Encountering Development – The Making and Unmaking of the Third World: 1 (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History) - Softcover

Escobar, Arturo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691150451 ISBN 13: 9780691150451

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2011

Synopsis

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era. Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts." In a substantial new introduction, Escobar reviews debates on globalization and postdevelopment since the book's original publication in 1995 and argues that the concept of postdevelopment needs to be redefined to meet today's significantly new conditions. He then calls for the development of a field of "pluriversal studies," which he illustrates with examples from recent Latin American movements.

About this title

About the Author

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is "Territories of Difference".

From the Back Cover

"An intelligent and thorough overview of the rise of the concept of 'development' . . . . [This book] represents the best of interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and speaks to central debates across the permeable borders of anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and development studies."--Orin Starn, Duke University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Encountering Development

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLDBy Arturo Escobar

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15045-1

Contents

Preface..................................................................................................viiChapter 1 Introduction: Development and the Anthropology of Modernity...................................3Chapter 2 The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development.....................21Chapter 3 Economics and the Space of Development: Tales of Growth and Capital...........................55Chapter 4 The Dispersion of Power: Tales of Food and Hunger.............................................102Chapter 5 Power and Visibility: Tales of Peasants, Women, and the Environment...........................154Notes....................................................................................................227References...............................................................................................249Index....................................................................................................275

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MODERNITY

There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress. —United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries, 1951

In his inaugural address as president of the United States on January 20, 1949, Harry Truman announced his concept of a "fair deal" for the entire world. An essential component of this concept was his appeal to the United States and the world to solve the problems of the "underdeveloped areas" of the globe.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. ... I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life.... What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democractic fair dealing.... Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge. (Truman [1949] 1964)

The Truman doctrine initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs, particularly those concerning the less economically accomplished countries of the world. The intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the "advanced" societies of the time—high levels of industrialization and urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern education and cultural values. In Truman's vision, capital, science, and technology were the main ingredients that would make this massive revolution possible. Only in this way could the American dream of peace and abundance be extended to all the peoples of the planet.

This dream was not solely the creation of the United States but the result of the specific historical conjuncture at the end of the Second World War. Within a few years, the dream was universally embraced by those in power. The dream was not seen as an easy process, however; predictably perhaps, the obstacles perceived ahead contributed to consolidating the mission. One of the most influential documents of the period, prepared by a group of experts convened by the United Nations with the objective of designing concrete policies and measures "for the economic development of underdeveloped countries," put it thus:

There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress. (United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs [1951], 15)

The report suggested no less than a total restructuring of "underdeveloped" societies. The statement quoted earlier might seem to us today amazingly ethnocentric and arrogant, at best naive; yet what has to be explained is precisely the fact that it was uttered and that it made perfect sense. The statement exemplified a growing will to transform drastically two-thirds of the world in the pursuit of the goal of material prosperity and economic progress. By the early 1950s, such a will had become hegemonic at the level of the circles of power.

This book tells the story of this dream and how it progressively turned into a nightmare. For instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence are only the most pathetic signs of the failure of forty years of development. In this way, this book can be read as the history of the loss of an illusion, in which many genuinely believed. Above all, however, it is about how the "ThirdWorld" has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post–World War II period.

ORIENTALISM, AFRICANISM, AND DEVELOPMENTALISM

Until the late 1970s, the central stake in discussions on Asia, Africa, and Latin America was the nature of development. As we will see, from the economic development theories of the 1950s to the "basic human needs approach" of the 1970s—which emphasized not only economic growth per se as in earlier decades but also the distribution of the benefits of growth—the main preoccupation of theorists and politicians was the kinds of development that needed to be pursued to solve the social and economic problems of these parts of the world. Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development, through concepts such as "another development," "participatory development," "socialist development," and the like. In short, one could criticize a given approach and propose modifications or improvements accordingly, but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not be doubted. Development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary.

Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms. Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam. The fact that most people's conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed.

More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made possible analyses of this type of "colonization of reality" which seek to account for this very fact: how certain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Foucault's work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Extensions of Foucault's insights to colonial and postcolonial situations by authors such as Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, Chandra Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking about representations of the Third World. Anthropology's self-critique and renewal during the 1980s have also been important in this regard.

Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination—as earlier Marxist analyses, for instance, did—and at the same time to explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates the possibility of "stand[ing] detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated" (Foucault 1986, 3). It gives us the possibility of singling out "development" as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form. This is the task the present book sets out to accomplish.

