This work examines how the exercise of power and the strategies of social movements transformed with the transition from a military to an elected-civilian regime in Chile.
"This will be an important book, and a powerful exemplar for the growing numbers of anthropologists who seek to place such things as democracy, citizenship, and neoliberalism under an ethnographic lens."-James Ferguson, author of Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambin Copperbelt
"In joining activism and fine ethnography, Paley enables us to appreciate the profound complexity of the links between civil society and public institutions. Chakrabarty's assessment of "the undemocratic foundations of 'democracy'" becomes a fine analytic tool as it is refracted in the words of the women of Población La Bandera."-Charles Briggs, author of Learning How to Ask
"Paley has produced an insightful and fascinating exploration of the shifting meanings of democracy for the Chilean state and for shantytown activists across the Pinochet dictatorship and through the contradictory democratic politics of the 1990s. The marketing of democracy is a highly relevant issue for societies and states throughout the world."-Kay Warren, author of Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala
"An important challenge to Polyanna conventional wisdoms about democratic transitions and neo-liberal miracles in Chile and its neighbors."-Peter Winn, author of Weavers of Revolution
"This is anthropology as the observation of and involvement in, the new, participatory politics of the previously excluded."-Sally Falk Moore, author of Law as Process
