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Culture, development and social theory

Towards an integrated social development

Zed Books Ltd

Transforming the discourse of development: cultures, suffering and human futures

As the world enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is evident that, despite the widespread culture of denial that persists in sweeping our major common problems under the collective carpet, it is entering and has indeed already entered a period of unprecedented crisis. Unprecedented not only because of the scale of the problems, but equally because of the convergence of what were once seen to be, if considered problems at all, quite separate ones, and because the evidence is that the tools that we have used in the past to manage the crises that have beset human society are no longer adequate to the tasks in hand. Indeed, decades of technocratic, economistic and managerial 'development' policies and practices have signally failed to alleviate these problems, and may even be, as many critics have suggested, a substantial part of the problem rather than elements in its solution. Despite the lofty rhetoric of the UN Millennium Goals and despite evidence of pockets of improvement, mainly in East and Southeast Asia, the huge issues of poverty; ethnic, social and gender inequality; abuses of human rights; massive environmental degradation and global warming; unsustainable resource depletion; illiteracy and lack of access to education; woefully inadequate health care; and conflict and wars continue to plague the planet in undiminished ways. Some – rising inequalities between and within nations, conflict and ecological damage, for instance – have intensified and have been joined by their not entirely unpredictable by-products of terrorism, corruption, globalized crime, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics of international proportions, erratic weather patterns and growing water shortages.

Yet despite the demonstrable magnitude of these issues and their inevitable massive impact on both the human future and the future of nature as a good in itself and as the resource base on which all life depends, we occupy a curious moral and intellectual environment in which (short of the total denial of the existence of these problems or their seriousness – a syndrome that tragically does exist), they are largely banished to the very narrow specialization of 'development studies'. This curiously hybrid field has little intellectual status among the established academic disciplines and has few strong links to related subjects, such as ecology, conflict studies, cultural studies, philosophy or religious studies, but by far the strongest institutional links to the much contested and criticized subject of economics. But in reality the themes that conventionally appear under the rubric of 'development studies' do not constitute a specialized 'field' at all: in the present world situation it is the context within which all other disciplines and policy sciences should be exercised. The triviality and narcissism of much of the work that goes on in cultural studies, literary and art criticism, sociology and many other subjects is very apparent when they are placed side by side with the enormity of the human suffering and bio-ecological damage that are being inflicted daily on the world both by the pornography of 'underdevelopment' and by the violence of much of what passes for 'development' itself.

Yet libraries are filled with currently fashionable or now outmoded tomes of development theory reflecting the ever-changing repositioning of writers in a curious field in which yesterday's solutions become today's problems in an apparently never-ending spiral. From an honest scholarly point of view the question must arise as to why our interventions to change the world (even assuming that to be a legitimate vocation) are so often ineffective, unimaginative, bounded by a self-limiting discourse, or simply so short-term and self-serving. This we witnessed in the recent past, for example at the 2009 UN Copenhagen conference on climate change, or the 2010 CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), in which certain countries showed themselves totally unwilling to rein in their consumption of certain endangered species simply because those species were part of their traditional 'national diet'. Development theory – the attempt to make sense of the nature and dimensions of our crisis and to formulate a language of response – is itself in crisis, largely, as I shall argue in this book, because it has trapped itself in a self-contained discourse that has become separated from both the concrete experiences of human suffering and the suffering of nature. Similarly, development theory has to a large extent separated itself from many of the progressive ideas in the social sciences other than economics narrowly defined, including economic anthropology, cultural studies, social philosophy, philosophical anthropology and social/cultural theory, which illuminate the core issues that development theory purports to address, but are so far almost entirely absent from its vocabulary and discourse.

The necessity of bringing these together is the core argument of this book. For while the whole concept of 'development' has become rightly suspect as its destructive, environmentally unfriendly and socially marginalizing effects have become apparent, the problems that the concept was designed to address are still not only present but on the whole worsening. The voices of critique (e.g. Sachs 1995; Rahnema and Bawtree 2003) have rightly had a major and positive deconstructive role. But the question then becomes: where to go after deconstruction in positive and reconstructive ways? A number of approaches have of course been proposed – participatory development, human needs, sustainability, and perhaps most recently the discovery or rediscovery of 'culture' and indigenous knowledge. But each of these possesses its own philosophical and practical difficulties – human needs theory, for example, having been taxed with its tendency to essentialism, and 'sustainable development' with the charge that the very term is an oxymoron. The issue of indigenous knowledge, while clearly very well motivated, raises again the classical anthropological issues of appropriation, ownership of and participation in the benefits accruing from the exploitation of that knowledge. Likewise, many studies in 'culture and development' do not, paradoxically, deal in any concrete way with actual living examples of cultural expression, such as art, dance, music, material culture, theatre, cooking, architecture, fashion and so on, but either treat the term 'culture' as a synonym for gender or ethnicity, as an abstract category often used, as in classical sociology, as a residual explanation of last resort, or as a pragmatic element to be introduced to make more effective the 'delivery' of development goods or goals already decided on elsewhere. Fewer still take a critical view of culture as something that can impede as much as promote human fulfilment, happiness, creativity, satisfaction and a harmonious relationship with nature.

