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As Raimon Panikkar explained in Living with the Earth ($24 from Intercultural Institute of Montreal, 4917 rue St-Urbain, Montréal, Québec, H2T 2W1 Canada), development is a monocultural process which not long ago meant "converting all people to one King, one God, one empire." It now promotes "one World Bank, one world democracy, one science, one technology, one network of everything." The drive for conversion to one culture took a quantum leap with the advent of colonialism 500 years ago, although it is much older than that. It took another leap with the development of economics 200 years ago. Since 1949, "development" has been the mantra under which the one, dominant Western culture has been imposing itself on Southern countries embedded in other world views, social institutions and lifestyles. It is despoiling both humanity and the Earth.
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"In the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely believed in the modern world, and in the modern centers of the non-modern world, that every society had to pass through clear-cut historical stages to finally conform to the prevalent model of a proper nation-state - exactly as every economy had to go through fixed stages of growth to attain the beatitude of development. It was also believed that to go through these inescapable stages, each society had to restructure its culture, shed those parts that were retrogressive, and cultivate cultural traits more compatible with the needs of a modern nation-state. Two forces seem to have changed that easy, progressivist view. First, a huge majority of Third World societies have failed to walk successfully the arduous path of 'progress', laid out so considerately by the dominant school of post World War II social science, and they have failed to develop viable nation-states along the lines prescribed by postᆥth century Europe. Second, culture in these societies has shown more resilience than expected by the learned and the knowledgeable. When pitted against the needs and rationales of the state, it is often the state which has given way to culture. This resilience of culture, also expressed in the spirited resurgence of ethnic self-awareness in many Third World societies, seems to show that what was once possible in the case of small tribes and minorities which were bulldozed by modernization is no longer possible in the case of larger cultural entities without arousing stiff resistance. Indeed, cultures have now begun to return, like Freud's unconscious, to haunt the modern system of nation-states."
-- Ashis Nandy, "State", The Development Dictionary (London/New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 1992).
The failure of development, the failure even of small, local projects initiated by NGOs at the grassroots level, compels one to think critically about the theories, the great development doctrines, which lie behind development strategies and projects. "Development" is profoundly rooted in Western culture, and its introduction into the countries of the South only reinforces their dependence, not only economically and technologically, but - worse still - mentally and culturally. Development theory is a manifestation of ethnocentric social Darwinism. "Catching up" involves progress up an evolutionary ladder upon which white people perch, rather comfortably, at the top. For development theorists following Rostow, the cultures of the people are often an obstacle to development. The precondition for "take-off" is a change of mind, a change of culture, the eradication of any archaic remnants of mentalities which are opposed to development. It is striking how our thinking on development has been hijacked by economists and ideologues. Development theory is in fact narrowly mechanistic and materialistic. Anthropologists, and more importantly, the people themselves, ordinary men and women, have hardly been listened to. The human dimension, or what you might call the cultural aspect, has been severely overlooked, not only by the technocrats on the right, but also by militant development workers at the other end of the political spectrum. We keep looking for solutions to the problems of development in the realm of economics and politics. But while they also matter very much, they cannot give us a full picture of reality. If we are ever to be able to accept the diversity of the peoples of the world, to respect their cultures and their right to such diversity, we must "get out of economics."
The revaluing of culture is not a question of reactionary "indigenism" or romantic culturalism, but of justice and, in the last analysis, of liberty. The struggle for cultural identity must not be confused with the nostalgia of archaeologists in love with the past, and even less with a backward-looking religious fundamentalism, although drawing on the deep intuitions of the local religion is often an important source of cultural energy and dynamism. It is important to know about the past and to build on it, but this is not an end in itself. What is even more important is the culture of a people as they are living it, here and now: their culture-in-action. What would it mean for most Brazilians to try to return to their "ancestral culture" when they are now so mixed? Apart from 200,000 Indians, several families of European stock and a few black people who have remained close to their Dahomean or Nigerian roots, to which culture should the majority of Brazilians turn, if not to the fascinating mixture they represent today? This perpetual bubbling over, the constant syncretism which is the charm of this people and which gives its amazing vitality, is their culture. Their culture is the here-and-now of their everyday life and it is from the present that they can draw their pride, confidence, meaning and orientation. A strong sense of cultural identity is important because it constitutes the basis for self-confidence, because it gives meaning to life, and because it can provide concrete solutions to everyday problems. Only confident people can accept foreign influences and ideas without feeling threatened or debased. Only a lively culture can allow people to struggle against those aspect of their tradition which they consider corrupt, unjust or inadequate.
Cultural re-valorization should allow each people to find, drawing on their own knowledge, the solutions they can most easily master, those that cost the least and which are often the most effective. Whether it is a question of health care, the fight against desertification, choice of construction materials, ways of resolving social conflict, or the struggle against a threatening external power, local cultures contain resources for action that it is wise to study before calling on external resources. The racism and paternalism that so often characterize development strategies have undermined the self-confidence of many women and men in the South. Lack of self-confidence leads to dependence, anomie, and fatalism. This is the essence of under-development: the withering away of the subject, whether it is individual or collective. The revaluing of culture should assure the ability to find meaning in life. The tragedy of capitalism, or of focusing exclusively on production and productivity, is precisely the absence of meaning, the absence of values."
