Just Like Democracy: Ethnography of Realpolitik in a City of Immigrants

Just Like Democracy: Ethnography of Realpolitik in a City of Immigrants
(2012 | Journal of Levantine Studies Vol. 2 no.1 pp.71-91)

Authors: Meirav Aharon-Gutman
Abstract: Engin Isin, in his work “Citizenship after Orientalism: Ottoman Citizenship,” offers a new paradigm for citizenship studies. Understanding citizenship after Orientalism begins with an inquiry into the kind of political culture that has emerged at the meeting point between immigrants and “imperial elites,” and how this political culture reshaped both groups.1 Following Isin’s paradigm, the goal of this paper is to open a new space for understanding political culture in polycultural, liberal societies. This new space lies at the intersection of the official perception of democracy and citizenship with the mixture of political languages used by the common people (as opposed to that used by the elites). The main challenge in this paper is to offer an ethnography of realsociology: an ethnography that liberates itself from the Occidental interpretation of citizenship, on the one hand, and from the fundamental interpretations of religion and ethnicity on the other. The ethnography of realsociology can shed a new light on the notion of citizenship: citizenship not as it is envisaged in the political philosophy of a normative future, but citizenship in the concrete politics of everyday life.