2 - Cultural Performance and Political Legitimacy: The Political Biography of Jeli Praise, 1960–91

Summary

Introduction

What is the role of cultural performances in generating legitimacy for a political order? In engaging this question, this chapter pursues a double purpose. Conceptually, it critically reconsiders what Beetham identified as the third dimension of legitimacy. Empirically, the chapter centres on cultural performances as a domain in which claims to political legitimacy are made, assessed and contested.

I argued in the Introduction to this book that Beetham's argument about the ‘expression of consent’ as the third constitutive component of the ‘normative structure of legitimacy’ (1991: 90ff) rests on a conflation of genetic (causal) and constitutive accounts of legitimacy. Beetham identifies as ‘confusing’ aspects of consent and its relationship to legitimacy, first, the kind of evidence for the existence of consent, as opposed to, say, obedience generated through coercion; second, the question whether consent is the same as, or different from ‘belief in legitimacy’ (if, following Weber, one equates legitimacy with belief in legitimacy). To clarify the matter, Beetham maintains that what matters most about the relationship between consent and legitimacy is the public expression of consent, rather than its underlying belief. The public nature of the expression of consent and of voluntary agreement is what confers legitimacy on a political order or person (1991: 91). This argument suffers from a lack of distinction between a constitutive account of legitimacy (i.e. an identification of its components) on one side, and a genetic account of legitimacy (i.e. its emergence, confirmation and reproduction through the public expression of consent) on the other. However, the distinction between the genesis of an attitude (in this case, consent) and an identification of the components of legitimacy is of key import to empirically grounded accounts of legitimacy. As I will detail below, historical, sociological and anthropological studies that ignore this important distinction end up with limited accounts of the process of nation-state making that they set out to examine. Notable examples are the studies by Turino (2000), Askew (2002), and Apter (2005) who take up the lead of Corrigan and Sayer's The Great Arch (1985) in studying the role of culture in the making and consolidation of African nation-states. As insightful as these studies are, they mistake the process of generating in listeners particular attitudes of approval for the actual existence of legitimacy. They confound people's attitude to a political order with their expression of this attitude.