Culture and Development Lecture 2

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Culture and DevelopmentLecture 2

• Development and the Idea of Progress

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Review of Lecture 1

• Anthropological approaches to the study of
  development
• Recognise multiple rationalities
• Look at actions, not just words
• Compare, compare, compare
• Reconfigure the boundaries of the problem

Adapted from Lambert McKevitt (2002) British
Medical Journal
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Review of Lecture 1

• Culture astradition holds people back from
  developing, from being/becoming modern
• Culture asromantic critique can be used to
  critique development and modernity as bare,
  mechanical, scientific improvement
• Culture aslocalised understandings and knowledge
  become the basis for a new kind of development
  practice

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Lecture 2 OverviewDevelopment and the Idea of
Progress

• 1) The cultural underpinnings of the idea of
  development
• 2) The implications of these ideas for
  development practice
• 3) How scholars like Weber and Geertz have
  theorised the relationship between economic and
  social change

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Three questions to consider

• 1) What is the relationship between economic and
  cultural change?
• 2) Is economic development a consequence of
  cultural change?
• 3) Is cultural change a consequence of economic
  development?

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Images of Tanzania c.1967
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Tanzania
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Images c. 2002, 2006
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The Nationalist newspaper, 26 February 1968
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• It is imperative, I repeat again imperative that
  all Maasai in your divisions be ordered that they
  are not to be seen wandering about naked but that
  they should instead wear normal clothes like
  other citizens.
• (Letter from the Hadeni Area
  Commissioner, 1968)

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Uhuru newspaper, 17 July 1969
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• Its 1964 for everybody in the world, including
  the Maasai, and the pressure for all to live in
  1964, including the Maasai is fantastic. Today
  the standard of living in the USA is part of
  Tanganyika. Sometimes I wish I could put
  Tanganyika on another planet. Then we could give
  it a hundred years to catch up. But we cant do
  that, we cant isolate ourselves.

President Julius Nyerere
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• You must reject in total to be equated with wild
  animals, and you must discard the habit of
  wearing red ochre. We preserve wild animals for
  the tourist industry, but that cannot be with
  human beings. You must progress and develop as
  your fellow compatriots in the rest of the
  country.
• (11 Sept 1968)

President Julius Nyerere
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• The African elite who took power embraced the
  modernist narrative with its agenda of progress.
  For them, the Maasai represented all they had
  tried to leave behind, and persisted as icons of
  the primitive, the savage, the past.
• (Hodgson, 1999225
• in The Poor are Not Us)

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Letters to the Editor, 1968

• Every tribe has or had its customs more or less
  like those of the Maasai. But since other tribes
  were quick to see the modernizing torch before
  them, they discarded them.
• Nationalist, 22 February 1968
• At one time the Europeans were also dressed as
  the Maasais now.
• The Standard, 22 October 1968

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Reactions Comments

• The issue of the Maasai dress bears very much on
  our avowed goals of human equality (in any sense
  you take it), human dignity and respect for all
  men.
• B.B. Mbakileki, University of Dar es Salaam,
  reported 17 Feb 1968
• The Maasai must be developed and not left to
  museum pieces. They are human beings and are
  fully entitled to development like any other
  tribe in Kenya.
• Reaction of Kenyan Parliamentarian,
  reported 2 Mar 1968

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• Ideas of leaving the Maasai to remain in their
  present stage of development were of foreigners
  who wished to see the Maasai look funny so that
  they could take their pictures.
• (Nationalist newspaper February 1968)

President Julius Nyerere
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Development as universal progress
Developed Modern Clothed Rich Industrial

• Undeveloped
• Traditional
• Unclothed
• Poor
• Pre-industrial

Maasai
Tanzanian
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Reference

• Schneider, Leander. 2006. The Maasais New
  Clothes A Developmentalist Modernity and its
  Exclusions. Africa Today 53(1)101-129.

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(No Transcript)
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The Enlightenment

• A set of interconnected ideas, values,
  principles, and facts which provide both an image
  of the natural and social world, and a way of
  thinking about it.
• (P. Hamilton, 199221
• in Formations of Modernity)

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The Enlightenment

• The Enlightenment view, common in Europe in the
  eighteenth century, was that there was a process
  of unilinear, historical self-development of
  humanity, which all societies would pass through,
  and in which Europe played the central, universal
  role because it was the highest point of
  civilization or cultured human development.
• (Bocock, 1992232)

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Hot Trends of the Enlightenment

• Reason
• Empiricism
• Science
• Universalism
• Progress

• Individualism
• Secularism
• Toleration
• Uniformity of Human Nature
• Freedom

Adapted from Scheh and Haggis (2000) Culture
Development A Critical Introduction
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Development Hierarchy

• Modernisation theory (we have the technology)
• Underdevelopment theory (we have the power/wealth
  and use it to underdevelop)
• Participation (we teach the poor to reflect on
  their problems and devise strategies to improve
  their position)
• In all 3 cases we have or know something the
  poor do not!

