Rites of Participation: Popular Encounters and Democratic Ritual in Brazil

Abstract

Political anthropologists and ethnographers often address the limits to citizen power, in terms of the material and symbolic barriers ordinary people encounter in their attempts to have a say in the rule of the state. Victor Albert's recent book, The Limits of Citizen Power: Participatory Entanglements and the State (Pluto Press) invites readers to consider the question from a different perspective. The limits of citizen power suggest not opposition or suppression of the people from an external force, but rather an internal limit of citizenship, one that may be immanent to citizenship itself as a social form.