DEVELOPMENT THINKING demeans the other

DEVELOPMENT THINKING demeans the other

1. DEVELOPMENT IMAGES ARE CANNIBALISTIC

Arturo Escobar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, 1995, p.153.

As Michael Taussig said, “From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation.” He continues, commenting on the absence of the narratives of South American indigenous peoples from most representations about them, “It is the ultimate anthropological conceit, anthropology in its highest, indeed redemptive, moment, rescuing the ‘voice’ of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time”. This is to say that as much as the plain exclusion of the peasant’s voice in rural development discourse, this conceit to “speak for the others,” perhaps even to rescuer their voice, as Taussig says, must be avoided. The fact that violence is a cultural manifestation of hunger applies not only to hunger’s physical aspects but to the violence of representation. The development discourse has turned its representations of hunger into an act of consumption of images and feelings by the well nourished, an act of cannibalism, as Cinema Novo artists would have it. This consumption is a feature of modernity, we are reminded by Foucault (“It is just that the illness of some should be transformed into the experience of others”). But the regimes of representation that produce this violence are not easily neutralized, as the next chapter will show.

Arturo Escobar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, 1995, p.53.

The coherence of effects that the development discourse achieved is the key to its success as a hegemonic form of representation: the construction of the poor and underdeveloped as universal, preconstituted subjects, based on the privilege of the representers; the exercise of power over the Third World made possible by this discursive homogenization (which entails the erasure of the complexity and diversity of Third World peoples, so that a squatter in Mexico City, a Nepalese peasant, and a Tuareg nomad become equivalent to each other as poor and underdeveloped); and the colonization and domination of the natural and human ecologies and economies of the Third World.
3. CLAIMS TO REPRESENTATION ALLOW THE WEST TO WRITE THE HISTORIES

Arturo Escobar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, 1995, p.107.

Because often decisions are made by centralized organizations headed by representatives of ruling groups, the whole work of organizations is biased in relation to those in power. “Our relation to others in our society and beyond is mediated by the social organization of its ruling. Our ‘knowledge’ is thus ideological in the sense that this social organization preserves conceptions and means of description which represent the world as it is for those who rule it, rather than as it is for those who are ruled.” This has far-reaching consequences, because we are constantly implicated and active in this process. But how does the institutional production of social reality work? A basic feature of this operation is its reliance on textual and documentary forms as a means of representing and preserving a given reality. Inevitably, texts are detached from the local historical context of the reality that they supposedly represent. “For bureaucracy is par excellence that mode of governing that separates the performance of ruling from particular individuals, and makes organization independent of particular persons and local settings… Today, large-scale organization inscribes its processes into documentary modes as a continuous feature of its functioning… This [produces] a form of social consciousness that is the property of organizations rather than of the meeting of individuals in local historical settings.”

WE SHOULD STILL ACT TO SOLVE WORLD PROBLEMS LIKE POVERTY

1. EVEN IF THE DISCOURSE HARMS WE MUST NOT STOP ATTEMPTS TO HELP THE OTHER

Arturo Escobar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, 1995, p.16.

At the core of this recentering of the debates within the disciplines are the limits that exist to the Western project of deconstruction and self-critique. It is becoming increasingly evident, at least for those who are struggling for different ways of having a voice, that the process of deconstructing and dismantling has to be accompanied by that of constructing new ways of seeing and acting. Needless to say, this aspect is crucial in discussions about development, because people’s survival is at stake. As Mohanty insists, both projects- deconstruction and reconstruction- have to be carried out simultaneously. As I discuss in the final chapter, this simultaneous project could focus strategically on the collective action of social movements: they struggle not only for goods and services but also for the very definition of life, economy, nature, and society. They are, in short, cultural struggles. As Bhabha wants us to acknowledge, deconstruction and other types of critiques do not lead automatically to “an unproblematic reading of other cultural and discursive systems.” They might be necessary to combat ethnocentrism, “but they cannot, of themselves, unreconstructed, represent that otherness”. Moreover, there is the tendency in these critiques to discuss otherness principally in terms of the limits of Western logocentricity, thus denying that cultural otherness is “implicated in specific historical and discursive conditions, requiring constructions in different practices of reading”. There is a similar insistence in Latin America that the proposals of postmodernism, to be fruitful there, have to make clear their commitment to justice and to the construction of alternative social orders. These Third World correctives indicate the need for alternative questions and strategies for the construction of anticolonialist discourses (and the reconstruction of Third World societies in/through representations that can develop into alternative practices). Calling into question the limitations of the West’s self-critique, as currently practiced in much of contemporary theory, they make it possible to visualize the “discursive insurrection” by Third World people proposed by Mudimbe in relation to the “sovereignty of the very European thought from which we wish to disentangle ourselves”.

Ismail Serageldin, Vice-President, Environmental Sustainable Development , World Bank, NURTURING DEVELOPMENT: AID AND COOPERATION IN TODAY’S CHANGING WORLD, 1995, p.5.

There is no doubt that these general principles are present in much of the public debate everywhere in the world today. They are undoubtedly constituent elements of the evolving world conscious­ness. For many in the developing world this set of constructs has been seen as "Western," usually meaning originally European val­ues, currently championed by the United States and Europe. They fear the spread of these ideas as "Westernization," which they see as the adoption‑forced or voluntary‑of Western values and institu­tions by the rest of the world, thereby sealing the hegemony of the Western powers by the most complete subjugation of all peoples and societies of the world; a subjugation that ensures their adher­ence as marginal members of the Western world order. This view is possibly the reflection of the insecurities that lead people to seek refuge in the narrow constructs of the past. Perhaps the solution to all these problems and contradictions is to carry these ideas further, much further than Western societies have dared to do until now, and in the process create that global world order that would be truly new and truly universal.
3. INVESTMENT IS NEEDED TO STOP INFRASTRUCTURAL COLLAPSE OF ECONOMIES

WORLD BANK INSTITUTE, 2000, Accessed May 1, 2000, www.worldbank.org.

In many of these countries there has been over the past five years a drastic compression of funds allocated to maintenance and capital rehabilitation in infrastructure. The warning has been made from many quarters that if this pattern were to continue, damage to the existing stock of public infrastructure in these economies may be irreparable. It is a well-known conclusion in public expenditure policy and fiscal management that replacement costs tend to be a high multiple of the funds now being saved in maintenance and basic rehabilitation. In addition, if economies in transition are to find a steady path to growth and recovery, additional investments in local infrastructure and services will be much needed