Democracy: Anthropological Approaches

The contributors to this volume focus on the way that specific definitions of democracy are advanced as normative and others eclipsed, and how certain claims to represent the will of the people gain currency and others are silenced. While previous scholars of democracy have proposed one definitive model after another, the authors in this work suggest that democracy is by nature an open ended set of questions about the workings of power-questions best engaged through the dialogical processes of fieldwork and ethnographic writing.