Skrabut Residency Counts and Housing Rights: Conflicting Enactments of Property in Lima’s Central Margins By Kristin Skrabut Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 6, December 2018 ABSTRACT In a shantytown in Lima, who counts as a resident depends on who’s counting. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Peruvian “self-help” housing community, I show how censuses and surveys are woven into residency determinations and negotiations over property rights. In these contexts, “residency” is not a self-evident status, but rather a complex performance that involves possessing the right kind of need, participating in development activities, accumulating documents, and being legible to myriad political and personalistic “statelike” entities. Meanwhile, conflicts over inadequate residency performances generate violence, insecurity, and confusion about who “the community” is and who is entitled to represent it. I argue that viewing residency as a contested performance that mediates and remakes longstanding inequalities can improve anthropological interpretations of the sprawling and pockmarked cities of the Global South and the dynamics of urban citizenship that produce them.