Citizenship: Anthropological Approaches to Migration and Social Exclusion

The connections between the transformation of citizenship, the diversification of poverty and the development of transnational ways of migrating is the focus of the chapter. As a result of the emergence of new poverties, the ways of impoverishment are characterized by a deep individualization, so that it is possible to observe different situations of life, forms of privation that go beyond ordinary economic deprivation. Furthermore, new ways of migrating and of managing difference within multicultural configurations have led some scholars to imagine new paths for claiming and granting rights. However, human rights discourses tend to reify complex and ambivalent social and cultural processes through which rights are negotiated, realised or denied within specific contexts. In some cases one notes the gap between the provision and the realisation of rights which is often affected by negotiation between individuals and groups. Such negotiation is influenced in multiple ways by the representation (symbolic as well as political) of social and migrant minorities. We stress the importance of disaggregating both migrant as well as poor “communities”. Poor persons do not constitute a homogenous group and migrant groups are characterized by multiple and differing biographical and social trajectories. Taking into account the experiences of social practitioners implementing policies towards migrants and the case of the street lawyers providing legal support to homeless, we discuss the problem of essentialism and sedentarism informing many institutional practices and the implementation of rights. By considering citizenship as a problematic performance to be grounded in specific contexts, we seek to explore how anthropological and ethnographic approaches can contribute to the analysis of the realization of human and citizenship rights in our contemporary societies.