Enactive Democracy

This dissertation describes the consequences of identifying democratic ideals of reasoning and reciprocity with political dialogue across difference. In contemporary pluralistic societies, many marginalized groups are faced with a choice between incurring the risks of participating and exposing vulnerable cultural practices to scrutiny within dominant institutions or the risks of withdrawing from participation. I argue that Indigenous peoples experience this `deliberative ultimatum' most forcefully as they seek to protect land-based forms of life through litigation and political negotiation. The dilemma arises because prevailing conceptions of reciprocity only extend to individuals, mutual reason-giving, or, in some models, to practices of mutual care that serve as the pre-conditions of mutual reason-giving. To illustrate, I show how within Canadian political and legal institutions, Indigenous modes of reason-giving suffer from systemic forms of denigration and dismissal. Moreover, some forms of Indigenous practical understandings either cannot be articulated or are culturally prohibited from being communicated. Hence, Indigenous peoples often formulate `proxy claims' aimed at strategic protection of Indigenous forms of life. Proxy claims aimed at gaining jurisdiction or title over land suffer form additional distortions, however, as officials who are authorized to preside over a jurisdiction vis-Ă -vis the territorial sovereignty of the state must reconfigure claims to fall under their purview. The ensuing regulations can be more harmful than when practices were enacted without regulated sanction.\nAs a corrective, this dissertation takes initial steps in developing a theoretical and institutional model that preserves the democratic ideals of reasoning and reciprocity without imposing dialogue on vulnerable communities or incurring risks related to the deliberative ultimatum such as the strategic formulation of proxy claims. What I call `enactive democracy' takes practices and forms of life themselves as objects of reciprocity and attends not to speech but to the reasoning that inheres in embodied practices when norms of conduct are establish, contested and modified non-discursively. From here we can see that institutions of cultural autonomy captured in such arrangements as `treaty federalism' or `subsidiarity' can be justified on democratic grounds as a pre-condition of effective reasoning both within and between different cultural forms of life. I conclude with a discussion the application of enactive theory to the emerging fields of deliberative systems and comparative political theory.

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