Rats claiming rights? More‐than‐human acts of denizenship in Amsterdam

Abstract

AbstractThe anthropology of citizenship has sought to understand citizenship beyond formal‐legal definitions, including a focus on how those who are legally without citizenship rights also engage in everyday acts of political claims‐making. While this emphasis on the enactment of citizenship has expanded our understanding of who counts as a political being, it has also been obviously human centered. Might we also understand animals’ acts, their presence and movements, as having the potential to constitute political constituents? This article develops a more‐than‐human perspective on political claims‐making by connecting insights from human‐animal studies to the anthropology of citizenship. We draw on research on rats in Amsterdam to propose an understanding of these animals’ interventions in the urban built environment as more‐than‐human “acts of denizenship.” Focusing on different forms of rat behavior, we analyze rats’ mundane interactions and relations with the city's residents, infrastructure, and other animals as forms of claims‐making. We see the behavior as efforts that are partially recognized by humans and that, as such, can be understood as enacting a relation of denizenship. Such attention to how rats act in and on urban space, we suggest, can help us conceptualize political agency and the formation of political belonging in ways that extend beyond the human.