Some preliminary notes on the cultural life of democracy

Democratic theorization has been long associated with Eurocentrism. My attempt here is to explore the notion of cultural life as an alternative conceptual and methodological heuristic to understand the diversity of democratic practice. It differs from existing attempts at alternative understandings of democracy by avoiding the repudiation of norms as inherently Eurocentric. At the same time, I am suspicious of alternative accounts of democracy that romanticize putatively non-European practices as more emancipatory. The reflections I offer here are also informed by recent events in Sri Lanka, and are preliminary and contingent – I sketch what the cultural life of democracy more in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is.

The past few months in Sri Lanka have been surreal. A country classified as middle-income is now facing economic oblivion. But, amid this narrative of national catastrophe, Sri Lanka also bore witness to a spectacular people’s uprising called the aragalaya (struggle) that succeeded in forcing the resignations of the president, the prime minister, and several cabinets. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the aragalaya was undermining the Rajapaksa political dynasty, which had perfected a toxic mix of crony capitalism, majoritarian racism, and impunity to build a seemingly unshakable political edifice. However, within weeks of the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the discredited political order reasserted itself. His successor, Ranil Wickramasinghe, unleashed systematic repression through mass arrests and at the same time strategically promoted an instrumental discourse about the rule of law and safeguarding the state from anarchy. Wickramasinghe is also a patrician politician who has little popular legitimacy, which makes his repression all the more bitter for those who struggled for a culture of political accountability.

I begin with this anecdote because it speaks to the complexities of mapping out what the term cultural life of democracy might encompass. Sri Lanka’s democratic trajectory does not fit neatly within terms such as ethnocracy or illiberal democracy. Ethnocracy is a term that speaks to how Sri Lanka’s representative democratic system has enabled a culture of majoritarianism, and illiberalism captures the paradox of a country that regularly exercises universal franchise but where people remain disenfranchised. But, while both these terms delineate something of Sri Lanka’s democratic dilemmas, they do not tell the whole story. 

The country is often positioned as a model colony that saw a peaceful transition to independence. The rest of this narrative is one in which this democratic promise has been squandered. The predominant image of Sri Lanka today is that of a failed state. Much of this discourse also centers on the failure of democratic institutions and processes as well as the lack of active citizenship and the dominance of patron-client relationships. Instances of patron-clientelism in the Global South are often associated with the persistence of pre-modern culture. Such critical assessments also hold that normative features of democracy are insufficiently realized in societies that are democratically deficient. These assessments are informed by what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “hyperreal Europe,” where Europe functions as a universal referent. Partha Chatterjee characterizes this as a norm-deviation model. Chatterjee argues that an ahistorical normative democratic model is associated with “hyperreal Europe,” which in turn shapes the negative evaluation of non-European societies. 

The dominance of this normative model has led to a number of attempts to understand democracy in relation to non-European social experience. These include drawing on the practice of adda in Calcutta society as a form of public sphere, rethinking democracy from the margins in Chile where the isolated Chachapoyas region has historically resisted modernity, and examining Islamic forms of democratic participation in Arab societies. Collectively, these can be understood as forms of alternative democratic participation. Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society also deals with this complexity. In many postcolonial societies, Chatterjee argues, there are significant parts of the population that exist outside the legal structures that inform civil society but are recognized by the state. There can also be exceptions to the notion of equal citizenship, such as in the case of the “scheduled castes” in India.

However, the question that then emerges is to what extent such exceptions can be recognized as democratic. When do they violate the spirit of democracy? This is also a question posed by populism. For instance, populist authoritarianisms the world over have presented themselves as alternatives. In Europe this has manifested itself as a populist challenge to liberal democracy. In South and Southeast Asia the discourse of Asian values has led to instrumental justifications of electorally sanctioned authoritarianism. It is here that an approach like that of the cultural life can lend itself to the rationalization of undemocratic forms of political life. There is a risk that the moral exceptionalism often accompanying the critique of Eurocentrism tips over into an uncritical justification of illiberal politics. This is visible, for instance, in how Chatterjee neatly maps the norm-deviation model onto an East-West binary. However, as these brief references to Asia and Europe suggest, this binary may be more apparent than real. There needs to be recognition that democracy as a practice takes a wide variety of forms and that even so-called mature democracies rarely follow an ideal script.

There are perhaps alternative ways of conceptualizing such variations in democratic practice that do not align the discussion along essentialist binaries such as civil society versus political society or the East versus the West. One way in which this might be done is through what the anthropologist Jonathan Spencer has called “actually existing politics.” The cultural life of democracy is an attempt to do so by looking at how culture, defined in a very broad sense, plays a vital constitutive role in politics and at the same time by exploring how “actually existing politics” can take diverse cultural forms. 

In conclusion, I would like to return to Sri Lanka. The past few months in the country have challenged many preconceptions. A society that was thought to lack a civic consciousness staged a spectacular people’s uprising. Within this uprising there were also many moments where Sri Lanka’s protracted history of ethnic and religious enmity as well as of social divisions based on class, caste, and gender were transcended. While the uprising was undoubtedly underwritten by the extreme economic precarity that is gripping the country, it was not economic rationality alone that brought people to the streets. Yet, a few weeks after the uprising, it seemed that politics as usual was reasserting itself as a corrupt political order rallied and regained power. However, even as this unfolded, a fresh and ongoing discourse emerged in Sri Lanka about legality versus legitimacy. While the current president was appointed within the recognized legal-constitutional framework, his legitimacy has been seriously questioned, as has that of the parliament. This in turn has resulted in an intense and widespread discussion about the meaning and intent of democracy, and of whether the existing representative democratic system is fit for purpose or a more hybrid model with space for direct citizen’s involvement in governance is necessary. 

What this moment in Sri Lanka’s political history suggests is that democracy is a work in progress – conceptually and procedurally – and that the analytical work envisaged in the cultural life of democracy can help further nuance our understanding of democracy as a lived political practice. The cultural life of democracy as a conceptual and methodological heuristic has no distinct “shape” at the moment, but it can be tentatively understood as a contingent orientation towards democracy that recognizes that democratic practice takes plural forms and that at a fundamental level democracy is an agonistic negotiation between “‘the will of the people” and an ethical imperative towards social justice.

Harshana Rambukwella is Professor at the Postgraduate Institute of English, the Open University of Sri Lanka. He was a guest at the IWM in 2022.