In this book I argue for some fresh approaches to development theory while keeping the notion of culture (to which I will return in detail in the subsequent chapter) central. At the core of the argument are a set of propositions about the relationships between culture and development. These can be summarized as follows.

The first is the closer incorporation of the existential issues central to all human life, and the suggestion, which will be worked out throughout the book, that the route to the elaboration of an existential paradigm for development theory is through confrontation with the nature, causes and dimensions of human suffering and the building of models for the alleviation of suffering based on what is essentially a philosophical rather than a technical investigation.

The second is that the analysis of the concept of 'development' itself is a philosophical and ethical as well as a political and economic enterprise. At the core of a truly humane conception of development are both notions of rights, needs, freedoms and entitlements, and those of hopes, futures, memories, happiness, creativity and imagination. Seen in this light, development theory becomes the contemporary incarnation of what used to be called philosophical anthropology.

Third, development does not simply involve politics, but more centrally cultural politics, which involves among other things the analysis of knowledge itself in the form of a kind of social epistemology: the examination of the gendered and social basis of knowledge, of its class, ethnic and cultural biases, and of the fact that in many cultures knowledge is not confined to the cognitive alone, but includes the sensuous and the emotional, and, very significantly, the relationship between humans and nature, a question only recently posed again in the West by the advent of deep ecology and the belated invention of environmental sociology. The fact that the mainstream social sciences have until now, when an unprecedented ecological crisis is upon us, ignored nature as a constituent part of human identity and of society itself reveals a profound cultural politics at work. The reintroduction of a central concern with nature into the Western social consciousness, first through the New Age movement and deep ecology and then through the subsequent rise of an activist environmental movement, the rediscovery of the non-anthropocentric ontologies of non-Western and Native American cosmologies, and the recovery of a connection between ecology and sociology, indicates a profound and hopeful shift in that cultural politics and a step beyond the necessary but anthropocentric gender and race preoccupations of what has passed as cultural politics up until now.

Fourth, a cultural approach to development involves a distinctive methodology, that of listening: the hearing of stories, the respecting of indigenous narratives, the recovery of forgotten voices and of the many suppressed histories and alternatives that are present in indigenous social thinking, and the production of organic intellectuals in music, art, religions and local spiritual traditions and ecological models, and that most ignored source of protest and utopias, indigenous literature. Finally, any culturally informed development theory must connect with debates and advances in a wider range of social sciences, especially cultural studies, postcolonial studies, globalization theory, feminist theory, social theory and developments within marginalized branches of cultural sociology such as the sociology of the arts.

Seen from these perspectives, development studies, far from being a sequestered technical discipline located in a distinct 'institute of development studies' located somewhere on the edge of a university campus, becomes a broad inquiry into the human condition, our place in nature, the historical processes through which we have reached our currently seriously dysfunctional social and ecological situation, and the resources of imagination and fresh thinking that can potentially lead us beyond our impasse. For whatever the critics of the concept of development might rightly say, it does nevertheless name the pressing issues of the day. These are the great ethical and practical questions of our generation. Furthermore, rather than approach these problems in a mood of pessimism and defeatism, a revitalized and constructive conception of development fuels our intellectual and moral excitement. For here are the truly nontrivial issues really worthy of serious commitment, the exploration of which spills over into and contributes to the renewal of other fields of human endeavour, including the practical search for social alternatives, a renewed form of social ecology that does not see humans and nature as basically opposed, a reorientation of science to basic human needs, new perspectives on conflict resolution, and sources of imagination and imagery for art, architecture, the theatre and literature.

