Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

James Holston is one of the most innovative anthropologists of citizenship today, and this book is a significant contribution to the contemporary literature on citizenship. It is also a solidly grounded and methodologically sound history of São Paulo, especially its peripheries. Clearly written, it will be of considerable interest to a wide range of scholars including historians, sociologists, and anthropologists at all levels from undergraduates to faculty.The notion of “insurgent citizenship” requires a conceptualization of citizenship as something that has been struggled over throughout history. More than merely a legal status of membership of a nation, citizenship is qualitatively different in different historical and spatial contexts. It must also be understood as both formal and substantive, with the two not necessarily (or even usually) commensurate. Holston’s argument, in brief, is that Brazilian citizenship has developed as differentiated: specifically, inclusive but inegalitarian. By that he means that the category of Brazilian citizenship incorporates almost everyone but does so unequally. He contrasts this to the nineteenth-century developments of French citizenship as inclusive and egalitarian, and American citizenship as exclusive but still egalitarian. Whereas under the French and American regimes, once one achieves citizen status one has a moral and constitutional claim to equal rights and treatment, in Brazil, many people can be counted citizens but be differently treated according to various perceived capacities and qualities. Of course race plays a central part in this, but two other significant qualities are literacy and property ownership.Holston argues that the development of the peripheral settlements from the mid-twentieth century onward have challenged that differential treatment by basing an “insurgent citizenship,” a claim to rights, precisely on a form of property ownership that historically shaped differentiation in civil citizenship. This has been facilitated by the rise in literacy that resulted from widespread urbanization. However, it is complicated by the legal machinations associated with land ownership, the other principal theme of the book. Residents of the peripheries have often found that even after paying their dues to a real estate company they have not been able to achieve legal title to the land for a number of variously convoluted reasons, both legal and fraudulent. Holston shows with detailed historical description how this is intimately tied to the way that Brazilian property regimes and laws have developed over time.The wider point, then, is one about Brazilian law, and it is Holston’s argument that the legal and the illegal are intertwined and create each other: for example, illegal landholding can be legalized by the recognition of productive use and of continuing occupation of the land. Also, entirely legal proceedings mostly have the effect of creating such confusion and delay that parties turn to extralegal, that is, political, solutions to the dispute. For example, a land “owner” disputing the right of a real estate company to sell lots in a certain area may agree to drop his case in return for compensation. The ethnographic detail in the book on the operation of the law is fascinating and incredibly illuminating, proving a point that I think is relevant across Latin America, namely that irresolution, and therefore fraud and stratagem, are not externalities that corrupt a system that embodies basic principles of justice, but rather they are internal to that system.What is new is that groups of the urban poor are starting to manipulate the law in the way that elites have done for centuries, and this is what Holston considers to be insurgent citizenship. The book makes some very important arguments and breaks open the assumption that citizenship is essentially only a legal status. However, Holston retains some assumptions about citizenship that I would question. One, for example, is the idea that clientelism is antithetical to citizenship, perhaps even external to it, in the same way that irresolution is seen as external to the basic principles of law in the view that he critiques. The value judgment here reveals an essentially liberal conception of citizenship, which in other places Holston ably dismantles — as with, for example, his notion of differentiated citizenship. For Holston, the insurgent citizenship he so admires is good precisely because it makes claims to the kind of universal equality promoted by French and American formulations of citizenship. It is (implicitly) undermined every time someone makes use of social differences to argue for differential treatment, as in the case of positive discrimination schemes or different retirement ages for men and women. Furthermore, he argues that (insurgent) citizenship is exercised when the poor have recourse to the law (and persist and even at times succeed), and undermined when the judicial and police systems are dysfunctional or corrupt. I would suggest that this is quite a North American view of citizenship as the ability to litigate within a predictable system.Similarly, what citizenship actually is seems to vary through the book. At times, Holston describes “citizenship regimes,” and at other times, citizenship is given some kind of agency and power of its own, or it is a goal or a claim to have rights, or something that describes particular property-owning regimes. Holston is part of a trend within current scholarly discussion of citizenship that has resulted in the addition of qualifying adjectives such as (in his case) differentiated, formal, substantive, or insurgent. But the risk is that citizenship as a concept may then float away, becoming anything (as long as it has the correct adjective in front) and therefore nothing. That said, if dissolving this particular concept gives rise to discussions of law, property holding, political activity, democracy, and modernity as sophisticated, interesting, and vibrant as in this particular book, then readers cannot complain.