Toward an Anthropology of (Democratic) Citizenship Education

Abstract

In recent years, discourses about citizenship have come to occupy center stage, in both contemporary political practice and academic scholarship. The salience of citizenship has certainly made itself felt in anthropology as well, but less so in our educational subfield. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the relationships between educational processes and citizenship education from an anthropological perspective. In doing so, I review (not exhaustively) a good deal of work in anthropology that probes these relationships, but I also argue that our patchwork conceptual frameworks in the anthropology of education have yet to catch up with the richness and complexity of citizenship education across both formal and informal educational domains. I hope to point the way toward a more coherent and unified approach.