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Progress

• With a few temporary deviations, all societies
  are advancing naturally and consistently up, on
  a route form poverty, barbarism, despotism and
  ignorance to riches, civilization, democracy and
  rationality, the highest expression of which is
  science.
• (Teodor Shanin, 1997)

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Three questions to consider (again)

• 1) What is the relationship between economic and
  cultural change?
• 2) Is economic development a consequence of
  cultural change?
• 3) Is cultural change a consequence of economic
  development?

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Godfathers of Modern Social Theory?

• Marx
• Capitalism, exploitation and labour theory of
  value
• Political economy
• Durkheim
• Industrialisation, division of labour, and move
  from mechanical to organic solidarity
• Sociology
• Weber
• Rationality and capitalism
• Cultural

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Max Weber (1864-1920)
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Sociology of social action

• Four kinds of social action
• 1) Rational goals pursued through rational means
• 2) Non-rational goals pursued through rational
  means
• 3) Affective actions
• 4) Traditional actions

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Rational goals, rational action

• Science (physics, biology, chemistry)
• Art (system of notation in music, perspective)
• Society (legal system)
• Economy (capitalism and the pursuit of wealth
  through means-ends rationality)

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Capitalism as Rational Action

• Where capitalistic acquisition is rationally
  pursued, the corresponding action is adjusted to
  calculations in terms of capital. This means that
  the action is adapted to a systematic utilisation
  of goods or personal services as means of
  acquisition in such a way that, at the close of a
  business period, the balance of the enterprise in
  money assetsexceeds the capital.
• (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
  Capitalism, 1904)

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904)

• What is the (cultural) origin of sober,
  bourgeois capitalism?
• Peculiar rationalism of Western culture
• Rational ethic of ascetic Protestantism
• Predestination
• Success is proof of chosen status

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Key questions

• What qualities must a society, a group, or people
  possess in order to progress? Does a particular
  cultural ethic have to be in place in order for
  economic development to occur?
• What political and cultural changes lead to rapid
  development?
• Does cultural change have to precede economic
  change?

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Peddlers and Princes, 1963
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Per capita income

• Allows us to measure development
• Makes meaningful comparison easy

• Obscures internal differences
• Cannot reveal underlying social and cultural
  transformations behind change

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Peddlers and Princes (Geertz 1963)

• The years since 1945, and in fact since about
  1920, have seen the beginnings of a fundamental
  transformation in social values and institutions
  towards patterns we generally associate with a
  developed economy, even though actual progress
  toward the creation of such an economy has been
  slight and sporadic at best. Alterations in the
  system of social stratification, in world view
  and ethos, in political and economic
  organization, in education, and even in family
  structure have occurred over a wide section of
  society. Many of the changes the
  commercialisation of agriculture, the formation
  of non-familial business concerns, the heightened
  prestige of technical skills versus religious and
  aesthetic ones- which more or less immediately
  preceded take-off in the West have also begun to
  appear, and industrialisation, in quite explicit
  terms, has become one of the primary political
  goals of the country as a whole.

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Questions to Consider

• What political and cultural changes are taking
  place in the country that lead to rapid
  development?
• When is critical mass reached so that take-off
  actually occurs?

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Indonesia
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Modjokuto a Javanese market town

• Plantation economy
• High levels of immigration
• Commercial hyperactivity

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Tabanan a Balinese court town

• Historical importance of nobility
• Sharp spatial divisions reflect social hierarchy
• Farmers
• Less market oriented than Modjokuto
• No mass political movements

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Cultural Precedents for Economic Development

• entrepreneurship occurs in a well defined
  social/cultural group
• the innovative group emerges out of a larger
  traditional group with an extra-local outlook
• the group experiences rapid and radical change as
  part of its relationship with the wider society
• the entrepreneurial group considers itself as a
  locus of religious and/or moral excellence
• the innovative group faces organisational rather
  than technical problems how to use
  technology/rationality in an effective and more
  efficient way
• role of entrepreneurial group is to adapt
  well-established means to new ends they operate
  in both the traditional, customary world and the
  world of economic rationality

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Summary

• Specific cultural ideas and conditions need to be
  in place for economic take off to occur
• Weber saw Protestant ethic as exemplary of
  required rationality
• Geertz borrows and adapts Webers basic premise
  to the case of Java and Bali
• Required ethic not exclusively Protestant?