Anthropologists, through their ethnographic method, relationships with people outside of formal and elite political institutions, and attention to alternative worldviews, bring to the study of democracy an examination of local meanings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power that is rare in the scholarly literature on democratic transitions, which has largely focused on political institutions and formal regime shifts. This review brings together the writings of ethnographers working in a wide variety of settings to generate lines of inquiry and analysis for developing an anthropology of democracy.
