Political Participation

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 100 C5.P86 C5.P87 C5.P88 C5.P89 C5.P90 C5.P91 C5.P92 C5.P93 C5.P94 C5.P95 C5.P96 C5.P97 C5.P98 C5.P99 C5.P100 C5.P101 C5.P102 ruth dassonneville, fernando feitosa, and michael s. lewis-beck Lewis-Beck, M. S., and M. Stegmaier. 2013. “The VP-Function Revisited: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions after over 40 Years.” Public Choice 157 (34): 367–385. Martins, R., and F. J. Veiga. 2013. “Economic Performance and Turnout at National and Local Elections.” Public Choice 157 (3-4): 429–448. Morley, S. Machado, R., and Pettinato, S. 1999. Indexes of Structural Reform in Latin America Santiago, Chile: ECLAC Economic Development Division, LC/L.1166. Nadeau, R., Lewis-Beck, M. S., and Foucault, M. 2019. “Wealth and Voter Turnout: Investigating Twenty-Eight Democracies.” Polity 51.2: 261–287 Nannestad, P., and M. Paldam. 1994. “The VP-Function: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions after 25 years.” Public Choice 79 (3-4): 213–245. Norpoth, H., M. S. Lewis-Beck, and J. D. Lafay. 1991. Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Özler, S. I. 2013. “Political Institutions and Protest: A Comparative Analysis.” Representation 49 (2): 135–154. Polacko, M., O. Heath, M. S. Lewis-Beck, and R. Dassonneville. 2020. “Policy Polarization, Income Inequality and Turnout.” Political Studies: doi: 10.1177/0032321720906581 Powell, G. B. Jr. 2000. Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riker, W. H., and P. C. Ordeshook. 1968. “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (1): 25–42. Rosenstone, S. J. 1982. “Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 26 (1): 25–46. Shah, P., and A. Wichowsky. 2019. “Foreclosure’s Fallout: Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout.” Political Behavior 41 (4): 1099–1115. Smets, K, and C. Van Ham. 2013. “The Embarrassment of Riches? A Meta-Analysis of Individual-Level Research on Voter Turnout.” Electoral Studies 32 (2): 344–359. Soroka, S., P. Fournier, and L. Nir. 2019. “Cross-National Evidence of a Negativity Bias in Psychophysiological Reactions to News.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (38): 18888–18892. Southwell, P. L. 1996. “Economic Salience and Differential Abstention in Presidential Elections.” American Politics Quarterly 24 (2): 221–236. Verba, S., K. L. Schlozman, and H. E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Viechtbauer, W. 2010. “Conducting Meta-Analyses in R with the Metafor Package.” Journal of Statistical Software 36 (3): 1–48. 9780198861126_Book.indb 100 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN chapter 6 C6 Anthrop ol o gy and P oli ti cal Parti ci pati on julia m. eckert C6.P1 C6.P2 C6.P3 The study of political participation in anthropology has engendered a concept of politics that provides for the possibility to examine the constitution of political order and of a polity through diverse and divergent forms of participation. Anthropology has responded to what has been identified as the crisis of contemporary democracy, a post-democratic (Crouch 2005) or even post-political (Rancière 1999) era with an insistence that we are observing an intensely political time (Postero and Elinoff 2019). The analysis of contemporary impossibilities to participate emerging in the neoliberal age has been the subject of many anthropological enquiries into contemporary politics (e.g., Li 2019); they have acknowledged a crisis of formal institutions of democracy in many places, and enquired into their de-politicizing dynamics (Ferguson 1994; Coles 2004; Muehlebach 2012), as well as their employment as instruments of hegemony (Li 2007). Anthropology has treated this observation as a call to take into view the diverse strategies and struggles of people to recuperate participatory possibilities, assert participatory rights, and negotiate and expand the norms that define legitimate participation. Anthropologists focus on the modes and practices in which people attempt to realize participatory rights, and to deepen or expand the possibilities of participation in situations in which people perceive to have lost participatory possibilities. They have found political participation to rely on diverse forms of practices, including those not usually identified with participation in a political system. They observe how such participatory practices address all sorts of relations of power, not only those with the agencies of government. Moreover, they find such practices of political participation to engage with diverse imaginations of political community, not only those of the nation state or its parts, nor only small-scale local ones, but addressing at times the political order of world society. For anthropology, political participation could be defined as all action in respect to a political order which lays claim to the promise of taking part in deciding upon one’s collective circumstances. There are other forms of relating to a political order than participation: Indifference, dependence, subjection or devotion, all form part of the repertoire of “politics.” Some of them also aim at making authorities more respondent to one’s needs, and often coexist side by side with participatory forms of relating to authorities. One could 9780198861126_Book.indb 101 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 102 C6.P4 C6.P5 C6.P6 C6.P7 C6.P8 julia m. eckert argue, furthermore, that most of these ways of relating to political