Capacities, Expertise, Empowerment – Rethinking the Anthropology of Participation

Abstract Often studied in the context of political developments and the alleged shift from representative democracy to participatory democracy, participation is discussed here in terms of changes in our anthropological coordinates. The exigencies and expectations of participation are found in many areas that go beyond the political sphere, extending from the business world and its quality circles to the production of self-assembly kits calling for the buyer’s assembly skills. This extension of the field of participation is based on a certain number of anthropological presuppositions which ascribe to actors the capacities and competencies they are supposed to have, unless they are invited to enhance them through empowerment strategies in the event that they are failing or insufficient. This paper argues that evaluating people and the configuration of many recent social mechanisms tend increasingly to adjust to this new anthropological paradigm. Such is the case for political participation, new social policies, empowerment training, educational objectives, and development and health policies. Returning more specifically to political participation, the paper shows how these new anthropological coordinates reconfigure by redrawing the division between ordinary and specialized expertise and, in this way, the balance between spaces in which participatory democracy can take place and those that remain confined to technocratic expertise.