Cultural Perspectives on Development 9780714643373, 9781315831633

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: A Cultural Perspective on Development
Cultural Globalisation: Placing and Displacing the West
Beyond Development: An Islamic Perspective
Development Theory and the Politics of Location: An Example from North Eastern Brazil
‘Cultures of Land’ in the Caribbean: A Contribution to the Debate on Development and Culture
Gender, Culture and Development: A South African Experience
Health, Medicine and Development: A Field of Cultural Struggle

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CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENT

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Cultural Perspectives on Development edited by

VINCENT TUCKER

in association with The European Association o f Development Research and Training Institutes (EA D I), Geneva

First Published in 1997 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1997 Taylor & Francis Reprinted 2002 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-714-64337-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-315-83163-3 (eISBN) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on ‘Cultural Perspectives on Development’ of the European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 8, No.2, December 1996 published by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher Typeset by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Contents Introduction: A Cultural Perspective on Development

Vincent Tucker

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Cultural Globalisation: Placing and Displacing the West

John Tomlinson

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Beyond Development: An Islamic Perspective

Ziauddin Sardar

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Development Theory and the Politics o f Location: An Example from North Eastern Brazil

Jane L. Collins

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‘Cultures o f Land’ in the Caribbean: A Contribution to the Debate on Development and Culture

Tracey Skelton

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Gender, Culture and Development: G. Honor Fagan, A South African Experience Ronaldo Munck and Kathy Nadasen

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Health, Medicine and Development: A Field of Cultural Struggle

Vincent Tucker 110

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Introduction: A Cultural Perspective on Development VINCENT TUCKER Development workers and theorists alike are turning towards culture in an attempt to go beyond the current malaise in development thinking and practice. Yet the admonition that more attention needs to be devoted to culture is rarely accompanied by theoretical precision or methodological considerations. Culture means many different things to different people and the concept is widely used in ways that are unclear and imprecise. It denotes both everything and nothing. It appears stripped of all content and yet is seen as determining everything. Disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies have grown up around it and a UN agency, UNESCO, has responsibility for the cultural dimension of development. For some it is a residual notion referring to arts, crafts, music, and literature which add ‘local colour’ to an otherwise global process. As such it is the icing on the cake, worthy of attention only when people have been fed, housed, clothed and integrated into modem social and political institutions. For others the cultural turn in development is a distraction from what really counts - the economy. More than a decade ago Peter Worsley [1984] introduced culture as the ‘missing concept’ in development thinking and provided a useful but preliminary assessment of the various ways in which the concept was used. Amin [1989] uses culture to extend his modes of production analysis and to challenge the Eurocentrism of development studies. Verhelst [1990] identified culture as the ‘forgotten dimension’ in development practice. A previous edition of this journal examined the relationship between popular culture and development focusing particularly on the theme of modernity [Lehmann, 1990]. Theories of post-modernism, post-colonialism and globalisation are all manifestations of the cultural turn, challenging both conventional and radical development paradigms and, in some cases, threatening to dissolve further the terrain of development studies. Dirlik [1994: 329], for example, argues that ‘postcolonialism claims as its special provenance the terrain that in an earlier day used to go by the name of “Third World’” . For theorists of globalisation Vincent Tucker, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland and a Coordinator of the Postgraduate Programme in Irish and World Development; e-mail: [email protected]. He wishes to thank Jane Collins, Kathy Glavanis, Cristobal Kay, Kieran Keohane, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, David Slater and John Tomlinson for their helpful comments on various drafts of this contribution.