authority entail aspects of participation, an observation much discussed in anthropology, but this is not my focus here. Rather, I will explore those anthropological approaches to political participation that have examined how the promises of political participation capture the imaginations and aspirations of people in the most different circumstances, and which have sought to explore the tension arising between these participatory desires and their ever-failing realization. In these anthropological perspectives, political participation appears to be driven by the attempts to realize its promises; it is a form of voice, an immanent critique, that (re-) creates and criticizes at the same time and is realized only in practice. It is the stuff of politics. This perspective has moved three questions to the center of anthropological engagements with political participation. First is the question of in what ways people participate politically, and what makes the practices of participating in a political order “political.” Anthropologists, who take into account how the political is shaped by economic action, religious belief, or social intimacies (and vice versa), and who have therefore dissolved the boundaries between the private and the public erected by liberal conceptions of politics, pay attention to the ways in which seemingly “non-political” practices are employed as political means; or when overtly political ones change in their meaning, as when electoral experiences are significant not for their impact on electoral outcomes, but for collective identity, self-worth, or a sense of possibility. For anthropologists thus, many forms of participation make “politics”: they are quintessentially political in their projective character, seeking to impact on the order of things. The second question that anthropologists have engaged with when they have discussed political participation in its diverse forms, is, what difference it makes that people do participate—to them, and to the order that they participate in. Anthropologists have debated whether political participation, even in their encompassing understanding, reinforces the hegemonic dynamics of an existing order or can actually effect change. Does participation merely reproduce a political order? The third question central to anthropological explorations of political participation is who (and what) are subjects of political participation; and, related, how we need to think the constitution of the body politic. Anthropologists have in recent years developed a more processual understanding of the polity, one that reflects the practices of bordering political communities. Thus, anthropologists have explored participatory practices for their expression of “insurgent” norms of legitimate participation. The central question that emerges today is thus that of the relation between participation and membership, that is, the question whether participation is confined to members of a given polity, or whether it is itself constitutive of the polity that one participates in. In the following, I will explore these three questions, around which anthropological perspectives on political participation have centered. I will begin with the many faces of the political that early political anthropology identified, which necessitated, or rather: enabled an encompassing concept of the political. For subsequent studies this opened up the possibility of a perspective on political participation to be identified in various acts and practices of the everyday. Moving from the observation of “different” practices and norms of participation in non-Western political orders, anthropologists came to take into view the myriad ways of participating in all political orders. Second, I will focus on the anthropological studies which came to focus on the expressive aspects of participatory practice and the contestations over norms of legitimate 9780198861126_Book.indb 102 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN Anthropology and Political Participation 103 participation. This brought to the fore the question of the very constitution of the polity that people participate in. Thirdly, and in order to take up this question on the constitution of the polity through participation, I will turn to the debate on the effects of participation, that is, the question whether political participation merely reproduces a political order or actually transforms it, a question that arises, on the one hand, in relation to the anthropological skepticism towards the possibilities of the subaltern to speak, but equally, on the other hand, in relation to the discipline’s presumptions about the prefigurative effects of subaltern projective practice. The Many Faces of the Political C6.S1 C6.P9 C6.P10 C6.P11 Political anthropology from the very beginning set out to explore norms and practices of political participation. The early political anthropologists of functionalist or structural functionalist orientation examined the rules which regulated political participation in nonstate political systems (e.g., Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Leach 1954). They identified the ways that social position and aspects of the person determined participatory forms, rights, and obligations. Examining diverse ways of political participation and the specific conceptualizations of the person that underlay norms of political participation in different political orders produced a sensibility towards conceptualizations of political