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Escobar's alternative:

a cultural politics that start with peasants' self-understanding

and an autonomous development strategy

that builds upon their strengths and their possibilities.

The strategy should focus on:

a. alternatives to development,

b. hybridisation,

c. a non-Eurocentric, post-development regime

To post-development there are romantic and nostalgic strands: reverence for community, Gemeinschaft, the traditional.. There is a strand of equating poverty with purity and the indigenous and local with the original and authentic.. Post-development's programme is one of resistance rather than emancipation. (Pieterse, 1998: 361)

Post-development theory is guilty of homogenising the

idea of development.. [It] is reluctant to suggest concrete

political alternatives. (Kiely, 1999: 30)

Escobar strikes back

[It] arises out of their unwillingness to accept the post-structuralist insight about the importance of language and meaning in the creation of reality.

We did not try to represent the real, this was everybody else's project, and part of the problem from the post-development perspective. (2000: 2)

Involvement in prescribing better development can only serve the interests of those in power.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos + World Social Forum:

No global social justice without global cognitive justice.

Neo-liberal globalisation... owes its hegemony to the credible way in which it discredits all rival knowledges, by suggesting that they are not comparable, in terms of efficiency and coherence, to the scientificity of the market laws. (de Sousa Santos, 2006: 14)

Modes of production of non-existence:

1. Monoculture of knowledge

2. Monoculture of linear time

3. Monoculture of classification

4. Monoculture of the universal and the global

5. Monoculture of criteria of capitalist productivity and efficiency

Sociology of Emergences:

aims to identify and enlarge the signs of possible future esperiences, which are actively ignored by hegemonic rationality and knowledge.

Monocultures should be replaced by ecologies.

1. Ecology of knowledges

2. Ecology of temporalities

3. Ecology of recognition

4. Ecology of trans-scales

5. Ecology of productivity

Buen Vivir = a different knowledge acknowledged?

Some warn that the real agenda of such policies is a re-colonization of lands-territories and their natural resources by means of new programmes of education, research, and development..

  • another discursive tool?
  • functional to the State with little significance for real intercultural transformation
  • meaning and orientation of development are still conceived by the state (Walsh, 2010)

1. Discourse of development does produce the Third World

2. Discourse of development does NOT produce the Third World

3. McD option gives hope beyond the post-development critique.

Now let's discuss again!

Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (McD :)

The main lines of world power today... the large

majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are precisely the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power..

The relationship between the European culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination. It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures.. This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated. (Quijano, 2007: 168)

The belief that knowledge of French technique enables cooks to prepare any world cuisine is based on the assumption that other

cuisines lack their own techniques or that such techniques are expendable. Academics, cooks and diners alike seem resistant to revise the myth of the superiority of French cuisine. (Janer, 2007: 392)

But instead of creating a truly universal and constraint-free cuisine, the French created a cuisine driven by the need for efficiency in the restaurant kitchen. By limiting the number of dishes and creating a system in which many steps can be performed ahead of time,.. a very exportable and learnable cuisine was created. The system of French cuisine is ironically in a continuum with the system of fast food restaurants. The success of both has more to do with ease of production and predictability than with taste. (Janer, 2007: 394)

Caribbean eating patterns were to some extent determined by what slaves were able and willing to produce. Fruits and vegetables were understandably more common than seafood given that slaves had limited access to the sea which would have provided them with opportunities to escape. This would explain why a great number of traditional Caribbean dishes feature salt cod, which was standard food in the transatlantic voyage and part of the ration, rather than fresh fish.

Salt cod fritters are popular in all the islands although with different names: accra in Trinidad, codfish cakes in Barbados, stamp and go in Jamaica, bacalaitos in Puerto Rico, acrats de morue in Martinique and Guadalupe, and marinades in Haiti. (Janer, 2007: 398-400)

Said and Orientalism

the West (Occident) produced & codified knowledge about the East (Orient)

the West and the East depicted as binaries

the construction of other = imperialist device to justify colonialism

Orientalism helped the West to define themselves

as contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience...

and in the same time to claim superiority upon the inferior East.

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

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.

The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources, which we can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples, are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.

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. And, in cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing development.

Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to lighten their burdens.

The statement exemplied 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. (Escobar, 1995: 4)

To think of development -- of any kind of development -- requires first the perception of themselves as underdeveloped, with the whole burden of connotations that this carries.

(Esteva, 1992: 7)

For 2/3 of people on earth, this positive meaning of the word development is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.

(Esteva, 1992: 10)

The creation of the Third World:

1. Identification

2. Professionalisation

3. Institutionalisation

Foucault and Power/Knowledge

knowledge = integral part of struggles over power

in producing knowledge, one was also making a claim for power

imbalances of power relation --> production of knowledge.

Discourse?

- a system of meanings

- a formalised way of thinking manifested through language

- has the power to create, influence, shape reality

Influence:

Michel Foucault in dynamics of discourse and relationship of power and knowledge;

Edward Said's critiques about Orientalism and Eurocentric thoughts.

Time for discussion :)

1. Disqualified knowledge that should be acknowledged

2. Acknowledged knowledge which should be disqualified

Arturo Escobar (1995) says so:

Discourses of development produces the Third World...

By contrasting its people as poor, ignorant, overpopulated, thus in need of development.

By linking the knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention.

Post-development - 15 mins

Discussion - 10 mins x 2

Presentation of discussion - 5 min x 2

Break - 5 min

Video - 8 min

Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality - 12 min

Discussion - 10 mins x 3

Presentation of discussion - 5 min x 3

Recap & feedback - 5 min

Does Development Produce The Third World?

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