Anthropology’s Democracy Problem

Popular sovereignty is the common denominator that links populism to democracy and modern politics more generally. It would be hard to dream up a more exotic political first principle or one better suited to anthropological inquiry, but with a few notable exceptions, anthropologists have been silent on the subject. This silence is one facet of a larger democracy problem that haunts the discipline. The following article attempts to recover popular sovereignty as an object of anthropological investigation. Doing so means provincializing a Cold War problematic that tacitly orients much of contemporary scholarship. A key element of this Cold War problematic is what I call “the sovereign equivocation,” which assumes that all sovereignties are created equal and that they are all equally bad. Such undifferentiated treatment of sovereignty puts anthropologists in a bind because it forsakes popular sovereignty and political self-determination, which are foundational principles of democratic politics. I argue that unraveling anthropology’s democracy problem means digging into the intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century and that a good place to start is with the concept of “populism.”