Whether considered as a status, a set of activities or from a political philosophy point of view, citizenship has been largely explored by political science and legal studies. Such research are meanwhile mainly normative or theoretical and empirical approaches are much more rare, especially in the French context. This HDR explores and discuss an original anthropological approach in the field of citizenship studies; an approach characterised by a will to analyse the social and political "manufacture" of citizenship and to "destabilise" its theories by a critical analysis.