"This will be an important book, and a powerful exemplar for the growing numbers of anthropologists who seek to place such things as democracy, citizenship, and neoliberalism under an ethnographic lens."--James Ferguson, author of "Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambin Copperbelt

"In joining activism and fine ethnography, Paley enables us to appreciate the profound complexity of the links between civil society and public institutions. Chakrabarty's assessment of "the undemocratic foundations of 'democracy'" becomes a fine analytic tool as it is refracted in the words of the women of Poblacion La Bandera."--Charles Briggs, author of "Learning How to Ask

"Paley has produced an insightful and fascinating exploration of the shifting meanings of democracy for the Chilean state and for shantytown activists across the Pinochet dictatorship and through the contradictory democratic politics of the 1990s. The marketing of democracy is a highly relevant issue for societies and states throughout the world."--Kay Warren, author of "Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala

"An important challenge to Polyanna conventional wisdoms about democratic transitions and neo-liberal miracles in Chile and its neighbors."--Peter Winn, author of "Weavers of Revolution

"This is anthropology as the observation of and involvement in, the new, participatory politics of the previously excluded."--Sally Falk Moore, author of "Law as Process

In recent decades, powerful institutions have packaged Western democracy for export around the globe. Although Western democracy is grounded in specific historical experiences and cultural assumptions, advocates have generally taken its normative status for granted. So too have most academics. Yet if democracy is broadly understood as government by "the people," it must necessarily differ along with "the people" in question. Just what "the will of the people" is and how it might be realized become questions of pressing importance. Rather than advance alternative definitions of democracy, celebrate alternative democracies, or posit alternatives to democracy, the contributors to this volume focus on the way that specific definitions of democracy are advanced as normative and others eclipsed, and how certain claims to represent "the will of the people" gain currency and others are silenced. While previous scholars of democracy have proposed one definitive model after another, the authors in this work suggest that democracy is by nature an open ended set of questions about the workings of power--questions best engaged through the dialogical processes of fieldwork and ethnographic writing.