personhood and the way that shapes political participation. A concept of participation adequate to these diverse norms regulating participation was needed to provide for conceptual possibilities to conceive of political participation not as a right, but also as an obligation, a duty, an aspect of a specific phase of life, or of a specific subject position. Therefore, political anthropology had to employ a notion of politics that was not confined to specific practices or “methods” of participation; nor to an idea of rationality, deliberation, or voluntarism; one, furthermore, not focused on specific addressees of participatory practices or claims, such as “government.” Rather, their comparative project attended to the multivalent aspects of politics they found in different political orders. They needed to take into account in their concept of the political how different orders reflected all: the fundamental sociality of being underlying any politics (Pina-Cabral 2018) and the communitas of political practice (Turner 1969), as well as the “stratagems and spoils” (Bayley 1969) of political negotiation and maneuvering. The successors of the early political anthropologists in the 1960s and early 1970s often explored the egalitarian “participatory ethos” that they found in the political norms and institutions of polities without a state (e.g., Barth 1959; Clastres 1974; Sigrist 1967). Some explicitly countered the teleologies of modernization theory. They employed the Boasian assertion of the equal value of diverse cultural forms as a critical instrument for modernity, considering those alternative political institutions as evidence of the possibility of an “otherwise.” For contemporary exploration of political participation from an anthropological perspective taking account of these diverse systems of political participation is thus not a matter of “difference” as such. Rather, the exploration of such different logics of organizing, normatively legitimizing, and understanding political participation necessitated anthropologists to develop a broader concept of political participation that they could employ also for understanding political participation in contemporary liberal democracies and other 9780198861126_Book.indb 103 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 104 julia m. eckert political systems (e.g., Hage 2015). Observing institutions of political participation that highlighted aspects of social obligation pertaining to people with specific capacities or in specific age groups, or understanding rituals of political participation to enact particular conceptualizations of both the person and the polity, and particularly the relation of both, provided conceptual tools to explore these aspects also in polities organized as democratic states. The holism characteristic of the anthropological endeavor made anthropologists consider the specific delineations of “the political,” that is the distinctions that different systems made between what issues and concerns pertained to the realm of the political and which did not. Thus, political anthropology developed a perspective, which paid attention to the polyvalent aspects of different forms of political participation; and which could explore the constitution of specific notions of “the political agent” through institutions of political participation, and, vice versa the constitution of political community through acts, practices, and rituals of participation. Norms of Legitimate Participation C6.S2 C6.P12 C6.P13 C6.P14 For anthropology, seeking to trace the expression of political norms and aspirations in such diverse forms of political participation is also a result of the long-standing predominance in the discipline to “study down,”1 that is, to explore precisely the realities of those whose voices go mostly unheard, and whose normative orientations remain unrepresented. Paying attention to the diverse strivings to participate has been of interest to anthropologists because they are one form in which “the subaltern can speak” (Spivak 1988). Systemic impossibilities of political participation go far beyond the denial of formal participatory rights. Differential obstacles to participation in relation to class, caste, race, gender, ethnicity, legal status, sexual orientation, “ability,” or others, have always been the norm (e.g. Inda 2005; Nuijten and Lorenzo 2009; see also Chapters 33, 34, 35 this volume). The counterpublics (Negt and Kluge 1972; Warner 2002) that form around systemic impossibilities of participation, create the grounds from which people begin to participate, either in order to delineate a space of autonomy, or to claim access and recognition. For anthropologists, thus, political participation appears as a promise that people strive to realize when they feel excluded in whatever way or threatened by political decisions that affect them but that they cannot influence. When attention moved to the impact of colonialism and imperialism on political institutions, political anthropology focused on the re-definition and re-constitution of political authority that colonialism had effected (e.g., Mamdani 1996) and that shaped post-colonial polities. One form of political participation prominently discussed in political anthropology was patron–client relations and similar arrangements. “Clientelism” was discussed as a form of political participation because it was a predominant form of accessing the political system and the resources of states, particularly in situations shaped by high socioeconomic inequality, where access to the resources and services of states were 1 “Studying down” for long replaced studying “the other”; studying up (Nader 1969) and studying “through” (Wedel et al. 2005) have become important but have not informed explorations of political participation. See also Chapter 16 this volume on ethnographic methods. 