Content area
Full Text
Key Words civil society, social movements, citizenship, governmentality, NGOs
* Abstract Anthropologists, through their ethnographic method, relationships with people outside of formal and elite political institutions, and attention to alternative worldviews, bring to the study of democracy an examination of local meanings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power that is rare in the scholarly literature on democratic transitions, which has largely focused on political institutions and formal regime shifts. This review brings together the writings of ethnographers working in a wide variety of settings to generate lines of inquiry and analysis for developing an anthropology of democracy.
INTRODUCTION
Much ebullience greeted news of transitions to democracy worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s: yet in the wake of the celebrations, cynical phrases such as "low intensity democracy" (Gills et al. 1993) and "democracy lite" circulated widely, betraying a residual skepticism about the positive nature of political shifts. In academic literature, what had been hailed as "the third wave of democracy" (Huntington 1991) later came under critical scrutiny, as scholars aimed to understand different types and intensities of regime changes, their endurance ("consolidation"), and more recently still their "quality" ("deepening democracy").
By and large, these studies of democracy were conducted by political scientists whose concerns with political institutions, formal regime shifts, and comparative country studies shaped the questions and set the agendas for debate (see, e.g., O'Donnell & Schmitter 1986, Linz & Stepan 1996, Diamond et al. 1997, and the Journal of Democracy, published in part by the National Endowment for Democracy. But cf. Carothers 2002 as a critique of the transition paradigm, Putnam 1993 as an example of a widely read single country study, Yashar 1997 for an historical account, and Schaffer 1998 for an examination of democracy in cultural terms). Yet as anthropologists doing fieldwork in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere have witnessed regime transitions in the places they study, democracy has emerged as a salient theme. Anthropologists' ethnographic method, their relationships with people outside of formal and elite political institutions, and their attention to alternative worldviews have led them to look beyond official political transitions to the local meanings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power accompanying the installation of new political regimes. 1
More...