, including sweet potatoes, greens beans, squash, fruits, and taro. The yams are mainly used by men as gifts to their married-out daughters and sisters who will display them publically in a special yam house. The obligation to participate in gift-giving is in this instance dictated by the local kinship system. People in the Trobriands traditionally adhere to matrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence. This means that when a woman gets married to a man, she moves to his village but her husband continues to belong to his mother’s lineage. The woman who married him will in turn belong to her own mother’s lineage. The gift of yams from a man to his sister or daughter brings the woman prestige and status because it shows how many strong supporters she has from her matrilineal kin. The gift of yams thereby recognises the woman as the actual owner of the matrilineal group. In return, her husband, who will receive some of the yams that she is given, will similarly be obligated to produce and send yams to the house of his married-out sister or daughter who, again, will be living in her husband’s matrilineal community.

These interlocking exchange relationships between men and their married-out sisters or daughters do not stop at the exchange of yams. By giving yams to one’s sister and thereby to her husband, one obligates one’s brother-in-law to give a return gift. This must come in a particular form—bundles of banana leaves given by women. When a man dies in a matrilineal village, all female descendants of this matrilineal lineage who are already married must come back to participate in the funeral as the kinswomen of the deceased. More importantly, they return as the true owners of the matrilineal group. During the funerary ritual, these women give away their special wealth—bundled banana leaves or banana-leaf skirts—to funeral guests. They also mourn the deceased and contribute to the ritual with labour. The woman who gives away the largest number of bundles and skirts is recognised as a ‘wealthy woman’ (Weiner 1992).

Here the links among a woman, her husband, and her brother are made visible and embodied in the flow of yams and banana leaves. The production of yams and banana leaves is in fact so important that it occupies a central place in the local economy, keeping both men and women busy all year around. Importantly, they are not busy for their own consumption needs; rather, they work hard in order to have more gifts for others and expect to receive return gifts as well.

On the surface, gift-giving in both the Kula ring and the exchanges of yam and banana leaves is an obligatory act with specific expectations about the time of return and the volume of the returning gift that takes place between persons as representatives of their own familial/kin groups. These gifts serve socio-political functions while forming an important part of the local economy, motivating economic behaviour and ‘making the world go around’. This contrasts sharply with contemporary understandings of individual gifts, which should be non-obligatory and have no strings attached, especially not specific expectations of return gifting.

Yet this difference become less striking in some customary gift exchanges in the modern West, for example the exchange of holiday greeting cards. More importantly, the expectation to offer gifts but also to receive them and then to make counter-gifts is clearly present in the family tradition of Christmas gift exchanges. This is similar to the yam exchange among Trobriand Islanders, although the value and content of Christmas gifts should be individualised. Truly free gifts seem only to exist in discourse. As Marcel Mauss notes (1967 [1925]), the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts constitute the foundation of gift-exchange systems all over the world, notwithstanding special cultural and temporal differences.

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

Anthropologists have been debating for many years about what motivates gift-giving around the world. Although not the first to explore the subject, Mauss offered the first theory on various gift-exchange systems in non-Western cultures that continues to provide inspirations for the study of the gift. He highlighted the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of gifts being simultaneously obligatory and free, material and spiritual, with interest and disinterested. He started this intellectual journey by asking the fundamental question, ‘What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’ (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 1). Mauss finds his answer in the Maori concept of hau—a mystic power that lies in the forest and in the valuables (taonga) given by one person to another. According to studies of the Maori that Mauss had access to, the hau always wishes to return to its place of origin, but can only do so through the medium of an object given in exchange for an original gift. Failure to return a gift can result in serious trouble, since not returning the hau can cause the death of gift recipients. It is the hau in the gift, Mauss asserts, that forces the recipient to make a return, and he calls this ‘the spirit of the gift’ (1967 [1925]: 8-9). According to the Maori, to receive a gift is also to receive a part of the gift-giver’s own spiritual essence. Thus, one must make a return gift to keep the original giver intact.

The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift, however, did not convince Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Prior to the appearance of Mauss’ classic 1925 work, The gift, Malinowski had already published the famous ethnographic account of Kula exchange in Melanesian society (summarised above) and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from ‘pure gifts’ to ‘real barter’ (1984 [1922]). Rejecting Mauss’ interpretation of the spirit of the gift, Malinowski retracted his category of the ‘pure gift’ in a later book (1962 [1926]) and articulated the principle of reciprocity to explain the Trobriand system of economic transactions. Malinowski argued that the binding force of economic obligations lies in the sanction, which either side may invoke to sever the bonds of reciprocity. One gives because of the expectation of return, and one returns because of the threat that one’s partner may stop giving. He thus concluded that the principle of reciprocity serves as the foundation of the Melanesian social order (Malinowski 1962 [1926]: chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9).

Inspired by Malinowski's work, Raymond Firth argues that among the Maori in New Zealand, exchange is driven by reciprocity (locally called utu). The Maori attach great importance to the idea of ‘compensation’ or ‘equivalent return’ (Firth 1959: 412ff). According to Firth, Mauss misinterprets the hau by imputing active qualities to its social construction, which Maori people do not recognise; Mauss also allegedly confuses the hau of the gift with the hau of the gift-giver (Firth 1959: 419-20). In a similar vein, Claude Levi-Strauss went so far as to call the spirit of the gift a mystification:

Mauss strives to construct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau. Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? (1987: 47).

The most effective advocate for the accountability of the principle of reciprocity, however, is Marshall Sahlins, who introduces a tripartite division of exchange phenomena—generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. He identifies three variables as critical to determining the general nature of gift-giving and exchange: kinship distance, sociability, and generosity (1972:191-210).

The principle of reciprocity was so frequently employed to explain various patterns of gift exchange that it quickly became something of a cliché, as Geoffrey MacCormack warns: ‘the description of all types of exchanges as reciprocal easily leads to an obscuring of the significant differences between them’ (1976: 101). Ultimately, the principle of reciprocity is nothing more than saying that no one will do anything for nothing. As Annette Weiner commented, such a rational and overly general notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought and has been used to justify theories of a free market economy since Thomas Hobbes (1992: 28-30).

To truly understand what motivates various systems of gift exchange in non-Western cultures, therefore, one must go beyond Western assumptions of economic rationality and the notion of Homo economicus, which is exactly what Mauss did in 1925 (see also Graeber 2001). The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift was therefore revitalised from two directions. First, in South Asia studies, anthropologists have explored the Hindu idea of giving without expectation of material return. As early as the 1970s, Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk (1971) noted some asymmetric gift-giving relationships in the context of caste hierarchy. Here, people of low castes were generally not expected to return the dan gifts they receive from their superiors. Further investigations reveal that the dan gifts, which are offered by the dominant caste to lower castes during various secular and religious rituals, serve to transfer dangerous and inauspicious elements, such as illness, death, and misfortune, from the donor to the recipient. The acceptance of these gifts is intended as a vessel of evil and inauspiciousness, like swallowing poison. The recipients of lower castes are required by caste ideology to receive this type of poisonous gift without returning it. As a result, the institutionalised flow of poisonous gifts from the dominant caste to subordinate castes creates a mode of cultural domination (Raheja 1988). These findings seriously challenge generalised models of reciprocity. They led Jonathan Parry (1986) to interpret the absence of reciprocity in the Indian dan in terms of an ‘evil spirit’ of the gift. This denies Mauss’ original argument that the spirit of the gift elicits a return gift. Realising this difficulty, Parry writes: ‘Where we have the “spirit,” reciprocity is denied; where there is reciprocity there is not much evidence of “spirit.” The two aspects of the model do not hang together’ (1986: 463). James Laidlaw argues that the notion of the non-obligatory pure gift exists in all world religions, albeit often in obscured forms, such as the case of the dan gift to Shvetambar Jain renouncers in India, and it carries as many important social meanings as the obligatory gifts (2000).

A solution to the tension between motivating spirits and merely secular reciprocity is found in studies of Pacific island societies. One can see both the ‘spirit’ and the social obligation to return. Rather than accepting Mauss’ interpretation of the Maori hau, many anthropologists have employed the notion of inalienability to explain the existence of spiritual, non-utilitarian ties between giver and recipient. Frederick Damon discovered that not all Kula objects are in the endless circle of exchange; the Muyuw islanders, for example, separate particular types of conus shell valuables known as kitoum from other Kula gifts. They may take the kitoum gifts in or out of the circle at their individual choice. This is because they represent the ‘congealed labor’ of their individual owners and because ‘no matter where a kitoum is . . . it can be claimed by its owner’ (Damon 1980:282). All Kula valuables are brought into exchange by the labour of specific individuals whereby they constitute one’s inalienable kitoum (Damon 1980: 284). Similar views are developed by Christopher Gregory in his analysis of the difference between gift-debt relations and commodity-debt relations, positing that gift-debts involve a transfer of inalienable objects between mutually dependent persons, whereas commodity debts result from the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (Gregory 2015). Interestingly, the inalienability of certain valuables may explain not only the motivation to return but also the original motivation for participating in competitive exchange such as the Kula (Feil 1982).

The inalienability of gifts is at the core of an innovative theory of exchange by Weiner (1992), arguably the sharpest critic of standard anthropological studies of the gift which routinely rely on the principle of reciprocity. She maintains:

[w]hat motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give-and-take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another (1992:43).