9780198861126_Book.indb 104 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN Anthropology and Political Participation C6.P15 C6.P16 105 mediated by “brokers.” For “the politics of the governed” (Chatterjee 2004) brokers in state administrations and government authorities might forge particular relations with clients, that are not based on rights but rather on bio-political forms of “assistance” to life, thereby potentially continuing their exclusion from what Chatterjee (2004) called “civil society.” There has always been the observation that in many places where people suffer from insufficient infrastructures and services, votes are exchanged for immediate material benefits, be they simply money, or be it electricity connections, the paving of roads, or access to municipal waterpipes. Given the absence of many state provisions for large segments of the population of many states, however, such strategic exchanges of votes for palpable material benefits appear as immediately rational. More importantly, such transactions can be understood as a form of participation in as much as they involve negotiations, in which voters’ needs and expectations are articulated to relevant political authorities. Often it is precisely in people’s discourses about states’ failures to fulfill people’s demands and expectations, such as in talk of corruption (Gupta 1995; Parry 2000), that norms of rights and duties are shaped. Rather than considering such relations mainly as determined by a lack of inclusion into formal institutions of representation, however, anthropologists have analyzed them also for their productive aspects. Harri Englund (2008) and James Ferguson (2013), for example, have both suggested, that we should re-think the (negatively connoted) concept of dependence (on patrons or “the state”) as articulations by “dependents” of norms entitling them to care, and attributing an obligation onto their patrons. Thus, relations of dependence can be conceived of as a form of political participation in as much as they are often the site in which norms of obligation are negotiated. As Veena Das (2011) has argued, rights wax and wane, and they are negotiated for in everyday interactions in which people constitute themselves as citizens, articulating their ideas of the state and their relationships to it (Das 2011; Gupta 1995; Harriss 2005; Eckert 2011). Such politics of negotiating relations with political authority are not necessarily properly understood when considering them simply as enactments of “traditional” forms of political relations, or as rooted in stable norms of reciprocal obligations. These are forms of political participation. They assert the right and entitlement to what they claim (Eckert 2011), thereby advancing their own understandings of the norms and values that should govern the polity. It is such attention to the articulations of the norms that should govern political relations in the diverse forms of political participation, which have put the aspirational expressiveness at the center of anthropological analyses of political participation in recent years. Anthropologists studying democracy (see e.g., the contributions in Paley 2008), for example, have often observed the embrace of electoral rights in diverse situations (Edelman 1985; Spencer 2007: 93; Coburn and Larson 2009). Voting, they have found, is valued, because it is the one moment when the promise of equality inherent in democratic ideals becomes real (e.g., Banerjee 2011a; Carswell and de Neve 2014). It is less the idea that one’s vote actually has an impact on the future of one’s government; rather, it is the enactment of the equality of all through the equality of all votes, which is central to this particular form of political participation. In anthropologists’ exploration of voting, the ritual of elections is a symbol of that ever-unfulfilled idea of equality, and a symbolic assertion of its validity. Such an ideal of equality can refer to the individual, but also to a particular community aspiring for greater self-determination and the possibility of having power as a group (Michelutti 2007; Witsoe 2011; see also Chapter 47 this volume). Aspirations to equality are enacted in elections also through the experience of “communitas” that such ritual enables (Banerjee 9780198861126_Book.indb 105 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 106 C6.P17 C6.P18 2011b; see also Chapter 38 this volume). From an anthropological perspective, to speak of elections as “mere” ritual is thus misguided, since it is precisely the ritual that is of significance (Spencer 2007: 77), both as the moment of communitas, and in terms of the expression of political values and norms, of hopes, aspirations, and expectations. Such expressive aspects have often been studied in relation to the projects of social movements. While anthropology has its own rich literature on social movements (e.g., Edelman 2001; Nash 2005; Susser 2016), it has not confined the exploration of such expressive aspects to these. Rather, anthropologists have analyzed “pre-ideological” (Bayat 2010: 19) everyday struggles for “social