Is Democracy a Universal Ideal?

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time reading up on civil society, democracy, and politics more generally in a cross-cultural perspective. Being an anthropologist, but also someone committed to the idea of social justice, I am left in a bit of a dilemma: Do our ideals of democracy apply universally? How far and in what ways is cultural relativism relevant when discussing topics like democracy?

Certainly in both American foreign policy and in the social sciences the term tends to get used as a universal ideal. There’s a certain evangelical ring in a lot of the official policy discourse about spreading “democracy and freedom” around the world. In the social sciences, some writers tend to reduce democracy to a few institutions or a method of decision making such as elections—a tradition that grew out of Joseph Schumpeter’s writings. Others, like Robert Dahl, have defined ideals first and gone out to test to see if certain institutions realizes these ideals, but with little sensitivity to the fact that the ideals chosen may be influenced the scholars own social and cultural background.

A book I am finding very thought provoking on this topic is Frederic Shaffer’s Democracy in Translation. Political Scientist by training, Schafer uses linguistic and ethnographic methods to try to understand how native Wolof speakers in Senegal speak and think about democracy. Schafer then compares these ideas to elite discourses in Senegal, to American understandings of democracy, and to academic theories of democracy. His focus is on understanding Wolof perceptions of democracy in their own terms and the variety of ideals that may guide democratic institutions (8). What he finds is that both popular ideals and academic theories of democracy differ substantially from understandings of democracy on the ground in Senegal.

Demokaraasi, the Wolof term, although etymologically related to the term “democracy” focuses on consensus, even handedness, and solidarity (84). In other words, a common Senegalese conception of democracy does not focus on individual freedom to decide who to vote for, breadth of participation, keeping elected officials accountable, or the creation of at least an ostensibly equal political sphere. Instead, maintaining community solidarity and networks of reciprocity; a sense of fair treatment from those higher in the political hierarchy; and general amicable agreement are considered more important. The implications of this difference can be profound. For example, people in Senegal often choose their vote so as to maintain smooth social functioning rather than for a particular candidates platform (98). Even vote-buying can be a completely ethical form of exchange if it is perceived to be part of a properly reciprocal relationship (98).

However, Schaffer does not argue that democracy is untranslatable or that some cultures simply cannot conceive of democracy. Rather he argues that: “Democracy,”…is unique in the particular combination of its features; but each individual feature may still have analogues in other languages and cultures” (145). The ideals that come to be associate with democracy in any particular case are a mix of more familiar, internationally recognizable forms, and local concerns and culture. Which ideals become important and how they shape politics, however, and mean every case deserves its own attention. Schaffer’s approach has the advantage of not reducing democracy to simply elections nor relying on the uncritical use of measurements that rely on culturally specific political ideals. 

However, the book never resolves the issue of whether these cultural forms are sometimes a type of false consciousness, or ideology, or veneer that hide exploitative or authoritarian realities. What are your experiences with democracy or discussing democracy with other people? Do you think democracy is universal or culturally relative?

Making Culture a Part of Development and Social Justice

So far we’ve had some wonderful articles on specific development or health problems. I would, at the risk of seeming too hand wavy, like to discuss social justice, development, and culture. In particular, what do we mean by social justice? Is the “just society” a plural or singular concept? And what should we make of cultural difference when considering the ends of development?

One answer is to treat culture instrumentally. Under such a perspective culture is treated almost like any other input for development. Like land, labor, capital or forms of human capital, culture needs to be manipulated strategically to produce a desired outcome. Culture may take the form of a type of human capital, or knowledge that can be used for certain developmental ends; for example, local agricultural knowledge about a staple crop. NGOs and development organizations have also found such a perspective useful. Or, culture may be seen as a set of attitudes that hinders or helps a society develop. A fair amount of literature on development uses this perspective—most famously the school of thought known as modernization theory.

Indeed, viewing culture instrumentally allows us to ask and answer very practical questions. What sorts of cultural attitudes promote or hinder development? How might we adjust attitudes or incentivize behavior to achieve these goals? The instrumental perspective takes ideas seriously as motivators of human action. Likewise a strategic approach to culture views culture as something malleable rather than fixed. We can change it. Programs like gender mainstreaming, for example, would not be possible if we viewed culture as relatively fixed or from such a radically relativist perspective that we saw all gender practices as essentially equal or incommensurable.

However, many anthropologists chafe at such a perspective. It reduces culture to a mere variable, and can sometimes assume an undue superiority or objectivity in our own ways of knowing. In effect, it precludes any substantial discussion about what the ends of development should be. It shifts social justice and development from a topic of discussion, a political process, to a technical problem. My argument is that social justice should be both.

One of the primary insights of 20^th century anthropological work on development is that it is a profoundly political process. Development—and the knowledge that drives it—involves choosing alternatives, a process that is always on some level non-rational, or cultural. This was Foucault’s point—knowledge and power are linked. How and what we quantify, what we consider and do not consider in things like cost-benefit analysis, forms and degree of distribution, how much inequality we as a society are willing to sacrifice for economic growth, all of these are political questions. Development may seem like a technical problem at times, but it is laden with difficult ethical questions and our answers to them are shaped by our particular ideological perspectives.

The other asset anthropologists bring to the table is a humility that comes from taking other ways of life seriously and seeing our own way of life as not necessary but historically and culturally contingent. To put it more bluntly, anthropologists firmly believe and try to show through their work that other people know things and that the fact that other people could conceive of and live so differently from us shows that our own way of living is far from the natural or only way. Anthropology would have us try to understand other people in their own terms and to take them as serious alternatives to our own way of living.

Is this progress? Are there problems with how we
think about development?

At its worst, such a perspective becomes a debilitating form of relativism or naïve romanticism of what pre-industrial life was like. But at its best and most convincing it’s a request to pause and step back and to give serious consideration to what other people think and where our own thinking may be limited. In more conventional terms, it’s an attempt to democratize development. Here I mean not democracy as a system of voting where majority rules, but in the sense of equality and a process involving the demos or people—a focus on providing a more equal space for alternative voices to be heard.

Or are anthropologists just romanticizing
pre-industrial life?

In fact, just such a belief is what got me interested in anthropology as an approach to development and in Bhutan, where I study. In my next post I will talk about the issue of “Gross national Happiness” that seems to have become a fad around the world and gained much of its notoriety from Bhutan. Why has “happiness” caught on globally as an economic measurement? What implications, if any, does it have for how we think about development? Is it an example of indigenous culture speaking back to orthodox development?