It is this principle of keeping-while-giving, rather than the norm of reciprocity, that can explain the obligation to return a gift (Weiner 1992: 46). Weiner also believes that Mauss is right about the Maori hau: ‘[t]he hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions and thus adds inalienable value to the objects’ (Weiner 1992: 63; see also Godelier 1999; Graeber 2001; Thompson 1987).

Weiner’s theory of the inalienable gift may be hard to apply to gift-giving practices in some complex societies, where most gifts are purchased commodities and where gifts are often individualised. For example, in China, money plays an important role in ceremonial gift-giving, and most material gifts are consumer goods, such as wine, cigarettes, or canned food. Altogether the monetary expenditure on gifts among Chinese villagers costs about twenty percent of household income, making it literally a gift economy (Yan 1996). Moreover, in contrast to the Melanesian and Polynesian cases, which involve the endless circulation of valuable shells, fine mats, or cloaks, the commodities-turned-gifts exchanged among the Chinese are rarely recycled as return gifts; instead, it is expected that gifts will be consumed by their recipients soon after their acceptance. In this sense, not only is a gift alienable, it must be alienated; to return the same gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection (Yan 1996).

While posing a challenge to the notion of inalienability, the Chinese case suggests that the spirit of the gift can be understood at two levels. Inalienability as elaborated by Weiner, among others, can be seen in the Melanesian case, where gifts are believed to contain hau or some similar spiritual essence and thus cannot be disposed of freely by the recipient. This is the empirical evidence upon which Mauss bases his argument; but, as an empirical observation, it may not be true in other societies. Therefore, the key issue in any society is to determine what people think about the message conveyed by the gift—love, friendship, caring, obligation, competition, or a supernatural spirit—and the essential implication is that a bond between individuals or groups can be created through the association between persons and things.

The person in the gift

Indeed, the underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects. The bonds created by gifts (inalienable objects) are often considered to be the same as the mutually dependent ties between persons. Here we can see that the fundamental issue in Mauss’ analysis of the gift is to determine how people relate to things, and, through things, how people relate to each other. As John Liep notes, both Karl Marx and Mauss are concerned with the alienation of people from the products of their labour, which correlates to the development of a world capitalist market economy (1990: 165). But unlike Marx, who focuses on the system of commodity exchange in modern societies and discovers the secret of surplus value, Mauss concentrates on gift exchange in pre-capitalist societies and seeks answers from indigenous belief systems. To compare the archaic, personalised gift economy with the modern, impersonalised system of commodity exchange, Mauss draws a three-stage, evolutionary scheme: social exchange begins with ‘total prestations’, in which the materials transferred between groups are only part of a larger range of noneconomic transfers. The second stage is gift exchange between moral persons who represent groups, leading finally to commodity exchange between independent individuals in market societies (see Mauss 1967: 68-9).

Jonathan Parry (1986) pushes Mauss’ thesis further by first showing that the Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types: the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given, while the latter denies reciprocity. However, the Maori gift and the Indian gift share one thing in common: namely, the absence of an absolute disjunction between persons and things. The separation between persons and things is, according to Parry, a product of Christian cosmology: ‘Christianity—with its notion that all men are fashioned equally in the image of God—has developed a universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving’ (Parry 1986: 468, italics in the original). Furthermore, the strong faith in freedom and rational choice also leads to the belief that ‘those who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’ (Parry 1986: 469).

In line with Parry’s view, James Carrier argues that the ideology of the perfect gift in the West is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism:

Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labor and capital (Carrier 1990: 31).

This ideology, however, does not always guide everyday practice. Instead, modern American gifts are often predictable and socially regulated (see Caplow 1984; Cheal 1988). The obligatory gift relations characterised by Mauss for traditional societies also exist in capitalist societies (for a further discussion of these themes, see Sanchez et al. 2017).

One important implication of Parry’s and Carrier’s works is that, although gift exchange exists in all human societies, the form it takes varies greatly depending on the particular culture within which it is rooted. Hence we may find multiple ‘forms’ of the gift—the Melanesian gift, the Indian gift, the Japanese gift, the American gift, and so on. At a deeper level, different forms of gifts tend to reflect different customs in the cultural construction of personhood. In Melanesian societies, for example, the person is relationally constructed and in turn represents a set of social relations in his or her social acts, including gift-giving. A primary feature of relational personhood is that ‘persons simply do not have alienable items, that is, property at their disposal; they can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others’ (Strathern 1988: 161). By contrast, the free, autonomous individual defined in neoclassical economics has nothing intrinsic to his or her personhood but the ‘bare undifferentiated free will’; everything else is alienable (Radin 1996: 62). In other words, the differences in personhood provide us with a key to better understanding why the Melanesian pure gift is inalienable and thus obligatory, while the Western perfect gift is free and thus must be unconstraining. Moreover, personhood also explains the idiosyncratic differences between the two prototypes of gifts and gift-exchange systems: the modern individual gift and traditional collective gifts.

Particularly noteworthy is that a Western-centric understanding of personhood may easily contribute to the misunderstanding of the gift in non-Western societies. At the core of the debate about the nature of the gift is its essential ambiguity; that is, gifts are at once free and constraining, self-interested and disinterested, and are motivated by both generosity and calculation or expectation of return. Although Mauss initiated the anthropological discourse on the gift by taking a both/and approach in examining its ambiguous nature, most subsequent studies focus on one side or another. As a result, the principle of reciprocity, the inalienability of the gift, and the dichotomy of gifts vs. commodities have taken turns dominating the study of the topic. Underneath all these theories, there is a Western notion of a pure gift based on the belief of the autonomous and free individual that has been used as the ultimate measurement to examine gift-giving activities all over the world. As Mark Ostern points out:

We have met the enemy and he is us: the perfect altruist is nothing more than the obverse face of Homo economicus…[w]e will achieve no deeper understanding of gift exchange and their relationships to economic and social behavior until we discard or at least modify the notion of persons as free, unconstrained transactors (2002: 240, italics in the original).

The inability to think beyond Western economic rationality is precisely what caused cultural misunderstandings between the early European settlers and Native Americans, discussed at the outset of this essay.

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Anthropologists have explored a great number of social functions of gifts as well as the explicit and implicit rules governing gift exchange, which in turn help us to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. The enigma of the gift continues to draw more scholars to such an intellectual endeavour, and the study of gifts has gone far beyond anthropology to become an interdisciplinary enterprise in its own right. This section can only make a few brief observations thereof, barely scratching the surface.

Gifts are commonly exchanged in ritualised contexts and can even constitute a rite in and of themselves, such as the presentation of a wedding ring. Thus we can make a distinction between ceremonial and non-ceremonial gifts. The most common examples of the former include gift-giving activities in rites of passage and holidays, such as weddings, funerals, and the Christmas holiday. An occasional gift offered to a helper to express gratitude or some regular exchange of presents among family members or friends may be considered as the latter.

Yet, one possible classification is to see the social identity symbolised by the gifts. Do two persons exchange gifts on behalf of the respective group that they belong to, such as family, lineage, or village community? Or is the gift exchanged between two autonomous individuals? The custom of bridewealth and dowry constitutes a good example of collectivist gift-giving; by contrast, most gift-giving activities in contemporary Western societies occur between two autonomous individuals.

In general, most collective gift-giving activities are institutionalised and ceremonial because collective identities and group interests are at stake, while most individualistic gifts occur in non-ceremonial occasions. But there are exceptions. The exchange of Kula valuables is an institutionalised ceremonial activity but remains a highly competitive enterprise whereby individuals act as free agents. On the other hand, the offer of an engagement ring in contemporary Western societies is a highly ritualised and institutionalised act of individual gift-giving.

Once we place gift exchange in the larger social context, we can see the difference between horizontal and vertical gift exchanges. Horizontal gift exchange occurs among social equals, while vertical exchange cuts across the boundaries of social status. Both types of gift-giving activities may coexist on some occasions. Taking Christmas gift-giving as an example, the horizontal exchange of gifts among friends, classmates, or coworkers goes side by side with vertical exchange of gifts between employers and employees, patrons and clients, hosts and service providers, and to a lesser degree, between senior and junior generations in a family or kin group. Because the obligation to return a gift places its recipient in the inferior position of being indebted, gift-giving is often used as a way to create political authority and dominance, such as in cases of the Melanesian big-man and the Polynesian chieftainship (Sahlins 1972). It may even become a weapon to fight against one’s political opponents, such as in the cases of potlatch among Native Americans on the Northwest Pacific coast.

This superiority of the gift-giver, however, may not work in complex societies with a clearly defined class hierarchy and/or a centralised state authority. For example, in her study of the repayment of Japanese on gifts (benevolent favours from superiors), Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1969) demonstrates that, given the hierarchical context of Japanese society, the gift-donor who is in a subordinate position can never balance what has previously been received from a superior. In Chinese society, a particular type of gift known as xiaojing, which is rooted in the cultural promise of filial piety, unilaterally flows up the ladder of social status and no equivalent return is expected. Recipients remain socially superior because their acceptance is already regarded as a favour to the gift-giver, showing that the principle of hierarchy overshadows the principle of reciprocity in this context (Yan 2002).