citizenship” (e.g., Holston 2007; 2011; Das 2011) and “acts of citizenship” (Isin 2008) for such expressions of goals and desires “unrepresented” and before their articulation within the framework of a particular vision of social and political change. They have assumed the immediate needs of marginalized people to give rise to the articulation of new norms of legitimate participation, evident in multitudinous squatting of urban land (e.g., Bayat 2000), the unregulated construction of homes (e.g., Holston 2007), the assertion of access to public space (e.g., Bayat 2010: 96–114; Göle 2006), and the mass mobilities that demand freedom of movement and the right to “be there” (e.g., De Genova 2009; Mezzadra 2006). We observe also legal challenges to governmental agencies, international organizations, or multinational corporations (e.g., Eckert 2006; Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito 2006), to be employed for such expressive goals: The “juridification of protest” (Eckert et al. 2012), while often charged with de-politizing at base political struggles (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), is increasingly a means to express political objectives and projects and advance alternative or novel understandings of legal norms (Eckert 2021). These all are ways in which the subaltern not only claim and appropriate access to specific goods, but through which they express their ideas of justice and injustice and formulate norms of legitimate participation. Imagining the Polity C6.S3 C6.P19 C6.P20 julia m. eckert Since the social struggles explored by anthropologists are at base about defining the polity in terms of legitimate participation, questions about the constitution of the polity and its boundaries moved center stage. The struggles observed by anthropologists proposed new grounds for claiming membership: People referred to their labor (Eckert 2011), or to their shared humanity (Das 2011). Holston (2011) has pointed to “contributor rights,” that particular legitimation of claims based on the labor and consumption of everyday existence that creates the polity in all its circumstance, and that in turn is grounds for participatory rights. The practical claims to participation that redefine the polity express visions of possibilities, ideas of oneself “(and others) as subjects of rights” (Isin 2009, 371) and ways of realizing them. These attempts to define legitimate participation in effect expanded the boundaries of political communities through the participation of people who had but insecure rights and possibilities of formal participation or who were denied them altogether. The central question that emerges for political anthropology today is that of the relation between participation and membership. Anthropology had had no difficulties in conceptualizing polities without “states” and “acephalous orders” (e.g., Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Sigrist 1967). However, it has 9780198861126_Book.indb 106 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN Anthropology and Political Participation C6.P21 C6.P22 C6.P23 107 proven more difficult to leave behind other essentialized notions, such as those of unified cultural communities. While the specific limitations of participatory rights with their discriminations in terms of gender, age, caste, and class were paid attention to, anthropological ideas of membership nonetheless often left unquestioned the processes by which the actual polities of which membership was negotiated, were constituted. Hence, membership and community were not, for a long time, problematized in anthropology: they were often defined by the assumedly given ethnic or kin belonging or national citizenship. The very term “culture,” particularly in its plural form “cultures,” which anthropology propagated, suggested units integrated by some given commonalities, be that language, history, blood, or even simply the cultural “text” and its collective reading. The critiques of such ideas of a unity of community constituted by “shared culture” began early (e.g., Barth 1969), but methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) shaped the design of fields for research in anthropology as much as in other social sciences for long (and continues to do so). While systemic limits to participation were thus considered, they were perceived as internal to a given polity, whether exploring membership in national polities or in sub-national communities, anthropologists thus focusing on the impossibility to participate of those who had whatever kind of given membership status. The fact that practices of participation often seek to define and redefine the very borders of political communities by suggesting alternative grounds for claims to legitimate participatory possibilities, was theorized only when the easy identifications of membership and ascribed identities of national–territorial or ethnic belonging was undermined by the emergence of more processual concepts of culture and identity in anthropology. They paved the way also for more processual approaches to the understanding of belonging and membership, and thus for taking into view the ways in which political participation itself constitutes political communities and their boundaries. Leaving behind seemingly pre-defined notions of a polity that people are members of to participate in, anthropologists have moved towards more pragmatic notions of polity, in the sense of examining the very constitution of political communities