What is required to belong as an equal member of a political community? Much democratic theory has privileged citizenship as the conceptual tool to address this question. Yet contemporary democracies are full of citizens who feel like they don't belong and full of citizens whom others feel don't belong despite their citizenship. Weaving together democratic theory and ethnographic fieldwork, A House is Not a Home examines the tensions and complementarities between citizenship and belonging in twenty-first-century democracies through the figure of the citizen who does not belong-those whose membership is dismissed as inauthentic or incomplete.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Mexico City and Paris, this book argues that belonging depends on social interactions with others just as much as it depends on legal inclusion by the state. But besides mapping the general intuition about the insufficiency of formal citizenship for belonging, ethnographic fieldwork helps unveil two core insights. First, that belonging need not require, and may at times even be undermined by, the affirmations of esteem that often characterize discussions of inclusion. And, second, that belonging does not merely trail citizenship but stands in a complex relationship to it. Citizenship can fall short in guaranteeing belonging-it can also moor and bolster belonging, and, at times and more troublingly, it can even hinder belonging.
A House is not a Home shows how an attention to "belonging" as a concept for political theory sheds light on the promises and pitfalls of democratic citizenship, capturing how it takes shape in practice, how it is experienced as a status that simultaneously disappoints and empowers, and how that bittersweet relationship shapes ordinary citizens' understanding of the value of democratic institutions.