Gender constitutes another important dimension in the world of gifts. Many earlier studies of gift-giving in non-Western societies seemed to be gender-blind because they tended to focus on institutions of ceremonial exchanges in public life where women were thought to play only a trivial role. Annette Weiner’s 1976 book, Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange, represents one of the first significant breakthroughs in this regard. Weiner argues that women in the Trobriand Islands are by no means the object of gift exchange by men; on the contrary, women play an autonomous and crucial role in certain ceremonial gift exchanges in public, such as the mortuary exchange described above. In it women reclaim their unique role in the matrilineage and restate matrilineal solidarity (Weiner 1976, 1992). Marilyn Strathern pushes the theme further by pointing out that, in Melanesian culture, women and men not only have their own domain in gift exchange but also separate realms of power and domination which are gendered by the gendering of gift exchange (Strathern 1988, see chapters 2, 4, 5 and 11). In contemporary Western societies, women not only give more but also receive more gifts than their male counterparts, and gift-giving is regarded as an essential part of a feminised ideology of love (Cheal 1988; Caplow 1984). How to assess women’s dominant role in gift-giving, however, remains to date a debatable issue (Komter 1996).

If we look at the purpose of gift-giving, we can see that a gift may serve an expressive or an instrumental function, or both. In expressive gifts, the existing status relationship between the giver and the receiver determines the conditions of gift exchange (the kind and value of gifts to be given), and gift-giving supports the status relationship. By contrast, if the conditions of exchange (the nature and value of the gift) determine or alter the respective statuses of a giver and recipient, we are likely dealing with instrumental gifts. In other words, expressive gifts are ends in themselves and thus often reflect a long-term relationship between a giver and a recipient; instrumental gifts are a means to some utilitarian end and ordinarily indicate a short-term relationship. Nevertheless, in practice, the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts never exist; rather, elements of expressivity and instrumentality coexist in almost all gift-giving activities, but in different ratios and combinations. In post-socialist Ukraine, for instance, a small payment of cash presented to a doctor is regarded as a gift instead of bribery, as long as the recipient did not explicitly demand it (Polese 2008).

In a broader sense, the exchanges of greetings, assistance, and moral support are often regarded as gifts from one party to another. Their nonmaterial nature often makes the giving a more disinterested act and thus closer to the idealism of the pure gift. In this connection, donations, charities, and especially online gifting to strangers are particularly noteworthy gifts that build impersonalised ties between the givers and the often-unknown recipients. The best example is the donation of human blood, tissues, organs and bodies, which are more often than not transacted from anonymous donors to unknown recipients. These altruistic yet unconventional gifts also raise new ethical issues in both Western and non-Western societies (Bolt 2012; Simpson 2004).

The economic implications of gift-giving are enormously far-reaching in post-modern and developed countries, as well as in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. Malinowski had long argued that the work incentives of the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained in terms of materialistic self-interest. Instead, they produce extra yams so that the harvest may be given to exchange partners and chiefs and eventually rot in storehouses for the sake of earning prestige. Similarly, they actively participate in the inter-island Kula exchange primarily to obtain the armbands and necklaces that have no practical value except to become renowned (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Weiner 1992; Graeber 2001). The exchange of Kula valuables therefore constitutes the very foundation of this prestige economy in Trobriand society. The cattle complex in Africa is another example in which the production and exchange of cattle mostly serve social, political, and ritual purposes, and people have an exaggerated and emotional personal attachment to their animals (Evens-Pritchard 1940). Gift exchange may be seen as a different type of economy even in the narrowest sense of the term: Christmas gifts alone amount to a multi-billion-dollar business in contemporary American society (Waits 1993). The global expansion of the capitalist market economy and consumerist ideology has pushed the gift economy to a higher level, leading to new ceremonial occasions like Mother’s Day and more convenient ways of gift-giving like gift cards (Otnes & Beltramini 1996). The most intriguing and perhaps excessively individualistic invention is the gift given to oneself, known as self-gifts (Mick 1996).

Riding the tidal wave of global consumerism, self-gifts can be found all over the world and are more popular among millennials. In the village community where I conducted a systematic study of gift exchange (Yan 1996), I found that the emergence of self-gifts is part of the much larger and important trend among young villagers to embrace the modern individual gift in their practice of gift exchange. Most of these individual gifts are not offered through ritualised family ceremonies; neither do many of them lead to long-lasting cycles of giving-receiving-returning between the donor and recipient. The occasions of individual gift-giving are not only personal but often ad hoc or situational, such as celebrating a friend’s promotion in the workplace or bringing something nice or exotic to family members from a trip back home. More intriguingly, the motivation of offering such a personal gift is also highly personal—as villagers put it, they did it because they had good feelings toward the recipient and they felt good after offering the gift as a token of their fondness toward the recipient. The influence of consumer individualism is obvious here, as all kinds of commercials and products of pop culture promote the importance of affection and emotional ties in the context of commodification. An emphasis on feeling good may have replaced past requirements of being or doing good; hence, personal gifts for feeling good replace obligatory gifts for being good. The implication here is that the two prototypes of gifts that we examined at the outset of this essay not only coexist in our time, but also influence and transform each other, creating new possibilities in the world of gifts.

The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens social bonds—be they cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define the identities of persons. Scrutinising gifts and gift economies may therefore provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given society. Lastly, although gifts are given and received among peoples all over the world and throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Gift exchange thereby crystallises the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anthropology of the gift is particularly important for understanding social life for several reasons. Gift-giving has long been one of the major forms of social exchange, along with redistribution and market exchange. Yet, unlike the other two, it encompasses multiple domains of social life and carries rich meanings above and beyond the economy. Moreover, the study of gift-giving reveals the social origins of economic institutions and provides insights about the value of human labour that have long been obscured by modern economic theories. They include the relationship between persons and things, or what drives people to work beyond their basic consumption needs. Gift-giving basically debunks the cornerstone assumption in neoliberal economics that human beings only aim to maximise individual utility, and thus has greatly enriched social theories. Additionally, the give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens various social bonds—cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define personal identities. An examination of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, will provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations. Furthermore, although gifts are universal and are given and have been received throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Therefore, gifts represent a crystallization of the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the gift is no longer the preserved subject of anthropology. Scholars of humanities and social sciences alike have joined forces to explore the dynamic, complicated world of gifts from different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, such as antiquity study, history, literary critics, philosophy, sociology, law, economics, and marketing research (see Cheal 1988; Davis 2000; Davies 2010; Hyland 2009; Kolm & Ythier 2006; Marion 2011; Osteen 2002; Otnes & Peltramini 1996; Satlow 2013). The growing literature also shows that, as the human interest in and capacity of doing gift exchange are consistently changing in response to a rapidly shifting environment of social life at large, the enigmatic gift will likely remain to be an attractive subject in anthropology and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their insightful comments on early drafts and advice for improvement.

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Note on contributor

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fudan University, China. His research interests include family and kinship, social change, and the anthropology of moralities. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village.

Prof. Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, 366 Haines, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. yan@anthro.ucla.edu

Autism

Felix Stein — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 10:21:03 +0000

Ben Belek

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Initially published 7 Sep 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19aut

Abstract:

The concept of autism is historically contingent. It did not exist, in any proper sense, before it was invoked by medical and mental health professionals in the twentieth century. This entry aims to shed light on this relatively recent concept. First, it contextualises autism within the broader social, epistemological, and political circumstances of its emergence and ongoing negotiation, showing autism to be a dynamic concept, whose meaning is constantly in flux. Second, it revisits some of the more insightful or influential analyses that autism has received over the years in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. And third, it illustrates that anthropologists have been particularly attuned to everyday experiences of autism, comparing it to other forms of human difference while occupying an ambivalent stance towards biomedical approaches to it. A discussion on how autism might matter for the discipline of anthropology features very briefly in the conclusion.

Disciplinary landscapes

Research into autism tends to cluster around two main analytic poles (see Solomon 2010). The epistemic gap between these analytic poles is considerable, and is sometimes discussed as a barrier to the advantageous progression of autism research at large (e.g. Orsini & Smith 2010, Raz et al. 2017, Yergeau 2010). On one end of the spectrum of autism research are the biomedical disciplines, which typically construe the condition as a neurodevelopmental disorder, and focus on those aspects of autism which they perceive as cognitive and social deficits. Research in these areas tends to address questions relating to the causality of autism, its underlying mechanisms, its symptoms, and its prevalence. Consequently, it promotes interventions of different kinds, working towards the development of better standardised diagnostic procedures for autism, technologies for early detection, methods of behaviour therapy, and in some instances, pharmacological treatment.

On the other analytic pole, there are those disciplines which include anthropology, sociology, history, rhetoric, geography, communication, gender studies, and disability studies. Scholars working in this tradition tend to view autism as a socio-political category, and a central component of individual experience and of social interaction. Studies produced within these disciplines thus focus on such spheres as language and sociality, identity and subjectivity, care work and expertise, knowledge-making and meaning-making, while others go about challenging literature in the biomedically-inclined disciplines.^[1]Moreover, within this analytic pole, autism self-advocacy occupies a crucial position, whereby autistic authors employ their experiential expertise, as well as social and literary theory and an oftentimes keen sense of social and cultural critique, to produce valuable scholarship.

