In Graeber’s “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”

“I’m currently doing my dissertation research in Russia, which makes for a sort of surreal election-watching. I am at once reading the English-language news about the utterly flawed execution of democratic process in the US, and hearing Russian acquaintances continuously implicitly and explicitly reference American Democracy when talking about unfair elections or other various political complaints about their own government…”

I can relate…I am working in Mexico and have had some similar conversations here. Especially right around the time of the elections here in Mexico. There is certainly a lot of distrust about the democratic and political process here in Mexico, and sometimes people have asked me “Well, it’s a lot better in the US, right?” Well………is what I answer. I remember one specific conversation where someone was complaining about the number of different parties, and that someone can win the election with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. This person contrasted this with the US, saying that at least the person who gets elected is voted in has more than half the vote. My response was “Ya, but we also have a bit of a problem where two parties have complete control of the electoral process.” And so on…maybe these discussions about democracy are inherently messy.

“How is it, I wonder, that the global news machine churns out continuous critique of Russian democratic process in English, but Russian-language press stays out of any assessment of the democratic-worthiness of US elections?”

Ya, that’s a really good question. The role of the media in shaping what *we think* democracy is all about is key.

Thanks for the source as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Indian-Givers-Native-Americans-Transformed/dp/0307717151/ref=pd_sim_b_1

And given that the Guardian article starts out by mentioning Tagg Romney, worth reading alongside this: http://www.salon.com/2012/10/18/tagg_romney_mr_white_privilege/

And relating to anthropologist John Jackson’s discussion on ‘georaciality’ and David Theo Goldberg’s ‘Presidential Race’: http://threatofrace.org/2008/10/blog/presidential-race-by-david-theo-goldberg/.

Worth thinking about democracy, in relation both to ancient Greece/Rome and the post-colonial, post-slave state Americas (north and south), in relation to enduring legacies of slavery and circumscribed, unequal definitions of citizenship and democratic belonging.

Hmm. Thanks for posting this.

Anyway, he offers a helpful summary right at the start:

1) Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a “Western” concept that begins its history in ancient Athens. They also assume that what eighteenth and nineteenth-century politicians began reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same thing. Democracy is thus seen as something whose natural habitat is Western Europe and its English or French-speaking settler colonies. Not one of these assumptions is justified. “Western civilization” is a particularly incoherent concept, but, insofar as it refers to anything, it refers to an intellectual tradition. This intellectual tradition is, overall, just as hostile as anything we could recognize as democracy as those of India, China, or Mesoamerica.

2) Democratic practices—processes of egalitarian decision-making—however, occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given “civilization,” culture, or tradition. They tend to crop up wherever human life goes on outside systematic structures of coercion.

3) The “democratic ideal” tends to emerge when, under certain historical circumstances, intellectuals and politicians, usually in some sense navigating their way between states and popular movements and popular practices, interrogate their own traditions—invariably, in dialogue with other ones—citing cases of past or present democratic practice to argue that their tradition has a fundamental kernel of democracy. I call these moments of “democratic refoundation.” From the perspective of the intellectual traditions, they are also moments of recuperation, in which ideals and institutions that are often the product of incredibly complicated forms of interaction between people of very different histories and traditions come to be represented as emerging from the logic of that intellectual tradition itself. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, such moments did not just occur in Europe, but almost everywhere.

4) The fact that this ideal is always founded on (at least partly) invented tradition does not mean it is inauthentic or illegitimate or, at least, more inauthentic or illegitimate than any other. The Contradiction, however, is that this ideal was always based on the impossible dream of marrying democratic procedures or practices with the coercive mechanisms of the state. The result are not “Democracies” in any meaningful sense of the word but Republics with a few, usually fairly limited, democratic elements.

5) What we are experiencing today is not a crisis of democracy but rather a crisis of the state. In recent years, there has been a massive revival of interest in democratic practices and procedures within global social movements, but this has proceeded almost entirely outside of statist frameworks. The future of democracy lies precisely in this area.

Also, here’s a link with some history about debates in the US:

http://people.howstuffworks.com/debate.htm

Pay particular attention to the role of the League of Women Voters, and the agreement between Republicans and Democrats in 1988. Kinda makes you wonder.

And how about a couple of quotes:

“Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy.”

-Franz Boas

“To claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a one-sided expression of Americanism.”

-Franz Boas, again.

http://sarweb.org/index.php?sar_press_democracy

Julia Paley: “Toward an Anthropology of Democracy.”

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085453