THE POST DEVELOPMENT READER

EDITED BY MAJID RAHNEMA WITH VICTORIA BAWTREE

ZED BOOKS             1997

PART 2

 

Introduction by Majid Rahnema (cont.)

The contributions to this Reader have been classified in five parts.

Part One pictures a number of world societies in the pre-development era. It starts with excerpts from Marshal Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics. In this revolutionary text, which has now become a classic, the author, basing himself on recent anthropological findings, shows how the economist bias has served to give a totally distorted picture of life in the so-called archaic or primitive societies. According to Sahlins, hunters/gatherers were not poor. Rather, they were free. They were indeed leading quite a simple and frugal life. Yet, as a rule, the people’s material wants were satisfied. The fractions of people who went to bed hungry every night was paradoxically much smaller than in the present world of ‘affluence’ where it is still one-third to one-half of the population.

Helena Norberg-Hodge shows, in turn, how the preservation of the cultural sap had enabled another society, this time in Ladakh, to continue enjoying a good life until development broke in forcefully. Here again, an unbiased testimony shows how a population, internationally labeled as one of the poorest and least developed of the world, can still give the most ‘developed’ lessons of wisdom and virtue in every walk of life.

For Hassan Zaoual, a major reason why the development ideology has failed to grasp the rich complexity of the non-economized societies is its blindness to the specificity of their sites, in particular their symbolic dimensions. On the African sites, notices the Moroccan economist, ‘the economic logic rests on the native social soils’ and ‘the rational is nothing but the relational.’ These sites, which have been culturally produced with a view to saving the African way of life, are today threatened with total destruction by ‘the missiles of development’. People’s resistance to development should be studied in the context of their will to protect their local symbolic sites from destruction.

A testimony coming from a totally different geographic site, that of the American Indians of the Ojibway Nation, shows that the cultures of the world, despite their great diversity, have many things in common. Linda Clarkson, Vern Morrissette and Gabriel Regallet describe how, here as elsewhere, great traditions of wisdom and virtue, and millions of individual and group experiences, have converged to develop ‘customs, beliefs, institutions and methods of social control’ that cannot be dismissed, or worse, replaced from outside.

The taped interview of Gemetchu Megerssa with Dadacha, an elder of the Ethiopian Borana tribe, reveals other aspects of these sites. In this truly extraordinary document, Dadacha points his finger at the heart of the question. What is important to his sisters and brothers is fidnaa, a concept based on the ‘necessary harmony between God and people’, which ‘does not end with growth’ but with ‘something else which we call gabbina’ (well-being and splendour) and ‘is similar to that of a ram’s horn growing in a spiral’. The limaati, or the new concept of development, that is proposed to the people not only reduces their perception of a good life to an abstract economic formula but threatens to destroy ‘the flow of civilized life’.

In the small ‘boxes’ illustrating the main themes of Part One, many inspiring thoughts articulated by well-known thinkers, from Marcel Mauss to Jerry Mander, as well as less famous but even more significant people like the anonymous Inouit, show how the rich world of societies labeled as ‘underdeveloped’ continues to be misrepresented.

Part Two discusses the different aspects of the development paradigm – paradigm being taken here as the sum of the assumptions underlying the concept, and the beliefs or the world-view it both prescribes and proscribes. Teodor Shanin starts the discussion by examining the genealogy of the paradigm, which goes far back to the idea of progress. For Professor Shanin, this attractive ideology soon became ‘an immensely “energizing” tool of policy and counterpolicy’, ‘a particular expert style’ which took away from the majority ‘the right to choose and even to understand why their own experience was increasingly being negated’.

For Marshall Berman, Faust can be traced as the first developer, after he sells his soul to Mephistopheles and decides, at any cost, to develop an entire region around him. The arrogance that grows with his ambition to develop his services leads him to ask his new friend Mephistopheles to kill Philemon and Baucis, the sweet old couple who were offering hospitality to shipwrecked sailors and wanderers, and who refuse to sell him their little cottage. This tragic blindness to others’ feelings leads him ultimately to pronounce his own death sentence.

Using Foucault’s methodology to dissect the development discourse, Arturo Escobar shows how the discourse made it possible for the rulers ‘to subject their populations to an infinite variety of interventions, to more encompassing forms of power and systems of control’, including ‘killing and torturing and condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction’.