The anthropological study of autism can be grounded in the broader field of the anthropology of disability. The anthropology of disability has been slow to include cognitive disabilities within its purview (with the notable exception of Edgerton 1967). This may be the case because attempting to theorise cognitive difference anthropologically requires challenging one of the discipline's rarely disputed assumptions: that human beings all share similar cognitive capacities (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). Nevertheless, a body of literature has emerged over the past decades that focuses on such topics as dementia, intellectual disability, and mental illness, thereby accepting the challenge of envisioning collective life without assuming psychic unity. Anthropological studies of autism, in particular, can be said to constitute a cornerstone in this emerging anthropology of cognitive disability (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). They have also contributed to broader conversations in such subfields as psychological anthropology (e.g. Mattingly 2017), medical anthropology (e.g. Kaufman 2010), linguistic anthropology (e.g. Ochs & Solomon 2008), as well as social and cultural anthropology more broadly (e.g. Grinker 2007).

In what follows, anthropological insights on autism will be joined with important insights from other disciplines. While anthropological engagements with autism are not necessarily unique in their underlying assumptions or styles of argumentation, they do share some distinct analytical and epistemological commitments. First among those is a systematic engagement with the narratives, experiences, and everyday actions of autistic people, as well as with the distinct social worlds they inhabit. Anthropology's insistence on ethnography carves an important analytical space that acknowledges the role of agency, controversy, and creativity in the category's enactment and negotiation. Also typical in the anthropology of autism are frequent reflections over the type of difference that the category of autism represents, and its comparability to other forms of difference – mainly, culture – with which the discipline has traditionally engaged. Thirdly, anthropologists working on autism have usually remained ambivalent towards the claims of the biomedical disciplines. Their general reluctance to either wholly reject these disciplines' expertise or to uncritically accept it has afforded anthropologists a privileged position from which to attend to the epistemological dynamics surrounding autism.

The emergence of autism

The shifting meanings of autism – as a concept with which to make sense of certain atypical tendencies, a label with which to characterise those who hold such tendencies, and a category into which those so labelled are typically classified – derive from the historical processes of its emergence and subsequent negotiations. The history of autism therefore illustrates its fluid and dynamic nature and highlights the centrality of socio-cultural processes to the category's emergence.

Though a detailed social-historical account of autism remains outside the scope of this entry (but see Evans 2017, Eyal et al. 2010, Feinstein 2010, Nadesan 2005, Silberman 2015, Silverman 2012, Waltz 2013), a brief outline seems warranted. The concept of ‘autism’ had made its first appearance in medical literature in 1911 in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, when it was construed as a symptom of childhood schizophrenia. The concept had mostly retained this meaning until 1943, when the Austrian-born American psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his article ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’. This was the very first publication in which autism (then ‘infantile autism’) was described as a distinct disorder, preceding by a single year a publication by Hans Asperger, a German psychiatrist, in which he described a quite similar condition which he termed ‘autistic psychopathy’.

In the 1960s and 1970s, studies into the 'new' syndrome were becoming increasingly common, yet there was still much confusion. Many researchers and clinicians still interpreted it as a type of schizophrenia, while diagnosticians often associated autistic traits with brain dysfunction, mental retardation, or child psychosis. The 1980s saw an increase in systematic research into autism, as researchers began to demonstrate a clear biological factor to the condition, refuting previous assertions about its supposed psychogenesis. By the 1990s, more rigorous evaluation criteria were being devised, and it became increasingly recognised that autism may be a life-long condition. Subsequently, the condition re-emerged as a neurological developmental disorder – the framing that governs much of the academic discourse today.

An often-told fact about autism is the steep rise of its prevalence rates over the past three decades. It is this rise which has helped fuel false claims about the cause of the condition, including those concerning an alleged link between autism and vaccines (for critical accounts of such claims see Kaufman 2010, Offit 2008, Orsini & Smith 2010, Sobo 2015). Gil Eyal et al. (2010), however, convincingly attribute this rise to the widening of the diagnostic criteria for autism, as well as to improved access to diagnostic services. The authors provide a focused review of the entries for autism in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, demonstrating that its diagnostic criteria were becoming more inclusive with every new edition (see also Eyal 2013). It is through these broadening criteria that autism was increasingly being stretched into a 'spectrum', an idea originally coined by Lorna Wing & Judith Gould (1979) that has since become almost synonymous with the condition itself.^[2]

Autism's ontological status

Currently, the term 'autism spectrum conditions' has indeed come to represent a broad range of cognitive and behavioural atypicalities. Though it is generally accepted that the traits associated with the category of autism are shaped by genetic factors (e.g. Geschwind 2009), a focus on biological processes is fundamentally unsatisfactory in fully accounting for the phenomenon. The understanding, representation, and framing of autism significantly depend on variations in any society's hegemonic values, conceptions of normality, dominant norms of social interaction, and organising structures of knowledge and classification. Autism, therefore, is an emergent product of interrelated social as well as biological processes (e.g. Eyal et al. 2010, Grinker 2007, Nadesan 2005, Silverman 2012).

A popular way of making sense of the interplay between the natural and the socially constructed nature of autism is Ian Hacking's (1999) ‘looping effect’. Hacking conceives of people as ‘interactive kinds’ in the sense that they react to the categories, concepts or ideas which relate to them, and change as a result. Consequently, these categories and concepts need to be adjusted to these changes, in a continuous circle. Elsewhere, Hacking (2009a) has demonstrated a mechanism through which autism is thusly constantly reconstituted. This occurs as autobiographies by autistic authors affect the ways their autistic readers come to understand their own experiences as autistic.^[3] Eyal et al. (2014) further acknowledge that the looping effect of autism goes beyond shaping its meaning formalistically through classification and description. Rather, the practical meaning of the label is constantly negotiated as shifting understandings of autism shape – and are then in turn shaped by – autistic people's experiences of their bodies, for example, their styles of interactions, and their daily habits.

Another way to think about autism while considering both its biological and social-structural components is proposed by Elizabeth Fein (2015a). Fein holds that the condition we refer to as autism is at least in part shaped at the interface between a person’s natural tendencies and their social environments. She suggests that in many of today’s Western societies, where social relationships are based on choice rather than obligation, social difficulties at an early age might lead to exclusion and loneliness, as a child’s peers deny her their friendship. This social isolation leads to the exacerbation of the sometimes-subtle tendencies people may have already experienced, and so they are ultimately more likely to fall within the autism category. Damian Milton (2012) similarly focuses on the role of relationality in determining what constitutes autism. He reflects on the fact that both autistic and non-autistic people lack insight into the perceptions of the other, a disjuncture in reciprocity to which he refers as the 'double empathy problem'. Yet despite this being a problem of reciprocity, the power imbalance between the groups enables one group to deem themselves normal, while the other group is reframed as indicating a social deficit.^[4]

Self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement

Contrary to the view of autism common in the biomedical and psychological disciplines, which considers it a deficit or impairment, approaches based on neurodiversity consider autism to be a natural expression of human diversity (see Bagatell 2007, Chamak 2008, Grinker 2007, Lawson 2008, Savarese 2013, Waltz et al. 2015). This view partly stems from the social model of disability (Ginsburg & Rapp 2013, Oliver 1996, Shakespeare 2006), which acknowledges the crucial role of society and culture in shaping, if not constructing, the category and experience of disability. Neurodiversity advocates further suggest that much as there exists a diversity of gender or ethnicity, so there exists a diversity of cognitive structures; that is, of ways of being (see Arnold 2017, Baggs 2010, Limburg 2016, Milton 2012, Ne'eman 2010, Prince 2010, Yergeau 2010, 2013, 2017). Autism, therefore, according to such claims, should be accepted, even celebrated.^[5]

While the neurodiversity paradigm and its accompanying discourses are varied and nuanced, several of its generally-accepted principles bear mentioning. First, neurodiversity proponents maintain that autism is an inseparable and integral part of the autistic person. It is in light of this view that many autistic authors express their explicit preference for identity-first language (i.e., autistic person), over person-first language (i.e., person with autism) (e.g. Lawson 2008, Milton & Lyte 2012). Moreover, imaginaries of a potential cure for autism, or of technologies of its prevention, are seen to constitute a form of intolerance and oppression. Another common attitude in neurodiversity discourse is a rejection of functioning labels with regards to autism. Advocates maintain that the binary distinction between high-functioning and low-functioning autism is not only simplistic, but that it may be wholly misleading (e.g. Milton & Lyte 2012, Murray 2009, Savarese & Savarese 2010, Yergeau 2010). ‘Functioning’, in the end, is contingent on societal expectation, access to support services, available assistive technology, and changing levels of comfort. Functioning may therefore not be a property of an individual, but a relational category (e.g. Williams 2006). Importantly, neurodiversity advocates further assert that autistic people ought to be included in all public discussions about the condition, from scientific inquiry, through media representation, to legislation and policy making: as per the central idiom in many disability rights movements, 'nothing about us without us'.

