Differentiated citizenship, displacement, and materiality in state–citizen relations in Ahmedabad
This study examines urban restructuring, citizenship, and the state from the perspective
of displaced slum-dwellers in Ahmedabad, India. First, it explores how the state
seeks to reconstruct itself and to determine the borders of the nation and good citizenship
through world-class infrastructural development. Second, it traces displaced and
resettled people’s perceptions about the nature of the state and their relations to it.
Third, it analyzes how empirically differentiated citizenship is formed through the entanglement
of documents, infrastructure, state and non-state actors, and displaced
people.
The theoretical framework of the study is based on anthropological analyses of
differentiated citizenship and processual, performative, and disaggregated understandings
of the state. Methodologically, the study is based on ten months of ethnographic
fieldwork in the slum resettlement site of Sadbhavna Nagar, involving participant
observation and 58 semi-structured interviews with displaced people/residents of
the site. These are combined with analysis of newspaper articles, websites, resettlement-
related documents, apartment plans, government brochures, and court proceedings.
The findings of the study suggest that good citizenship has been defined in terms
of civility, cleanliness, economic prosperity, property ownership, and non-Muslim identity.
The everyday reality of citizenship for displaced people was conditioned by their
literacy, economic and political clout, religious and caste identity, personal persistence,
embeddedness in informal networks, and possession of documents and resettlement
apartments. It was also shaped by state officials’ compassion, corruption, mistakes, indifference,
and biased attitudes.
The main anthropological contribution of the study is its call for citizenship to be
viewed as a dynamic, differential everyday reality formed through the entanglement of
human and non-human forces via formal and informal relations. Citizenship cannot be
analyzed apart from the social, cultural, and material contexts within which it is constructed
and on which its various forms depend. The approach takes into account the
agency of displaced people as well as state and non-state actors, afforded and constrained
by paper documents and concrete housing.
Keywords: bureaucracy, citizenship, documents, imagineering, India, infrastructure,
materiality, state, urban development, worlding
...
Publisher
Jyväskylän yliopistoISBN
978-951-39-7774-0ISSN Search the Publication Forum
2489-9003Metadata
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- JYU Dissertations [844]
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