To see development as a historically produced discourse entails an examination of why so many countries started to see themselves as underdeveloped in the early post–World War II period, how "to develop" became a fundamental problem for them, and how, finally, they embarked upon the task of "un-underdeveloping" themselves by subjecting their societies to increasingly systematic, detailed, and comprehensive interventions. As Western experts and politicians started to see certain conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a problem—mostly what was perceived as poverty and backwardness—a new domain of thought and experience, namely, development, came into being, resulting in a new strategy for dealing with the alleged problems. Initiated in the United States and Western Europe, this strategy became in a few years a powerful force in the Third World.

The study of development as discourse is akin to Said's study of the discourses on the Orient. "Orientalism," writes Said,

can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. ... My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse we cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (1979, 3)

Since its publication, Orientalism has sparked a number of creative studies and inquiries about representations of the Third World in various contexts, although few have dealt explicitly with the question of development. Nevertheless, the general questions some of these works raised serve as markers for the analysis of development as a regime of representation. In his excellent book The Invention of Africa, the African philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe, for example, states his objective thus: "To study the theme of the foundations of discourse about Africa ... [how] African worlds have been established as realities for knowledge" (1988, xi) in Western discourse. His concern, moreover, goes beyond "the `invention' of Africanism as a scientific discipline" (9), particularly in anthropology and philosophy, in order to investigate the "amplification" by African scholars of the work of critical European thinkers, particularly Foucault and Lévi-Strauss. Although Mudimbe finds that even in the most Afrocentric perspectives the Western epistemological order continues to be both context and referent, he nevertheless finds some works in which critical European insights are being carried even further than those works themselves anticipated. What is at stake for these latter works, Mudimbe explains, is a critical reinterpretation of African history as it has been seen from Africa's (epistemological, historical, and geographical) exteriority, indeed, a weakening of the very notion of Africa. This, for Mudimbe, implies a radical break in African anthropology, history, and ideology.

Critical work of this kind, Mudimbe believes, may open the way for "the process of refounding and reassuming an interrupted historicity within representations" (183), in other words, the process by which Africans can have greater autonomy over how they are represented and how they can construct their own social and cultural models in ways not so mediated by a Western episteme and historicity—albeit in an increasingly transnational context. This notion can be extended to the Third World as a whole, for what is at stake is the process by which, in the history of the modern West, non- European areas have been systematically organized into, and transformed according to, European constructs. Representations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as Third World and underdeveloped are the heirs of an illustrious genealogy of Western conceptions about those parts of the world. Timothy Mitchell unveils another important mechanism at work in European representations of other societies. Like Mudimbe, Mitchell's goal is to explore "the peculiar methods of order and truth that characterise the modern West" (1988, ix) and their impact on nineteenth-century Egypt. The setting up of the world as a picture, in the model of the world exhibitions of the last century, Mitchell suggests, is at the core of these methods and their political expediency. For the modern (European) subject, this entailed that s/he would experience life as if s/he were set apart from the physical world, as if s/he were a visitor at an exhibition. The observer inevitably "enframed" external reality in order to make sense of it; this enframing took place according to European categories. What emerged was a regime of objectivism in which Europeans were subjected to a double demand: to be detached and objective, and yet to immerse themselves in local life.

This experience as participant observer was made possible by a curious trick, that of eliminating from the picture the presence of the European observer (see also Clifford 1988, 145); in more concrete terms, observing the (colonial) world as object "from a position that is invisible and set apart" (Mitchell 1988, 28). The West had come to live "as though the world were divided in this way into two: into a realm of mere representations and a realm of the `real'; into exhibitions and an external reality; into an order of mere models, descriptions or copies, and an order of the original" (32). This regime of order and truth is a quintessential aspect of modernity and has been deepened by economics and development. It is reflected in an objectivist and empiricist stand that dictates that the Third World and its peoples exist "out there," to be known through theories and intervened upon from the outside.

The consequences of this feature of modernity have been enormous. Chandra Mohanty, for example, refers to the same feature when raising the questions of who produces knowledge about Third World women and from what spaces; she discovered that women in the ThirdWorld are represented in most feminist literature on development as having "needs" and "problems" but few choices and no freedom to act. What emerges from such modes of analysis is the image of an average Third World woman, constructed through the use of statistics and certain categories:

This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being "third world" (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (1991b, 56)

These representations implicitly assume Western standards as the benchmark against which to measure the situation of Third World women. The result, Mohanty believes, is a paternalistic attitude on the part of Western women toward their Third World counterparts and, more generally, the perpetuation of the hegemonic idea of the West's superiority. Within this discursive regime, works about Third World women develop a certain coherence of effects that reinforces that hegemony. "It is in this process of discursive homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the third world," Mohanty concludes, "that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be defined and named" (54).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Encountering Developmentby Arturo Escobar Copyright © 1995 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0691150451
• ISBN 13: 9780691150451
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344