Identity, community, and subjectivity

The idea of autism as a form of alterity lends itself to questions of identity, subjectivity, citizenship, activism, and community, which have indeed stood as the basis of numerous anthropological studies. A major paradigm from which autistic people draw their self-definition is the neuroscientific discourse; for example, in adopting the view that autism implies an atypical wiring of the brain. According to Francisco Ortega (2009: 426), this preference reflects a diffusion of neuroscientific claims that extends beyond the laboratory and into various social domains. This cerebralised self-definition of autistic people may constitute the very basis of popular claims for ‘neurodiversity’ (see also Ortega 2013, Ortega & Choudhury 2011).^[6] Yet alongside the neurodiversity discourse, which values taking pride in one’s difference, there also exists the biomedical discourse, which values sameness, normalcy, and efforts to conform. Nancy Bagatell (2007) has thus pointed out that what best characterises the process of identity construction among autistic people is the active and difficult orchestrating of these mostly opposing voices. In other words, assuming an autistic identity is ultimately an active process driven by personal agency and choice.

Such biology-based discourses on autism might also serve as a powerful source of resistance. In assuming an identity constructed around neuroscience, members of the neurodiversity movement question the notion that impairment is objective or absolute (Brownlow & O’Dell 2013). Activists thus appropriate whatever biological basis autism may have – precisely that which according to a deficit model would be considered the cause of disability – and negotiate its meaning, turning it into a positive. Biological essentialism here serves to claim a natural difference between themselves and the hegemonic majority. Citizenship, the authors claim – neurobiological citizenship, in this case – is reflected by people asserting the freedom to negotiate a governing regime, and alternately reject it, accept it or withdraw from it entirely.^[7]

The distinctive possibilities for sociality supported by digital media have offered people with disabilities new opportunities for self-expression and self-determination. Such collective creations play a role in producing social spaces that are inclusive of the fact of disability, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means for people with disabilities to be human (Ginsburg 2012). Autistic people’s shared experiential backgrounds, along with a shared identity as autistic, are thus conductive of a collective voice (Davidson 2008). It is significant that these processes occur online; a social landscape where the communication difficulties associated with autism become less emphasised. Online media, moreover, has allowed autistic people to communicate freely without ‘betraying their autism’ (Antze 2010: 317) by obliging themselves to make eye-contact, for example, or suppressing their atypical body language; without, that is, pretending to be ‘normal’. Under the mostly discursive, predictable, and asimultaneous conditions of online communication, autism need not be an obstacle to communicating successfully, nor to forming relationships or establishing communities.^[8]

Yet while the role of the internet in affording the emergence of autistic communities should not be downplayed, such community building is not restricted to online spaces. Notable examples of actual spaces designed by autistic adults in order to accommodate the preferences and tendencies of those on the autism spectrum – conducive of what might be called an autistic culture (Dekker 1999, Sinclair 2010) – include Autreat (see Sinclair 2005), and its British counterpart, Autscape.^[9] A fascinating example of one such social spaces is a summer camp for autistic youth dedicated to live-action roleplaying games, which was explored ethnographically by Fein (2015b). A ‘folk healing system’, as she deems it, the camp, with its games and accompanying mythologies, offers a rich assemblage of cultural resources: characters, themes, and narratives. Players draw from these sources to metaphorically conceptualise and express their turbulent experiences. Fein further notes that this sociocultural ecology of the camp – with its predictable structures and relational commitments – allows campers to reformulate the challenges associated with autism, transforming them from sources of estrangement into opportunities for mutual recognition and shared enjoyment.

More insight on subjectivity and citizenship in the context of autism comes from authors who engage with the autism rights movement from a gender perspective. Kristin Bumiller (2008) considers the implications of the attempted normalization of autistic people – which among other things includes attempts to eliminate supposedly ‘wrong’ gender behaviour – and analyses autistic activists’ rejection thereof. She argues that the neurodiversity movement offers a unique contribution to the democratic political system, in illustrating that notions of citizenship need not be based on sameness (as it is sometimes imagined) nor on difference (as notions of diversity in other contexts often imply). This is because both sameness and difference imply a ‘norm’ against which people’s individual value is measured. Instead, autistic people's 'quirky' citizenship is to be based on inclusion, acceptance, and individual roles and contributions to civic life.^[10]

Language and sociality

Autism is characterised by an equivocal relationship with typical, i.e. symbolic and conventionalised, language. For both Dawn Prince (2010), an autistic anthropologist and Amanda Baggs (2010), an autistic self-advocate, conventional language is neither natural nor intuitive but partial and constraining. In their respective works, the authors articulate their preference for unconventional linguistic structures: modes of non-symbolic connection to the world that nevertheless capture its beauty and the richness of worldly experience. In light of these different linguistic styles commonly found among autistic people, they often experience difficulties in their attempts to make sense of social etiquette. And although many autistic people work continuously to uncover the underlying principles of social rules, they frequently remain unsuccessful in putting this knowledge into practice. As a result, they turn to shaping their social environments in an attempt to redefine the terms under which the appropriateness of their actions is evaluated. Failure to abide by etiquette should therefore be taken not as mere lack of success, but at least in part as deliberate action and contemplative craft (Belek 2018).

Elinor Ochs et al. (2004) have also discussed their autistic interlocutors' difficulties pertaining to 'social function'. They note that the skills required to converse successfully with each other exceed knowledge of interpersonal communication, to also involve the 'socio-cultural knowledge' necessary for appropriately inferring indexical signs. Autistic people's reduced ability to make sense of some utterances or events, and to react in a conventionally appropriate manner, is to a large extent due to their difficulty in drawing upon knowledge of social context. Such social misconduct, and how autistic children account for it, is the focus of a study by Karen Sirota (2004), who demonstrates the ways in which parents use various expressions of accountability (such as justifications, apologies, or excuses) when instructing their children on how to navigate breaches of etiquette. Yet seeing as accountability is a highly context-specific practice, its effectiveness as a remedy depends on understanding the particular conditions of its use. In the context of autism and the frequent unpredictability that accompanies it, the success of this strategy is limited (see also Ochs & Solomon 2008).

Some autistic authors articulate their arguably unique connection with animals (e.g. Grandin & Johnson 2009, Prince-Hughes 2004). Interactions with horses, for example, are said to enable various types of social behaviours and "open-up" autistic children to interactions they would otherwise typically avoid (Malcolm et al. 2018). Equine therapy thus facilitates a form of multi-species intersubjectivity, leading the way to novel possibilities for dynamic attunements between autistic and non-autistic people.^[11] Recently, the increasingly popular imaginaries of social robots as appropriate companions for autistic children has also been attended to. This notion is grounded in the persistent view of human sociality – especially where autistic people are concerned – as somehow mechanistic (see also Milton 2014). Yet others (e.g. Richardson 2018) contend that human to human attachment is in fact crucial to happiness and wellbeing. A successful therapeutic relationship depends on mutual trust, compassion, and empathy, and is therefore not replaceable by the ontologically divergent interactions between human and machine.

Body and senses

Various bodily attributions are common in autism: sensory sensitivity; a tendency towards repetitive movement, sometimes referred to as self-stimulating behaviours or ‘stimming’; and an atypical gait or posture, to name just a few examples. Autistic children have been shown in some cases to assume a laborious role when attempting to coordinate their (often atypical) bodily actions with societal expectations (Solomon 2011). Analysing video footage of a 9-year-old autistic girl interacting with classmates in the playground, Ochs (2015) has noted this minimally verbal child's continually alternating bodily responses to the social situations developing around and towards her. This constant awareness of one's own body – as an experiencing subject as well as an object exposed to the gaze of others – is what Ochs refers to as a form of corporeal reflexivity. In a similar engagement with corporal reflexivity in autism, it has been shown that autistic adults work to produce distinctions between bodily experiences of distress that they previously experienced as undistinguishable (Belek 2019a). Through a process of bodily cultivation, autistic adults come to design a specialised vocabulary – which includes such terms as trigger, overload, meltdown and shutdown – through which to attune more precisely and concretely to their atypical somatic sensations.

Autism around the world

Until quite recently, the anthropology of autism has focused primarily on the sociocultural conditions and implications of the category in Anglophone settings. This regional bias can be said to have set the tone for the discipline's engagement with the topic at large, further evidenced by scholars' frequent lack of acknowledgement that such a regional bias does in fact exist. Majia Nadesan (2005), among others, accentuates the crucial role that specific sociocultural, political, and epistemological developments in twentieth century Europe and North America had played in the emergence of autism. These include major shifts in psychiatric paradigms, as well as changing formulations of the category of childhood and the resulting alterations of the perceived goals of early education. ‘Autism’, she thus argues, ‘could not have emerged in the nineteenth century … because within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth century (and earlier) thought, autism was unthinkable’ (2005: 3). Although Nadesan does not press this point, her historical narratives indicate that the statement holds equally true concerning not only the temporal, but also the geographical and geopolitical locations of the category's emergence. However, over the past two generations, autism diagnoses have become increasingly common throughout the world (e.g. Elsabbagh et al. 2012).

Consequently, several anthropological studies have set about to explore the particular enactments of autism in more diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts.^[12] Ariel Cascio (2015a) is one example, as she analyses the use of the concept of rigidity by Italian professionals involved in providing therapy for autistic children. These practitioners frequently describe their clients as rigid, and consider rigidity a potential pitfall in their own work in autism service provision. By creating this semantic overlap between the experiences of people on the autism spectrum and their own, professionals open up a space of similarity between neurotypicals and autistic people, a rhetorical strategy which allows them to reflect more closely upon their work, while working to bridge the gap between the two groups.