As Ivan Illich was perhaps one of the first thinkers who, as early as the late 1960s, had perceived most of the dangers inherent in the development discourse, ‘Development as Planned Poverty’ is inserted here as a prophetic message. For him, ‘underdevelopment’ is ‘the surrender of social consciousness to prepackaged solutions’, a phenomenon that was actually fostered by development. Focusing on the school system as it was introduced in the ‘Third World’, he shows how ‘schools rationalize the divine origin of social stratification with much more rigour than churches have ever done.’

A quarter of a century later, we see the flowering of Illich’s earlier thoughts in the interview he granted as specially for this Reader. The gist of his message, as I understand it, places a totally different type of responsibility, and perhaps a much heavier one, on the shoulders of every one of us: ‘The possibility of a city set up as the milieu that fosters a common search for good has vanished. Dedication to each other is the generator of the only space that allows what you ask: a mini-space in which we can agree on the pursuit of the good.’

My own essay on ‘Development and the People’s Immune System’ closes this discussion on the development paradigm by taking up the history of homo oeconomicus as one of the main agents of development, and the way he historically introduced himself in vernacular niches, as the HIV does in the T4 cell, replacing the genetic codes of the latter by its own. In all economized societies, the stage now seems set for homo oeconomicus to ‘become’ his victims. To what extent, and how, could they resist the invasion? Are there ‘fields of power’ still left to the people exposed to the new ‘virus’, which may be reinforced in order to help them drive it back or destroy it? What could each of us do in the David-and-Goliath-like struggles that lie ahead? These questions can be better addressed if one gains a clearer notion of the institutions or the vehicles used by development in achieving its goals.

It is in Part Three of the Reader that some of these ‘vehicles’ are discussed. The articles in this section deal with economy, the nation-state, education, science, the colonization of minds, the hegemony of ‘the one and only way of thinking’, the media, and the international organizations.

Addressing the role of economy, as one of the most important vehicles of development, Serge Latouche defines development as ‘the trickle-down effect of industrial growth’. He submits that, for mainstream thinking, growth has been identified with ‘the good’. But the good it claims to represent ‘is not the quality of life, but the quantity of gadgets considered as useful by the mere fact that they are being produced and consumed’.

The problematique of the nation-state, another fundamental vehicle of development, is described in all its complexities and ambivalences by Rajni Kothari. As a thinker who, through all his writings, has denounced the abuses committed by the modern repressive nation-state in the name of development, he notices that, at a time when the state is being rendered weak and disembodied by the overriding forces of technology and the world market, it is facing another major challenge from a totally opposite direction: the assertion of cultures, ethnicity, nationalities, pluralism and the violence of terrorism and fundamentalism. ‘It us also ceasing to be an embodiment of civil society and a protector of the poor, the weak and the oppressed.’

The various aspects of education as a factor of ‘cultural defoliation’ are then discussed in a ‘multi-voice’ report by five authors well versed in the impacts of the imported school system on indigenous populations. They include Cheikh Hamidou Kane of Senegal, the author of The Ambiguous Adventure, and the Burkinabé historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo.

Vandana Shiva follows with an analysis of science and its ‘reductionist and universalizing tendencies’ that tend to destroy local knowledge. For her, it is not just development that is a source of violence to women and nature, but ‘at a deeper level, scientific knowledge, on which the development process is based which is itself a source of violence’.

In societies abruptly exposed to processes which systematically produce at all levels modern needs and expectations, these different vehicles of development have been highly instrumental in extending the old forms of colonization to the mind of their victims. Ashis Nandy’s analysis of the colonization of the mind gives a vivid picture of this new and pernicious type of control. At the level of the very societies that have been mainly responsible for such a colonization, the same processes have led to the institution of ‘the one and only way of thinking’. Ignatio Ramonet sees in this phenomenon an ‘intimidating force that stifles all attempts at free thinking.’ On another plane, James Petras discusses the role of the media in the cultural domination of societies exposed to development. Finally, Pierre de Senarclens discusses the role of the United Nations system and international assistance in prolonging the ‘colonial’ type of development.

Part Four starts with a forceful demonstration by Susan George of the ways ‘the poor are developing the rich’, thanks to development practices.