Module description
How is democracy understood and lived around the world? Do the geographically and historically specific imaginations and set ups of democratic governance exhaust the ways democracy can emerge and develop? How can we explain widespread democratic malaise in both established and emerging democracies today? This political anthropology module begins with the double assertion that, while democracy has become the hegemonic paradigm of political organization globally, democracy is not a system of governance per se. Rather, democracy is first and foremost an idea, namely that that people should actively participate in organizing the collectivity. Therefore, the module will delve into experiences of the democratic around the world with a view to perform the following critical scholarly gestures: 1) Pluralize the range of phenomena and attitudes that are understood and actualized as democratic 2) Trace the cultural implications of international democracy promotion predominantly but not exclusively in postcolonial societies 3) Provide geographically embedded critiques of institutionalized liberalism, the historically hyphenated partner of Western democracy, both its commitment to the naturalized values of individualism, rule of law, secularism, and capitalism and its elision with the prerogatives of the global market. The module will explore some case-studies from the Euro-American context, and will place specific emphasis on experiences from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The module does not require any prior knowledge in political anthropology. The module consists of live lectures and seminars for which preparation and active participation are significant components. The module requires a degree of independent research in the geopolitical and historical situations that feature in weekly sessions.
*Please note that module information is indicative and may change from year to year.
Assessment details
One 10 minute presentation (15%) and one 2,500-word essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module aims to:
- consolidate student understanding of democratic theories and the concept of democracy
- strengthen student ability to critically assess and produce scholarly insight over the productive interaction between theory and
- case studies
- familiarize students to the discipline of political anthropology
- familiarize students with a range of democratic experiences around the world
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module students will be able to:
- critically review Euro-American democratic theory in relation to its global applicability
- display a solid understanding of democratic discourse and practice in social science.
- Engage confidently in the systematic comparison of different political contexts
Employability & transferable skills
This module places considerable emphasis on student employability by cultivating transferable skills that are highly sought-after in the civil and diplomatic sectors, journalism, development, and other fields of political analysis. To this end, students will learn:
- how to critically approach and relativize dominant political concepts
- how to synthesize information across geopolitical and historical contexts
- how to produce a short analytical report in the form of an essay
- how to take initiative in the conceptualization and completion of a research process for the completion of the summative assessment
Teaching pattern
One-hour lecture and one-hour seminar, weekly
Indicative teaching schedule
Week 1: Democracy, An Anthropological Approach
Week 2: Pedagogies and Agents of Democracy
Week 3: Democratic Affects
Week 4: Democratic Rituals
Week 5: Democracy and the Nation
Week 6: Democracy and the People
Week 7: Democratic Malaise Part 1: Democracy in the Post Colony
Week 8: Democratic Malaise Part 2: Democracy and the Market
Week 9: Direct Democracies
Week 10: Essay Workshop
Note that this teaching schedule is indicative and subject to change.
Suggested reading list
Ansenbaum, H., 2016. Facilitating Inclusion: Austrian Wisdom Councils as Democratic Innovation between Consensus and Diversity. Journal of Public Deliberation, 12(2).
Banerjee, M., 2007. Sacred elections. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1556-1562.
Bolten, C., 2016. " I Will Vote What Is in My Heart": Sierra Leone's 2012 Elections and the Pliability of" Normative" Democracy. Anthropological Quarterly, 89(4), pp.1019-1047.
Brown, W. Undoing Democracy: Neoliberalism’s Remaking of State and Subject. In Undoing the Demos. Zone Books.
Chatterjee, P., 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Ch. 1.
Cini, L. and Felicetti, A., 2018. Participatory deliberative democracy: toward a new standard for assessing democracy? some insights into the Italian case. Contemporary Italian Politics, 10 (2).
Curato, N., 2016. Flirting with Authoritarian Fantasies? Rodrigo Duterte and the New Terms of Philippine Populism. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(1), pp. 142-53.
Ellison, S., 2017. Corrective Capacities: From Unruly Politics to Democratic Capacitación. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 35(1), pp.67-83.
Elstub, S., Ercan, S. and Fabrino Mendonça, S., 2016. Editorial introduction: The fourth generation of deliberative democracy. Critical Policy Studies, 10(2), pp. 139-151.
Fozdar, F., and Low, M. 2015. They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 21 (3), pp. 524 -543.
Fraser, N., 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), pp.56-80.
Greenberg, J., 2010. “There's Nothing Anyone Can Do About It “: Participation, Apathy, and “Successful” Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia. Slavic Review, 69(1), pp.41-64.
Greenhouse, C.J., 2018. Citizens united, citizens divided: Democracy and economy in a corporate key. American Ethnologist, 45(4), pp.546-560.
Jiménez, A.C. and Estalella, A., 2017. Political exhaustion and the experiment of street: Boyle meets Hobbes in Occupy Madrid. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), pp.110-123.
Kaltwasser, C. R., 2012. The ambivalence of populism: threat and corrective for democracy. Democratization, 19(2), pp. 184-208.
Kinnvall, C., 2019. Populism, ontological insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the masculinization of Indian politics. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 32(3), pp. 283-302.
Koch, I., 2016. Bread‐and‐butter politics: Democratic disenchantment and everyday politics on an English council estate. American Ethnologist, 43(2), pp.282-294.
Kreutzer, P., 2006. Violent civic nationalism versus civil ethnic nationalism: Contrasting Indonesia and Malay(si)a. National Identities, 8(1), pp. 41-59.
Mamdani, M., 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press, Introduction.
Mehta, U. S. 1999. Empire and Liberalism, University of Chicago Press. Chapter 1.
Mouffe, C. For an Agonistic Model of Democracy. In The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
Paley, J., 2002. Toward an anthropology of democracy. Annual review of anthropology, 31(1), pp.469-496.
Piliavsky, A., 2015. India's human democracy. Anthropology Today, 31(4), pp.22-25.
Rancière, J. 2014. Democracy, Republic, Representation. In Hatred of Democracy. London. Verso.
Tanabe, A., 2007. Toward vernacular democracy: Moral society and post-postcolonial transformation in rural Orissa, India. American ethnologist. 34 (3), pp. 558–574.
Wedeen, L., 2007. The politics of deliberation: Qat chews as public spheres in Yemen. Public Culture, 19(1), pp.59-84.