Chile is one of a handful of small countries whose political and economic history of the last 30 years disrupts regional typologies. Chile’s iconoclasm points to national processes of governance that pose genuinely troubling questions not only about the nature of Chilean democracy but also about the character of contemporary worldwide neoliberal economic reforms, which found their first fertile testing grounds in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). Since then, these reforms have accompanied democratic transitions in the former Soviet bloc, settlements to civil wars in Central America, the collapse of Marxist and Maoist revolutionary movements in Asia and Africa, and reconfigurations of state and society in the dozens of democratic Western industrialized countries that have followed the leads of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Especially because the study of democratic transitions and neoliberalism has been largely the purview of political scientists, Marketing Democracy, Julia Paley’s account of Chilean democracy in the postdictatorship period, will be welcomed by anthropologists seeking to understand the political and economic context of contemporary power relations.

In her book Paley examines the relationship between political action and political knowledge--how political knowledge is produced, how it is constrained and co-opted, and how it can be converted into a weapon against a democratic regime that shapes the techniques and purposes of that knowledge. More specifically, Paley documents how the social movements that brought down the Pinochet dictatorship now contend with a form of consensual politics that, paradoxically, disadvantages these movements in ways that they themselves have sanctioned by participating in electoral politics. She illustrates how the abstract and objective measurements of electioneering produce what she calls the “marketing” of democracy (pp. 125-130), promoting democracy as good while organizing its practice in ways that naturalize associations between the free market and political freedom. Paley argues convincingly that merging the market with politics eviscerates political opposition. Citizens in a democracy become indistinguishable from commodity consumers. She illustrates how in Chile the structural inequity that destabilized an authoritarian regime became legitimated under a democratic one.

At the center of Paley’s ethnography of democracy is Llareta, a grassroots health group in La Bandera, a shantytown (población) in the southern part of Santiago notorious since its inception for its simmering political opposition. Llareta was founded during a flurry of internationally supported clandestine organizing against the Pinochet dictatorship in the early 1980s. According to Paley, Llareta plays a central role in the history of La Bandera. Llareta’s founding members belonged to some of the original families who homesteaded La Bandera during a massive invasion organized by militant socialists against the more conciliatory communists during the volatile administration of Salvador Allende. Llareta persisted a decade after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship in spite of the massive demobilization of grassroots organizations, which was accomplished by integrating many organization leaders into the formal bureaucratic organization of the democratic state. Llareta’s survival sets the group apart and makes it an ideal foil for describing democracy’s political pacification. Like many grassroots groups, Llareta underwent its own transition in the postdictatorship period when the repressive state, the object of its opposition, disappeared. Unlike many other groups, however, Llareta managed to survive this transition by challenging the democratic state’s insistence on personal responsibility. In Paley’s account, Llareta members admirably convert the democratic state’s emphasis on individual responsibility for health and well-being into demands for public sector accountability. They do so by using the state’s techniques of democratic knowledge production (such as health surveys and health campaigns) against the state and by showing how household and personal health problems stem from conditions created by the state in the first place.

During her fieldwork, Paley actively aligned herself with Llareta members, and as a result, Marketing Democracy is a self-conscious demonstration of activist scholarship. Paley uses her book to give voice to her principal informants by privileging their analyses of democracy’s limits on political activism. She also demonstrates her commitment to making Llareta members part of the scholarly process of producing her ethnography. She begins the book, in fact, with an evocative description of the day she returned to La Bandera after a two-year absence to share the findings of her dissertation research with Llareta members. Paley’s narrative structure continues this braided thread: prologues to substantive chapters describe the responses to her dissertation by informants, community members, and one Chilean intellectual.

Paley’s experiment in ethnographic presentation falls short, however, because neither the activist account nor the scholarly account of her research is complete on its own. Although Paley makes it clear that she dutifully and assiduously repatriated the ethnographic knowledge that she had acquired while researching her dissertation, she does not make clear what comprised that knowledge. In the epilogue, she notes that “as it turned out my analysis closely paralleled the health promoters’ own commentary” (p. 214). Indeed, it is difficult to identify how her account of the history of the población and her critique of democracy differ from those of the health promoters. This begs an interesting question: if knowledge is entangled with the power relations that produce it (which seems to be a premise of Paley’s argument), how is it that Paley and her informants came up with the same analysis? Stated differently, what did Paley learn that differed from what her informants learned about the transition to democracy? This question suggests that Paley has sacrificed theoretical rigor in order to present a book faithful to her informants’ points of view. The danger therein, as one of Paley’s interlocutors points out after reading her dissertation, is that “what strikes me… is that I didn’t hear anything new” (p. 188). Although much of what Paley writes is worthwhile and will be new to readers unfamiliar with Chile, some readers might concur that Paley’s analytic method and its presentation are less than novel.

Despite my concerns about Paley’s narrative form, I believe that Marketing Democracy is an important contribution to studies of social movements, governmentality, and power. Marketing Democracy is also an engaging read; Paley’s history of Chile’s urban social movements over more than 30 years is richly detailed and comprehensive, and her vivid descriptions bring life and texture to both the depredations and triumphs of Chilean shantytown activists.