Ebook What Good Are Elections? An Anthropological Analysis of American Elections
This paper analyzes the shape and peculiar character of United States elections, paradigmatically presidential elections, using a complex of ritual models anthropologists have elaborated over the better part of the last century. This kind of ritual analysis, derived from the revival of Durkheim's French school between the 1950s and 1970s, and perhaps carried forward by Sahlins in the 1980s, was generated in a time when it seemed, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, that anthropology's role was to trade in amazement.
"It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle. Australopithecenes, Tricksters, Clicks, Megaliths—we hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchant of astonishment" (Geertz 2000:64). This paper turns the fruits of that
astonishment back onto the dominant culture of the present. Designed to instruct undergraduates in a course I have been teaching since the late 1970s, and presented in lecture format around the world since the early 1990s, I advance this paper now with the idea that others may add to the provisional insights it has generated to date. In a modest way, I hope this contribution will add to the work that others have recently put forth analyzing the central symbolic orders of contemporary states (Kapferer 1988; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993).
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Ebook What Good Are Elections? An Anthropological Analysis of American Elections
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