through multifarious practices of participation, bordering, “encroachment” (Bayat 2000) and appropriations (Eckert 2015). Anthropologists have thus found political participation to articulate diverse imaginations of political community, often unaligned with jurisdictional boundaries, sometimes more expansive than membership in an “imagined community” of a nationstate, and operating across multiple scales such as the local, transnational, and transversal (see Holston 2019; Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018; for the transnational see also Chapter 50 this volume). Anthropologists have in recent years addressed more centrally also the ways in which polities have been conceptualized “otherwise,” paying attention particularly to more egalitarian and participatory forms, and those polities that in their institutions reflect human and non-human cohabitation in the Anthropocene (Blaser 2019; Youatt 2020). They thus not only appropriate existing notions of membership in some form of pre-constituted collectivity, but radically rework ideas of membership (McNevin et al. 2021). Political participation then is about being effective in shaping one’s own circumstances in relation to others one is connected to through the multifarious entanglements of existence in our contemporary world. A “politics of presence” in a particular locality—the sheer fact of being there—carries a conceptualization of participatory rights that are currently tried out in those initiatives that experiment with “urban citizenship” (e.g., Glick Schiller and Çağlar 9780198861126_Book.indb 107 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 108 C6.P24 2009; Hess and Lebuhn 2014). They conceive of participatory rights as arising from coexistence or cohabitation in a locality or within a particular social situation. Focusing on the diverse forms of political participation that people engage in thus makes it possible to conceive of a polity, not as already constituted by an apparatus of institutions that distinguishes between members and non-members, but as actually always created by politics, that is, greater or lesser degrees of participation. This Arendtian conception of politics as participation (Arendt 1993: 15), that is, the very definition of politics as participation, enables us to rethink political participation in a manner that overcomes the methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) inherent in conceptions of polity as a pre-constituted collectivity. Unlike Arendt, who upheld a specific delineation between the public and the private founded in Greek political theory, politics therein residing exclusively in the public, and taking only specific forms considered appropriate and civil, anthropology, with its holistic attention to the myriad ways the political takes expression in the seemingly non-political, overcomes both the division between the public and the private, and the exclusion of some forms of political expression from what is (conceptually) admitted to the realm of the political. Anthropologists can thus contribute to a nuanced perspective on the actual processes of drawing such distinctions and delineating both the political and the polity. Beyond Hegemony: The Effects of Participation C6.S4 C6.P25 C6.P26 julia m. eckert Anthropologists differed as to the question what difference it makes that people do participate—to them, and to the order that they participate in. They have been skeptical towards the potential of political participation to actually build and shape state institutions, and the institution building capacities of political participation have mostly been observed in relation to the development of institutions alternative to established ones. Many considered participation (also) a form of obedience to the order people were scrambling to participate in, a form of disciplinary method that brought people to strive for what reproduces the order of things, a means of hegemony, or of ideology (Edelman 1985). The suggestion inherent in Rancière’s proposition that all forms of “successful participation” are already incorporated into the realm of “police,” “politics” residing in rupture rather than participation, points us to the question in how far participation is obedient to the constraints a political system imposes on it, and thus actually potentially effective in shaping that very system. Anthropologists have often considered the formation of subjectivities through the governmental colonization of minds and bodies (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991), the effect of state categories and classifications (e.g., Mitchell 1999; Collier et al. 1995). Following a pessimistic reading of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Michel Foucault’s notion of subjectivation, the discipline has paid attention to how social orders are reproduced through practice shaped by the habitual dispositions of agents, the mimetic elements (Gupta and Sharma 2006), and the bio-political governmentality articulated in democratic participation (Li 2007). Particularly, anthropologists studying the participatory standards in development “cooperation” and their rhetoric of “ownership,” have dissected such obligations to 9780198861126_Book.indb 108 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN Anthropology and Political Participation C6.P27 C6.P28 C6.P29 C6.P30 109 participate as a method of hegemony, a disciplinary tool that trains people into the desires and goals, procedures, and norms