Modern democracy has a strange sense of the concrete. It absorbs abstract categories, providing them with a tangibility by giving them attributes and propen sities. For example, the idea of citizenship evokes qualities of residence, entitlement, suggests rituals of voting. In a similar way, rights become a set of claims which is then hyphenated to a set of conceptual territories. It could be a right to life, property, information, education, health or development. As the list expands, the idea of rights inflates with gravitas and concreteness. But in turning citizenship or rights into ‘objects’, the idea of democracy acquires a sense of stock, becoming a basketful of claims or properties. While this has added much to the importance of persons and bodies, such an approach does not deal with time, the life cycle ritual, or the wider ecological processes that affect the livelihoods or security of a people. Time and cycles of life create not just new statuses but provide a sense of flow, fluidity and process to the life-world. Democracy as a framework of stock is different from democracy as flow. Flow brings a different set of subtleties to the democratic process. For example, citizenship seen as stock looks complete, bounded, spatially defined, but one needs a new set of concepts to understand situations where citizenship is incomplete.