In South Korea, local connotations and interpretations of autism lead mothers to resist thinking about their children as autistic (Grinker & Cho 2013). These South Korean mothers frequently attempt to battle exclusion and mitigate stigma in a society that values conformity, while also having to excuse their children’s difficulties in school in an environment that reveres academic excellence. Owing to their understandable reluctance, under such circumstances, to accept the label of autism, a local lay diagnostic concept has emerged; that of ‘border children’. Inconsistent with Western diagnostic classification, this emerging label has proven powerful in allowing mothers to reconcile their ambivalence to the label of autism with its implications of permanence and certainty, framing the condition instead as uncertain, contingent, and temporary.

This rejection of the label of ‘autism’ has also been described in an American context. Challenging the ethnic bias in the anthropology of autism, Cheryl Mattingly (2017) focuses on a family forced to deal with both race and disability: an African-American mother and her autistic child. Here, racial stereotyping, joined with a narrow view of autism, confines the child's conceivable future possibilities; thus teaching the child, in his mother's view, to internalise the fearful potentiality of his ‘becoming nothing’. Structurally visible threats associated with race and class are thus shown by Mattingly to play a central role in the opportunities presented to an autistic child as they enter adulthood.^[13] In light of this, it is claimed that refusing to accept an autism diagnosis might be the most logical means of protection from the pernicious threat posed by the entwinement of race and disability in certain social settings.

Conclusion

Anthropologists studying autism approach their object of study as they do other forms of human difference. They have employed such common heuristic frameworks as phenomenology, ethnomethodology, interpretivism, and critical theory to explore autistic subjectivities, experiences, bodies, and narratives, as well as the motivations and significations of other actors involved in shaping the condition. Yet one aspect of the phenomenon we call autism seems to call for a specialised interpretive framework: namely, its existence as both a historically contingent social construct, and as a name and category for underlying biological, neurological, and genetic conditions. It is predominantly this tension, never quite resolvable, that has led scholars to characterise autism as an uncertain entity (Hollin 2017b), a disability of context (Prince 2010), a disease and an epidemic of signification (Kaufman 2010, David & Orsini 2013) and an epidemic of discovery (Grinker 2007).^[14] Indeed, Ian Hacking may not have exaggerated when proposing, in reference to autism, that ‘we are participating in a living experiment in concept formation of a sort that does not come more than once in a dozen lifetimes’ (2009b: 506).

The anthropological literature recounted above constitutes a crucial step towards our better understanding of autism and of the people to whom this concept is said to apply. Yet the notion of neurodiversity might suggest that anthropologists should go further. They may want to incorporate their emerging understanding of autism into a broader analytical perspective in which the category of autism is no longer thematically and theoretically isolated. What may be needed is not only an anthropology of autism, but an anthropology with autism. As it was put by Richard Grinker,

We need to focus attention on the anthropological study of a form of difference that has previously been conceived of as lying outside the realm of the social. The concept of "diversity," with all its positive connotations of acceptance and celebration of difference, need not only apply to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. We can also begin to celebrate a diversity of minds (2010: 177).

Acknowledgements

I thank the entry's editor and reviewers for improving greatly on this text. Especially, I am grateful for their pointing out to me the discipline's bias to studying autism predominantly in Western English-speaking settings.

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Note on contributor

Ben Belek is a research fellow in social and medical anthropology at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His previous project focused on the ontological status of neurological diversity among autistic adults in the UK. In his current project, he explores the shifting values of blood constituents in the Israeli blood economy.

Ben Belek, The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 9190501.

[1] Examples of the critical strand of literature include Eyal et al. (2010) Fitzgerald (2013, 2014, 2017), Gillis-Buck & Richardson (2014), Hollin (2014, 2017a), Hollin & Pilnick (2015), Lappé (2014), Nadesan (2005, 2013), Navon & Eyal (2014, 2016), and Silverman (2012). For a review, see Hollin (2016). Other studies aim their critique at popular theories in cognitive neuroscience. These include Hacking (2009), Jack (2011), Krahn & Fenton (2012), McDonagh (2013), Milton (2012), Milton & Lyte (2012), Williams (2004), and Yergeau (2013, 2017).

[2] Grinker (2010: 173) has discussed the benefits of imagining autism as a spectrum, whereby the old image of the nonverbal, mentally underdeveloped, and unaffectionate male child has given way to the understanding that autism constitutes a broad range of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and sensitivities. However, the use of the spectrum metaphor does have several disadvantages, as noted by Hacking: ‘To the mind of a physicist or a logician … spectra are linear and autism is not. Autism is a many-dimensional manifold of abilities and limitations.’ (2009b: 503)

[3] Other studies focusing on the representation of autism in various media and its impact on understandings of the condition include Davidson (2007), Davidson & Smith (2009), Draaisma (2009), Hacking (2009b, 2009c), Murray (2008), and Waltz (2005, 2012); as well as the studies featured in an edited volume by Osteen (2008).

[4] The relationality inherent in the notion and category of autism, and its opposition to socially contingent understandings of that which is 'normal' has been similarly addressed by Belek (2019b), Bagatell (2007), Eyal et al. (2010), Grinker (2013), Lawson (2008), Milton & Lyte (2012), Molloy & Vasil (2002) and Nadesan (2005), among others.

[5] Studies which explicitly take this stance on autism as their starting point, are occasionally grouped together under the umbrella of "critical autism studies" (CAS) (O'Dell et al. 2016, Davidson & Orsini 2013, Runswick-Cole, Mallett & Timimi 2016, Woods et al. 2018).

[6] For a comparable analysis of autistic subjectivities as representing a ‘neurostructural self’, see Fein (2011). For autism as neuroqueerness, see Yergeau (2017).

[7] Other studies emphasising the active and often creative nature of constructing positive identities in autism include Badone et al. (2016), Bagatell (2010), Brownlow (2010), Davidson & Henderson (2010), and Fein (2015b).

[8] The affordances of digitally mediated environments in the context of autism were also explored by Belek (2013, 2017) Brownlow & O’Dell (2006), Clarke & Van-Amerom (2007), Giles (2013), Pinchevski & Peters (2016), and Ward & Meyer (1999), to name a few.

[9] See www.autscape.org

[10] Other notable studies focusing on gender in the context of autism include Cheslack-Postava & Jordan-Young (2012), Davidson (2007), Davidson & Tamas (2016), Goldman (2013), and Jack (2014).

[11] Solomon (2010, 2012, 2015) has similarly explored the ways sociality in some autistic children is facilitated and realised through social interactions with animals.

[12] Other examples of studies which engage with autism in various geographical contexts include Brezis et al. (2015), and Daley et al.'s (2014) work in New Delhi, India; Sarrett (2015), comparing ethnographic data from Kerala, India and Atlanta, US; Kim (2012) comparing Canada, Nicaragua and Korea; Rios & Andrada (2015) in Brazil; and Bilu & Goodman (1997) Shaked (2005), and Shaked & Bilu (2006) writing on autism in ultraorthodox Jewish communities in Israel. For a review, see Cascio (2015b).

[13] The intertwinement of parenting, autism and ethnicity from a phenomenological perspective has also been addressed by Angell & Solomon (2017), Lawlor & Solomon (2017), and Solomon & Lawlor (2013).

[14] The latter two drawing on Treichler (1987).

Citizenship

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sian Lazar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16citizenship

Abstract:

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about institutions of government, the right to vote and be elected, etc. Yet at its most fundamental, citizenship names political belonging, and here I argue that to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community.

Introduction

The sociologist T.H. Marshall gave the following definition of citizenship in 1950:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall 1983 [1950]: 253).

He equated community with the nation, and viewed membership of that community as primarily an individual ownership of a set of rights and corresponding duties. His version of citizenship has a distinguished pedigree: from Locke onwards, liberal citizenship has been seen as a status of the individual. The rights associated with this status in theory allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, as long as they do not hinder other’s similar pursuits, and the state protects this status quo. In return, citizens have minimal responsibilities, which revolve primarily around keeping the state running, such as paying taxes, or participating in military service.

However, liberal citizenship is not the only form of citizenship that we can find globally. Indeed, insights from ethnography complicate this normative picture of liberal citizenship, as anthropologists have insisted on the specificity of citizenship in different contexts. Alternative possibilities might be civic republican or communitarian forms of citizenship. This is because political membership is related in complex ways to day-to-day practices of politics, and citizenship is a mechanism for making claims on different political communities, of which the state is just one. One important consequence of this is that anthropologists denaturalize liberal citizenship and ask questions about the actual constitution of political membership and subjectivity in a given context. In the move from political philosophy to anthropology, we see an important analytical shift take place from the normative to the descriptive: from what citizenship and citizens should be to a critical analysis of what they are.

