Chapter 2 – Society, Culture and Political Culture

In order to investigate the relationship between culture and “democracy”, it will first be necessary to take a look at what could be understood by the word « culture ». Here it is assumed that culture, or such a related thing as society, is some sort of socio-anthropological object that is susceptible to scientific research. A philosophical approach that is suitable to deal with anthropological research may be provided by critical realist epistemology, introduced by Roy Bhaskar (1998a; 1998b; 1998c; cf. Holland 2005). This approach embodies the double intuition that the subjectivity of the researcher exists, but that a reality outside of such subjectivity also exists. Indeed the subjectivities of socio-cultural actors may be observed and explained in terms that are not of those subjectivities themselves (Abbink 2001: 13-14). Sensitivity to this aspect is necessary, because in studying “democracy” (but not only then) one is often confronted with the phenomenon that analytical approaches drawn from Euro-American literature are used to study non-Euro-American ethnographic material. An epistemological question that consequently arises is whether one is really producing an adequate understanding of politics in societies that are not Euro-American. To broaden culturally the conceptual base for studying “democracy”, and thus avoiding a too stark Euro-American bias in a practical way, was a major motivation for me to study political theory from non-Euro-American societies, as presented in chapter 4 below. In this chapter, however, I shall start with providing more theoretical explanation about the application of critical realism to anthropological problems and how such an application relates to problems of actors’ subjectivity and cultural ambiguity. This will provide a way to circumvent the cultural-relativistic idea that we would only be allowed to study cultures described “in their own terms”, and thus open the possibility to study cultures with concepts derived from literature that is not produced within those cultures, besides using indigenous concepts. The chapter ends with formulating ideas on political culture.