Legitimacy and Citizenships

This essay focuses on legitimacy in relation to three anthropological conceptualizations of citizenship: biological citizenship, cultural citizenship and spiritual citizenship. It takes inspiration from various chapters in Pardo and Prato (2019) and other related literature on citizenship, and draws on some of my own ethnographic work with Jamaican migrants in the United Kingdom. I consider the legitimacy of the different citizenships that migrants enact in a hostile environment created by unlawful government policies. Windrush generation migrants have forced the Home Office to recognise their legitimacy as British residents and citizens. Likewise, in asserting their Divine rights as spiritual citizens and resisting deportation, Rastafari migrants have succeeded in settling lawfully in the UK and starting on the path to British citizenship. Thus, work in the anthropology of legitimacy gives us hope that citizens of all sorts will ultimately retract the legitimacy of governments that act unlawfully.