of a political order (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Li 2007). Anthropologists have thus considered obedience in relation to political orders and the ways they are reproduced through people actively—intentionally or inadvertently—obeying their rules. A particularly precise study of such political participation is Emma Tarlo’s, who, in her ethnography of the emergency rule of the government of Indira Gandhi in India from 1973 to 1975, examined how state oppression was perpetuated by the active participation by many of those targeted by various programs (Tarlo 2003). Obedience is thus an important form of participation, the striving of the marginalized to be part of the system of marginalization proving the latter’s hegemonic force. It has often been the very unfulfillment of the normative promises of a political system that are the driving force of claims and demands for political inclusion; they are ubiquitous as the universalist claims of most modern orders have nowhere fulfilled their promises to all they promised participation (Holston 2007; Ong 2005). In short, any striving for inclusion indicates a valuation of the goods that the status quo could offer if one were included in it in a more privileged position, and thus also a limit to the political imagination. However, anthropologists have equally observed how precisely the limits imposed triggered the political imagination for an “otherwise.” Despite the frequent reading of Bourdieu as deterministic, his practice theoretical position also enabled anthropologists to examine the “break with the doxa” (1985: 734) and to explore the struggles between agents to impose their worldview by the “work of representation”: “The truth of the social world is the stake in struggle between agents very unequally equipped to achieve absolute, i.e. self-fulfilling, vision and forecasting” (Bourdieu 1985: 732). In his text on social space and the genesis of groups (1985), Bourdieu insists that we have “to integrate the agents’ representation of the social world; more precisely [we] must take account of the contribution that agents make towards constructing the view of the social world, and through this, towards constructing this world ( . . . )” (Bourdieu 1985: 727). While subaltern visions of political participation are often shaped by the aspirations founded in the very legitimating grounds that a political order entails, these promises are interpreted in ways that mesh moral or ethical and future imaginations possibly stemming from realms other than the dominant normative order. Interpretations of norms and of practices contain projects that are socially situated, grounded in past experience, the myths and rumors (Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 296) about the state as well as by normative assumptions about what ought to be. Attention to this interpretative and representational work has elucidated the creative and innovative use of existing political institutions that people engage in. They are creative in as much as they put forth specific interpretations of norms and act upon them in order to shape institutions accordingly. Isin, for example, sees “acts of citizenship” precisely in those actions that break with habitual practice, and allow for new norms to be enacted, distinguishing “between justice and injustice, between equal and unequal and between fair and unfair” (Isin 2012: 123). In this light, struggles for political participation could be considered a form of prefigurative politics in the sense of David Graeber, who argued that “the structure of one’s own act becomes a kind of microutopia, a concrete model for one’s vision of a free society” (2009: 210). The corrosion of the status quo that often goes along with its partial affirmation in the practices of participation that anthropologists have studied often lies in incremental transformations. (See also Chapter 46 this volume.) It consists first and foremost in slow 9780198861126_Book.indb 109 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN 110 C6.P31 C6.P32 and sometimes contradictory changes of the norms of what is “normal.” The slow and small transformations in the ideas about the acceptable and the right way of governing can add up to rather substantive changes in the relations of domination. These practices and forms of action constitute social change: They “succeed” when they affect what is considered “normal,” “standard,” and legitimate practice, or even shift the line between legal and illegal. In their attention to such “prefigurative” dimensions of participatory practice, anthropologists, however, have often neglected theoretical reflection on the “political neutrality” of a concept of prefigurative politics. Examining how participatory practices re-define the boundaries of polities, for example, needs to take into view all those struggles that strive for a prerogative of participatory rights, and seek to define polities in more narrow ways. Participatory rights are rights to membership in a polity, and such rights are more often than not asserted as the prerogative of specific identity groups. The “politics of the public square” (Graeber 2013) can enact all sorts of imaginations of polities. There, in the gathering, a selfconstitution of “we, the people’s” (Butler 2015) claims to be legitimate members have more often than not turned into claims to be more legitimate than others, and to exclude those others who are not deemed to be “the people.” Nationalist and fascist