The political community

The concept of citizenship has a long trajectory within political philosophy. Like anthropologists, political philosophers ask: how should we live with others in a political community? Here I trace some key moments in this enduring debate within political philosophy, a debate which informs most anthropological discussions of citizenship today. Aristotle (2013) is my starting point, as the most celebrated proponent of a civic republican tradition of citizenship that began in the early Greek city states. In the Politics, he discusses three very important issues: first, the question of how precisely to constitute membership – and exclusion; second, the nature of the citizen as person; and third, the nature of politics itself. The first question of membership was a particular problem in early Greek philosophical thought because of the presence of slaves, often in important bureaucratic positions in the government of the city. Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that ‘man is a political animal’ was not an inclusive one, but referred only to certain men, those who were not slaves (women were quickly dismissed and then ignored, along with children). He described the citizen: a member of the political community (polis) who participates in government in the sense that he ‘gives judgement and holds office’. Secondly, Aristotle discussed in great depth the development of the citizen as a particular kind of man capable of living in the collectivity, who held and cultivated the associated virtues, such as respect for law and for others and a passion for politics. Finally, politics itself was intimately linked with speech in Aristotle’s thought. Discussion and debate were absolutely central to Athenian politics and personhood. So, citizenship was constituted through political practice, and political practice was constituted through speech and deliberation.

The key points here are, first, that citizenship is more than simply a status denoting membership of a polity but is constituted through a set of practices associated with participation in politics. Second, political subjectivity is something that cannot be assumed to exist but that must be created. For Aristotle, political subjects – citizens – are inherently collective and also eminently moral.

The second set of foundational philosophical texts I want to highlight are those of the social contract philosophers and the Liberal tradition. For Rousseau and Locke, social order can only be achieved through the acceptance of all to live via the agreement of the majority for the benefit of all. This is principally in order to protect property rights, as in the state of ‘natural freedom’ (Rousseau 1971) prior to the establishment of a state, property is always subject to the threat of what Locke called ‘the Invasion of others’. To overcome this danger each individual ‘puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will’, thus creating ‘civil freedom’ (Rousseau 1971). The political community therefore comes into being when individuals voluntarily subject themselves to the collectivity (meaning the state and the rule of law). As with Aristotle, political subjectivity is not to be assumed, but is created, and is intimately linked to moral questions of personal virtue. The American Declaration of Independence^[1] (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man^[2] (1789) were more radical, in their willingness to question the inevitability of the existing regime of state power and sovereignty; and then to claim sovereignty for ‘the people’. They did so by claiming the equality of men (sic.) in the name of individual rights, especially those to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The political context meant that they needed to claim liberty so that they could change sovereign power, but liberty could also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau and Locke’s position that true freedom comes through the respect for the rule of law, not through the absence of law (for Locke, see his Two Treatises of Government, 2003).

The question of property was also fundamental for the authors of these Declarations, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual property rights became a central question of citizenship in Republican and Liberal regimes from the late eighteenth century on. In the first place, property was a fundamental criterion for membership, as only male property holders were defined as citizens. But also questions of property-holding often created practical difficulties for the implementation of individual, universal ideals of citizenship. For example, Latin American constitutions and legislation of the nineteenth century often attempted to abolish collective land-holding in favour of individual property rights, but this proved very unpopular, especially for indigenous communities in the region. For example, Andean communities were less keen on equal individual rights as defined by their rules, than they were on retaining customary forms of land-holding that protected their members and shared out access to resources (Platt 1984). Anthropologists have done a great deal to illuminate our understanding of the complexities of these processes in the contemporary world, giving due import to their historical, economic, and political background.

In the dominant Liberal narrative of the nineteenth century, liberty of one’s own person would be achieved through citizenship based on individual rights, which superseded institutions perceived as backward, such as slavery or collective property-holding. However, in practice, citizenship was continually negotiated, and collective traditions were not peculiar only to indigenous communities. In fact, the historical development of citizenship is linked to the coalescing of modern nation-states (which often took liberal forms) out of earlier city-state formations built on civic republican traditions. But even the most radical of modern nation-states mixed the two traditions of citizenship together.

One common aspect of both traditions has been the inherent connection of citizenship to exclusion from membership. The exclusion of women from liberal citizenship was denounced from its beginnings by early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges. Contemporary feminist political philosophers, historians, and other social theorists also point out that the ‘abstract’ individual citizen of Liberal ideals turns out to be in fact a very particular kind of white male property-holding individual citizen.

The debate about the abstract individual of contemporary Liberalism has provoked responses from communitarian political philosophers as well as from feminists. Both emphasize the embedding of subjects within collectivities; they recognize that in real life we are not merely individual subjects or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1984). Rather, and now I use more anthropological language, we are part of a whole network of social relations of care, obligation, rights, kinship, and so on.

However, as anthropologists are only too well aware, a community is not always welcoming and egalitarian. Feminist and queer political theorists, among others, have pointed out how the notion of community often leaves little space for individual variability. More importantly, it hides from view the internal power relations that constrain the ability to define what ‘a community’ is and what ‘it’ thinks best. Who speaks for ‘a’ community? Are any communities so homogeneous as to suppress difference within them, and what does that mean for their members?

For anthropologists, this is a crucial point, which has come out in debates as varied as those centred on individual or collective notions of the self, the interplay between ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ legal jurisdictions and national ones, human rights and property rights, and the practice of ‘development’. While many anthropologists have felt an affinity with subaltern groups and so have defended group rights from a perspective of cultural relativism, it has long been acknowledged that societal and legal recognition of group rights may inhibit individual claims to justice. Anthropological study takes the discussion beyond abstract principles, not least through the recognition that conflicts between group rights and legal regimes that are based upon Liberal notions of individual rights often happen in grey zones imbued with complex power relations. Examples of these grey zones are issues of land rights and the exploitation of natural resources.

In a classically liberal approach, individual rights constitute citizenship of the national political community and group rights undermine that civic belonging; while in political thought more influenced by communitarianism, smaller communities define their members. Contemporary liberals have modified the first position, to argue for liberal versions of community membership that protect both individual and group rights. Yet the tension remains largely unresolved. Anthropology’s distinctive disciplinary history and methodological approach, relying as it does on comparisons between different kinds of cultural, social, and economic practices, means that anthropologists are well placed to explore these contrasting notions of political community in both urban and rural spaces.

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

When we study how citizenship operates in different contexts, we see that political subject formation is a key element. Ethnographic work shows that political subject formation happens through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Aihwa Ong summed up this insight in an important early article, when she suggested that citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’ (1996: 737).

One prominent thread in the anthropology of citizenship uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine how states and other entities make citizens under various citizenship regimes. To research this, we can examine encounters between people and state officials or policy, and one area where a considerable amount of work of this type has been done is in immigration. Immigration is perhaps where boundaries between citizen and non-citizen are most contested, but immigration encounters are not solely punitive and exclusionary: governments also put in a lot of work to ‘assimilate’ different groups of migrants and refugees.

The interaction between assimilation and respect for difference was investigated early on through the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, first brought to an anthropological audience by Renato Rosaldo. For Rosaldo, cultural citizenship ‘refers to the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (1994: 57). In a series of research and activist projects with Latino immigrants to the US, he and his collaborators discussed immigrants’ experiences of second-class citizenship, and their struggles for better citizenship quality, which they often defined in terms of respect and dignity. He firmly located the struggle for cultural citizenship within a political struggle for rights in the face of exclusionary definitions of national identity.

State policies towards immigrants are not the only form of cultural citizenship regime in operation today. By citizenship regime, I refer to legal, bureaucratic, ideological, and material frameworks that condition practices of, and ideas about, government and participation in politics. States and NGOs all attempt to construct particular kinds of citizen, in policy areas such as development intervention globally and welfare policy at home.

One of the most important ways that states create citizens is education – or, better, schooling. National schooling systems have long been recognised as central to the development of national identity and civic commitment. Although so closely associated with nation-building projects, today education is transnational, and a key area for development intervention: from provision of universal primary education to human rights education programmes, for example. Still, the virtues promoted through schooling vary from country to county, valuing different languages, bodily and emotional dispositions. Schooling may create specific kinds of citizens explicitly through civics classes but also in the ways that pupil–teacher relationships are constructed and students’ bodies disciplined. They may promote certain gender roles, a hierarchical relationship with authority or a commitment to democracy as a value in itself. Schooling is always a moral project, even when that moral quality is hidden behind seemingly technocratic language as with the example of ‘human capital’. However, schools may not always succeed in producing the kinds of citizens envisaged by dominant ideologies, and anthropological analysis is very good at exposing the unintended consequences of educational policies.

Education continues to be inherent to citizenship, whether implemented through schooling or political participation, participation in local voluntary projects, or citizenship classes for immigrants. Other cultural and moral projects of citizenship construction include those that produce the citizen as consumer – of public services, goods, lifestyles; as knowledge worker in the information economy; as auditor of transparent government; as soldier or ex-soldier. These projects work in the interface between people, policy, markets, and the state.

Importantly, though, the processes of subject construction are not only top-down. Ordinary people frame and make claims of the state – for example, for disability benefits for those affected by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Petryna 2002), or for regularization of land titles in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo (Holston 2008). These studies bring out the complex relationships between people and state bureaucracy, and between people and law. The room for manoeuvre that citizens enjoy is not completely free, but constrained by legal and political regimes.