Culture and the structures of development inquiry

More than a decade ago an 'impasse' was announced in development theory, arising from the exhaustion of the neo-Marxist model that was then seen as virtually the only viable alternative to the mainstream paradigms of growth, modernization and uni-directional (industrial, consumerist and technological) development (Schuurman 1996). The problem, however, was not only that neo-Marxism was largely exhausted, in part because of its failure and that of its parent actually to change the world in a more socially just direction in the face of deepening inequalities and rapidly accelerating capitalist-led globalization (celebrated by the Right as signalling 'the end of history'), but also that development theory in general seemed to be going through a drought in which few critical let alone constructive alternatives outside of Marxism seemed to be available. Instead a succession of new methodologies essentially replaced creative theory: 'participation' and Rapid Rural Assessment, for example, in the initial phase and latterly newer concepts such as governance, Millennium Goals, civil society, sustainable development and indigenous knowledge. A reading of the World Bank's annual report or of the parallel although ideologically different human development reports of the UNDP provides a perfect barometer for tracking these shifting fashions. But methodologies are not the equivalent of or a substitute for theory, and while it can be argued that this theoretical loss of nerve was due to a number of factors, including the professionalizing of development and the proliferation of NGOs pursuing often very limited and local goals, one main explanation in fact is the severing of development thinking from creative work going on in other fields, leading to an isolation from much of the most progressive thinking on the key political, moral, ecological and justice issues of the age. So while the mainstream social sciences have largely ignored development, development specialists largely ignored new thinking in the other social sciences except for economics and, to a limited extent, sociology. And even with such development- related subfields such as development sociology, a similar process can be seen at work. Open almost any textbook in development sociology and the same discourse can be seen at work, not only in the conventional selection of the problems presented, but by the absence of any discussion of central cultural issues or linkages to major debates in other areas of sociology itself (for example, cultural sociology, urban sociology or the sociology of the family), or to anthropology, social history, cultural studies or ecology.

The place to begin in overcoming these absences is to look at the elements largely missing from or suppressed by mainstream development discourse. These include much of the subject matter of cultural studies – consumption, memory, the emotions and the sociology of the body, and the works of postmodern social theorists such as Baudrillard, who have drawn attention to the issues of value, death, subjectivities, ritual, sacrifice and the status of culture itself under a regime of postmodernism (Baudrillard 1993; Berry and Wernick 1992). Other exclusions encompass almost the entire subject matter of religious studies, ecology, identity politics and performativity (on the latter two, see Hetherington 1998), popular culture, actual cultural practices and production in the everyday sense of the word (dance, art, theatre, music, food and fashion), indigenous theories of the relationships between personal and social transformation, most of the extensive sociological work on the nature of modernity, social history, and, strangely enough, postcolonial theory. Development studies, paradoxically and ironically as it presents itself as the front line of engagement with the pressing social issues of the day, is often deeply anti-humanistic, for its real subjects, in all their existential depth, escape its grasp. The question then becomes how to put this dimension back.

Some attempts have been made to do so, mainly through the medium of reintroducing ethical debate into development discourse (Goulet 1995; Quarles van Ufford and Giri 2003) or by linking development and spirituality such that development comes to be seen as a personally and socially transformative process leading to greater sociality, levels of self-development and harmony, and studying this empirically by way of social movements that have some strong value system at their core (Zunes et al. 1999; Giri 2005). Both of these approaches have their virtues, but they need filling out in a number of directions which we will now consider. The resiting of development studies in a genuinely 'people centred' approach implies a sense of those people's existential needs, not just their 'empowerment'. Indigenous knowledge understood in its fullest sense includes these needs and their psychological and emotional dimensions, as well as their cognitive and political ones. As Stoller (1997) has shown, the phenomenology of local knowledges extends far beyond the rational. The now largely outmoded 'postmodern' turn in cultural theory, with its emphasis on deconstruction, fragmentation and pastiche, was clearly a luxurious outgrowth of the rich and overprivileged world, and its formulations sound at best ironical when applied to the larger part of the world where those same features are symptoms of tragedy not abundance. The political hollowness of postmodernism and its inability to confront in any meaningful way the deep structural problems of the contemporary world (Eagleton 2003) derive in large part from the decentring of values as a core element of any social vision worth having. Notions of justice, community, freedom, solidarity or beauty, together with ideals of peace, security and self-determination, a cooperative relationship between human rights and the rights of nature, or the notion of human responsibilities are rarely defined or discussed in mainstream development thinking, but are much more likely to be raised in 'peripheral' fields such as liberation theology (e.g. Boff 1997). While this is partly because of the absence of ethical analysis as a central theme in the social sciences, it is also due to the equally glaring absence of aesthetic and philosophical analysis and the absence of any systematic theory linking ecology, culture and development.

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Excerpted from Culture, development and social theory by John Clammer. Copyright © 2012 John Clammer. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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