-- No Life Without Roots, by Thierry G. Verhelst, 1990, Zed Books, 57 Caledonian Road, London N1 9BU, UK; £10.95/$19.95).
"The campaign to turn traditional man into modern man has failed. The old ways have been smashed; the new ways are not viable. People are caught in the deadlock of development: the peasant who is dependent on buying seeds, yet finds to cash to do so. The spreading Western monoculture has eroded viable alternatives to industrial, growth-oriented society and dangerously crippled humankind's capacity to meet an increasingly different future with creative responses. We need to open a window onto other, and different ways of looking at the world and to get a glimpse of the riches which survive in non-Western cultures in spite of development.
"Most so-called developing countries are broke or nearly broke, often as a direct result of various financial and economic 'assistance' programs. They are selling what remains of their souls to anyone who provides them with money to pay their debts. In a situation where they have to 'adjust' their economies, nothing can accommodate them more than passing on the costs to the poor - which is done in the name of participation and its corollary, self-help. Governments and development institutions are no longer afraid of people's participation. As more and more people become addicted to public services and consumer goods, they can be manipulated into supporting those in power and the programs they advocate in the hope that increasing the size of the national economic pie will ultimately increase their share. Thus, in situations where governments have learned to control and contain participation, important political advantages can be obtained through the ostentatious display of participatory intentions."
--"Participation," The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992).
It is fraud to hold up the image of the world's rich as a condition available to all. Yet this is what the economic development mythology of 'catching up' does. The post-war ideology of world economic development promises equal justice (which it defines as economic opportunity) and produces homogeneity (while maintaining and intensifying economic inequality). Placing the world under a single standard of measurement, it destroys the possibility of what might be called 'the effective equality of incommensurables'. If it could be recognized that different cultures really have their own standards of value, which cannot be subsumed into one another or rank-ordered on some supra-cultural scale, it would make sense to give each equal respect and equal voice. The contrary notion, and the one that prevails today, that all the world's cultures can be measured against a single 'standard of living' measure (which implies the standardization of all living) renders all those cultures commensurable, and hence unequal. It dispossesses the world's peoples of their own indigenous notions of prosperity. And it helps in the practical recruiting and organizing of more and more people into the global economic system. Placing all the world under a single yardstick, so that all forms of community life but one are disvalued as underdeveloped, unequal and wretched, has made us sociologically blind. By eliminating this stupefying category from our minds, we should be able to look at the world afresh and see not just two possibilities - development or its absence - but a multiplicity of actual and possible ways of ordering communities. Rediscovering these values in these diverse communities does not mean discovering a value in being poor, but discovering that many things that have been called 'poor' were actually different forms of prosperity."
-- "Equality," The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992).
"In searching for a new environmental and social order we should also realize that it is in the Third World that the new ecologically sound future of the world can be born. In many parts of the Third World and within each Third World nation there are still large areas of ecologically sound economic and living systems, which have been lost in the developed world. We need to recognize and identify these areas and rediscover the technological and cultural wisdom of our indigenous systems of agriculture, industry, shelter, water and sanitation, medicine and culture. I do not mean here the unquestioning acceptance of everything traditional in the romantic belief in a past Gold Age. … But many indigenous technologies, skills and processes are still part and parcel of life in the Third World, and are appropriate for sustainable development and harmonious with nature and the community. These indigenous scientific systems have to be accorded their proper recognition, and encouraged and upgraded if necessary, but they have to be saved from being swallowed up by the 'modern system'.
"Third World governments and peoples in the developed world have to first reject their obsession with modern technologies which absorb a bigger and bigger share of surplus and investment funds in projects like giant hydro-dams, nuclear plants and heavy industries which serve luxury needs. We must turn away from the obsession with modern gadgets and products which were created by the rich countries to mop up their excess capacity and meet their need to meet effective demand. We need to devise and fight for the adoption of appropriate, ecologically sound and socially equitable policies to fulfill needs such as water, health, food, education and information. We need appropriate technologies and even more so the correct prioritizing of what types of consumer products to produce. We can not accept 'appropriate technology' producing inappropriate products. And perhaps the most difficult aspect of the fight is the need to de-brainwash the people of the Third World from the modern culture which has penetrated our societies, so that lifestyles, personal motivations and status structure can be delinked from the system of industrialism, its advertising industry and creation of culture."
-- Martin Khor, "Development, Trade, and the Environment," The Future of Progress, ed. by Edward Goldsmith, Martin Khor, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, et al. (1992; The International Society for Ecology and Culture, P.O. Box 9475, Berkeley, CA 94709): pages 40 - 41.
* Unconfirmed, or travel money not yet available.
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