Citizen action is also shaped by the languages of political action available to actors. In some spaces, the processes of claims-making are articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand antiretroviral treatment from the state. The language of citizenship as a means of articulating claims usually names a claim to rights: rights to medical treatment, to legalization of property, to self-government, etc. As a result, for many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, the link between citizenship claims-making and rights is irrefutable and exclusive.

However, although the connection between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is in fact linked to languages of rights in quite specific political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership (i.e. citizenship) can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations, or the naturalized membership of a collectivity. This may reflect a non-liberal vision of citizenship. The recognition of languages of citizenship other than that of rights opens up analytical space for research into non-normative citizenship formations themselves.

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

People are members of varying political communities, not just those governed by national or even local states, and they are subject to forms of government that originate from different entities. Therefore, although citizenship is classically considered as related to the state, anthropological study reveals that this applies under particular political conditions of belonging, but is not always the case. This is especially evident when we take globalization into account. Given the contemporary importance of transnational and sometimes global political entities such as corporations or religious networks in the government of citizens of different nation-states, can we argue that citizenship is merely the relationship between the individual and the state? If we wish to argue that citizenship is participation in government, in the taking of decisions that affect our lives, then the citizen’s position regarding a range of governing entities becomes crucial in an assessment of the quality of his or her citizenship under a given political regime.

For most citizens, the dominant political community is the nation-state. In practice, though, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation-state, and indeed we should question the scale at which we perceive a given political community.

In early modern Europe, the dominant political community was the city, and today some of the most relevant political communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale. This may be global, as in the ideas of cosmopolitanism, world citizenship and human rights, but also transnational as for activist groups, citizen-migrants, diasporic groups and religious networks. Work on transnational migrants links many of the questions of citizenship discussed here, including membership, nationality, identity, cultural citizenship, and political practice.

As with the transnational dimension, local citizenship of the city is of equal theoretical importance to citizenship of the nation. David Harvey (2012) has argued that claiming the right to define the city is a crucial contemporary site for resistance to capital. Such action may not simply be urban protest or social movements, but may also be citizens making a life for themselves in the city. Urban public spheres include the streets, where people demonstrate and work, but also the many forms of association where citizens negotiate the building and defining of society, even act violently towards one another. Thus, the location for the practices of citizenship is a key question for the analysis of citizenship. The logical realm for political action for most citizens has always been their local area, and people are often suspicious of those who choose to extend their political action beyond that, and become professional politicians rather than citizens. Through ethnography we can examine which political collectivities are important in citizens’ lives at any given time and place.

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

However we define the political community, though, it is clear that citizenship as a language names membership. It is also a means of claiming membership, and commenting on the quality (or content, extent) of membership, as we can see when people make distinctions between full- and second-class citizenship or formal and substantive citizenship.^[3] Liberal citizenship has held out the promise of universal equality achieved through universal formal citizenship, at least for particular categories of persons; but despite this promise, citizenship regimes have developed differently in different historical contexts.

Holston (2008) shows how Brazilian citizenship developed historically as differentiated, but suggests that occupants of peripheral settlements of São Paulo have challenged their differential treatment from the mid-twentieth century onwards by claiming citizenship rights to property. They do so by struggling to legalize their homes, which have been built on land that was first occupied illegally. Holston calls this an ‘insurgent citizenship’, and their demand to legalize property ownership is a claim to hold rights just like elite citizens do. There is an irony here, since land-holding has been one of the most important aspects of citizen inequality in Brazil throughout its history.

Rights claims have been a feature of campaigns by other, more organized, social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially since the 1990s. Specifically, the concept of citizenship has been used in campaigns by indigenous, feminist, urban, and LGBTQ+^[4] social movement activists, who demand that they be recognized as active social subjects with the right to have rights and – crucially – the right to define what those rights are. This is a claim to participate in government and decision-making; to participate in political processes too often closed to these groups.

As non-citizens claim citizenship, or second-class citizens claim full citizenship, the nature of citizenship itself changes. Indeed, often the struggle for inclusion (or against exclusion) is what changes the nature of the political system. This could be by creating new laws or constitutions, new categories of people and political subjects, or by changing public opinion. Social and political practices of membership are a crucial part of this dynamic.

But if citizenship is a means of claiming membership or better quality membership, it is also a means of excluding others from that membership or shaping them in contrast to the normative citizen. Citizenship is constituted by both the virtue of the individual citizen as political actor and the nature of political practice. Recognising that non-citizens are excluded from the political community can lead to a positive politics of dissent and resistance and to the broadening of citizenship, but the ‘othering’ can also be highly restrictive, not to say violent.

The archetypal non-citizen is the foreign migrant, but ‘migrant’ is in practice not a simple identity category, not least because migration is often constituted within the force field of colonial and neo-colonial relations. The transformation from colonial subject to imperial citizen and then immigrant other is the outcome of a set of political choices that have a history. Most migrants have travelled to their host country for reasons of labour, and restrictions on their citizenship status that keep them as resident aliens often enable exploitation in the form of low wages and poor working conditions. They are especially vulnerable to abuse by state officials and, where migrants are kept wholly illegal, they are subject to the insecurity of constant risk of deportation. Culturally, the presence of ‘outsiders’ within an imagined ‘national body’ is often not constituted as a problem for the dominant group of citizens, but for the non-citizens themselves. They become ciphers, representing threat, hypersexuality, cultural backwardness, or diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Partridge 2008). They are marked out, subject to discrimination and racism, which persists even when they have become fully legal citizens, over generations.

Such operations of sovereignty are the other side of the coin to the operations of top-down subject creation discussed earlier. They may become violent, as when groups use languages of native belonging to justify attacks on others, who are seen as migrant interlopers regardless of long-standing histories of mobility and transnationalism. Thus, as boundaries are drawn between citizens and non-citizens, and legal frameworks mobilized to emphasize one group’s otherness, the status of citizen and non-citizen can become hardened, and citizenship restricted not amplified.

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

One of the results of recent developments in the anthropology of citizenship has been a proliferation of new concepts which work by adding a qualifying adjective to the term citizenship. Scholars have studied biological citizenship, flexible citizenship, agrarian citizenship, insurgent citizenship, therapeutic citizenship, urban citizenship, pharmaceutical citizenship, formal and substantive citizenship, etc. The qualifying adjective is important, because it recognises the diversity of citizenship today and acknowledges that liberal citizenship is one form among many. However, in the proliferation of adjectives we still risk assuming that we know what citizenship itself is, that the key is the ‘biological’, ‘urban’, ‘differentiated’ aspect, and that citizenship does not require explanation as a concept in its own right. Indeed, we should be wary of all essentialisms and acknowledge that ‘liberal citizenship’ must itself be plural, as attested by the varieties of liberalism both in historical reality and political thought.

At its most elemental, a focus on citizenship is a way of approaching the political, and one of the most exciting anthropological contributions to the debate is the way that we come to put into question the normative formulations of citizenship and explore the languages and practices of political membership, agency, and constitution of varied political communities, without assuming Liberal parameters for either. However, we must be careful, for two reasons. First, although it is important to take a critical position to normative understandings of citizenship, we do risk ending up in an enclave of cultural relativism where the only argument we can make is that citizenship there is different from citizenship here. While this is undoubtedly an important argument, anthropology has significantly more to contribute to our understanding of citizenship. Second, we should not lose sight of the political implications of such a strategy. Studying citizenship as political practice often obliges us to take a political stand, whether that be alongside those advocating for rights at individual or group level, or critical of mainstream (or even counter-hegemonic) notions of citizenship.

Nonetheless, if we recognize that from time to time our view of what citizenship is can be heavily coloured by a normative assumption about what it should be, we are then better placed to see how citizenship is configured in practice, and to explore the historical, material, and cultural reasons for that configuration.

References

Aristotle, 2013 [1984]. Politics (trans. C. Lord). Chicago: University Press.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: University Press.

Locke, J. 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marshall, T.H. 1983 [1950]. Citizenship and social class. In States and societies (ed.) D. Held, 248-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ong, A. 1996. Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37, 737-62.

Partridge, D. 2008. We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology 23, 660-87.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

Platt, T. 1984. Liberalism and ethnocide in the Southern Andes. History Workshop Journal 17, 3-18.

Rosaldo, R. 1994. Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, PoLAR 17, 57-63.

Rousseau, J.J. 1971 [1782] The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Sandel, M. 1984. The procedural republic and the unencumbered self. Political Theory 12, 81-96.

Note on contributor

Sian Lazar is author of El Alto, rebel city: self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of The anthropology of citizenship: a reader (Wiley, 2013). She works on social movements, political activism, and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina.

Dr Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sl360@cam.ac.uk

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

[3] Substantive citizenship is the ability that citizens have in reality to claim rights that they possess through their formal status as citizen: ‘formal membership, based on principles of incorporation in to the nation-state’ contrasts with ‘the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens’ (Holston 2008: 7).

[4] LGBTQ+ is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of gender identities, sexual orientations and romantic orientations that experience discrimination.

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Community

Gifts

Introduction

Obligatory gifts

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

The person in the gift

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Note on contributor

Autism

Disciplinary landscapes

The emergence of autism

Autism's ontological status

Self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement

Identity, community, and subjectivity

Language and sociality

Body and senses

Autism around the world

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Note on contributor

Citizenship

Introduction

The political community

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

Further reading

References

Note on contributor