Is This Democracy? Consensus Decision-Making and Collective Self-Governance in Mesoamerica

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The term “democracy,” with its roots in the Greek word demokratia, originally referred to the capacity of “the people” to make collective decisions regarding wider society and to effect change in the public sphere. As republicanism emerged in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “democracy” was co-opted and came to be conflated with a form of the state in which citizens vote for representatives to exercise political power on their behalf. This narrow understanding of “democracy” has led to the perception that democracy is historically rare, a uniquely “Western” invention that traces its roots to classical antiquity. This paper considers historical and contemporary examples from Mesoamerica, societies structured around relatively decentralized, egalitarian processes of decision-making, which rely on consensus-building and collective deliberation. How does the concept of “democracy,” as commonly conceived, limit our understandings of these societies and communities, and how do these examples, in turn, have the power to transform our own understanding of the term? Furthermore, how does the reconceptualization of “democracy” posed by these examples from Mesoamerica challenge narratives of “Western modernity,” and how do they affect political discourses today?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38247.0