mobilisation build precisely on the concomitance of participatory promises and exclusion of ‘others’ (Eckert 2003). Popular political participation can take the form of the “mob” (Tazzioli et al. 2021) and it is fascist politics that has often reverted to a politics of “direct action” and thereby provided (and provides) possibilies for public action and political participation, claiming public space through violent confrontations (Eckert 2003). Such aspects of prefiguration within political participation appear as particularly relevant and worthy of attention in times of a perceived crisis of political participation (see Giugni and Grasso 2019). Hence, attention to participatory prefigurations does not lead inevitably to a theory of democratization. (Unfortunately), the end to which political participation is put is open. Conclusion C6.S5 C6.P33 C6.P34 julia m. eckert Precisely because anthropologists consider the political dimension of many of the practices, acts, rituals, and relations they study, there is no unified position on political participation in anthropology, not even an integrated debate on it. The one position anthropologists would probably share is that if one wants to enquire into political participation in any way, be that in relation to its effects on a political order, be that into its reverberations in “the private,” insights can be found in all fields of existence. From identifying different forms of organizing participation in non-Western political systems, anthropology moved to analyzing the multivarious forms of participating they observed in the everyday; from studying the norms regulating how different subject positions determined legitimate participation, anthropologists came to study how different subject positions were differently restricted to participate—and how they struggled to overcome these impediments. The attention to the diverse but specific limits of and exclusions from political participation, when freed from its structural functionalist underpinnings, engendered attention to the multifarious ways in which those excluded or hindered from participation strove to overcome such limitations, and produced relations to political authorities beyond those formally instituted. 9780198861126_Book.indb 110 11-Feb-22 21:44:03 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Fri Feb 11 2022, NEWGEN Anthropology and Political Participation C6.P35 C6.P36 C6.S6 C6.P37 C6.P38 C6.P39 C6.P40 C6.P41 C6.P42 C6.P43 C6.P44 111 These shifts in perspective from studying plurality, to studying inequality so to say, or: the concatenation of plurality and inequality (Eckert 2016) provided for the possibility of anthropology to perceive the many ways of political participation, from the extraordinary in “acts of citizenship” to the everyday negotiations of membership. The focus on the struggles to overcome impediments to participation, to realize, expand, or deepen one’s participatory possibilities were analyzed as to their constitutive role of the political order in question. Thus, thirdly, anthropologists came to conceive of the polity as constituted (and delineated) by participatory practice. The attention to diverse forms of participation, and particularly those practices that strive to overcome forms of exclusion from the polity, be they ideological, legal, economic, or other, necessitates for anthropology a concept of political participation that considers it to come before membership, yes, to constitute membership. This has also opened the way in recent years for new notions of the polity: as constituted by the participatory practices of those present. Political anthropology thus, from studying mostly non-state polities, but with a largely unreflected notion of the constitution of political community, and through studying myriad ways of participating politically, has moved to radically different concept of both politics (Postero and Elinoff 2019) and the polity (McNevin et al. 2021), which leave behind the methodological nationalism of earlier, and consider participation as constitutive of political community. In fact, in the anthropological perspective on political participation, politics comes to be tantamount to participation, and the polity can be perceived as delineated by diverse participatory struggles. This “prefigurative” perspective has had a slant, often overlooking those movements that struggled to narrow participatory possibilities to a specific group, or to limit the role of participation. Notwithstanding this bias, the anthropological perspective can enrich a tradition of theorizing the polity as constituted and delineated by participation. The question whether and how political participation is transformative of a political order, redefining political institutions, can then enquire into the differential possibilities of diverse practices to initiate processes of change. This is the contribution of anthropology. References Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass. München: Pieper. Banerjee, Mukulika. 2011a. “Democracy Sacred and Everyday: An Ethnographic Case from India.” Pp. 63–96 in Julia Paley (ed.), Democracy, Anthropological Approaches, Advanced Seminar. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Banerjee, Mukulika. 2011b. “Elections as Communitas.” Social Research 78 (1): 75–98. Barth, Fredrik. 1959. Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans. London: The Athlone Press. Barth, Fredrik (ed.), 1969. 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