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‘global culture’ is the dominant concern and their approach often resembles a cultural version of world systems theory. Anthropologists, by contrast, have tended to equate culture with the ‘local’ and to specialise in the study of small scale societies. In the wake of the crisis in grand scale theorising many development theorists and practitioners are now also turning to the local in search of alternative developments. However, as Nederveen Pieterse [1995] has pointed out, while the culture and development debate may offer a corrective to a development discourse steeped in Eurocentrism the cure is not to adopt an inverse missionary position and espouse the chauvinism of local cultures. ‘What is needed’, he argues ‘is a fine sense of balance that does not yield to futures mapped from above nor to nostalgia for the rear exit, but a new sense of balance between universalism and localism’ [1995: 190]. What then we might ask, does cultural analysis have to offer development studies? Is culture a new paradigm for the study of development or a mine field of theoretical confusion? Is it a distraction from the more substantial concerns of economics and politics or can we develop a form of cultural analysis and a set of analytical tools which compliment those of political economy? Can we move beyond notions of ‘global culture’ and ‘local culture’ to a more refined notion of cultural processes? Can it help us address the current malaise in development? If our response is not to be a simple matter of ‘add culture and stir’ [Nederveen Pieterse, 1995: 184] then we must address two tasks, one epistemological and the other methodological. We need a more conceptually refined notion of culture and we must also address the methodological issues implied by the introduction of cultural analysis to the study of development. This collection of articles addresses these issues, illustrating a diversity of approaches. Two themes in particular run through the articles; the relationship between culture and political economy and the relationship between local and global processes. Several of the essays address the task of combining political economy perspectives and cultural analysis. They do this by addressing particular issues such as conflict over land in the Caribbean (see Skelton, this volume), gender relations in a South African township (see Fagan, Munck and Nadasen, this volume), the labour market in Northern Brazil (see Collins, this volume), and the Transnational Pharmaceutical Industry (see Tucker, this volume). In each case the authors address the methodological problems involved in combining structural analysis, which situates the social actors within political and economic contexts, both local and global, and cultural analysis. Two of the studies, Fagan et al. and Skelton, make extensive use of ethnographic methodology, emphasising the voices and perspectives of those usually considered to be the ‘recipients’ of development. Collins and Tucker caution against the pitfalls of the current tendency to look to the local or the ‘grassroots’ as the site of authentic development. In her case study of largescale irrigation in Brazil Collins explores both class differentiation and

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external forces and asks ‘how does one speak straightforwardly about the local in such a context?’. Tucker further explores the question of global-local relations and proposes a methodology for studying the relationship between global actors such as Transnational Pharmaceutical companies and other actors both local and global. Recent attempts to introduce culture into development theory and practice are motivated by an attempt to move away from the ethnocentrism which characterises much development thinking. When we speak of culture we draw attention to differences, to ethnicity, to community, to identity, to local diversity and to conflicts around these. Skelton suggests, that to admit culture into development is to contribute to ongoing critiques of development. It is to begin to question or problematise approaches which have long held sway in development thinking and practice. Sardar (this volume), writing from an Islamic perspective, goes beyond much of the current critiques1 and provides a trenchant and challenging critique dismissing development as ‘the imposition of western values in the guise of a discipline’. Sardar argues that ‘substitutes for the idea of development will come from the effort and struggles each civilisation undertakes to define its own identity in terms of its own notions and categories’. He then outlines new concepts and ways of thinking emerging from the Islamic world. Tomlinson (this volume) challenges the notion of global cultural imperialism, and the pessimistic narrative accompanying it which we often find in radical critiques of development. He argues that ‘Westernisation’ is not an indivisible package; it needs unpacking if we are to avoid Occidentalism. Both these articles pose the need to begin theorising the distinction between global capitalism and westernisation, a task which once again confronts us with the question of the relationship between culture and political economy. All the articles pose questions about the meaning of development. TH E M E A N IN G O F D E V E L O P M E N T

Cultural analysis focuses our attention on the meaning of development. In his introduction to the Development Dictionary Wolfgang Sachs argues that ... development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavor; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, a fantasy which unleashes passions. Perceptions, myths and fantasies, however, rise and fall independent of empirical results and rational conclusions; they appear and vanish, not because they are proven right or wrong, but rather because they are pregnant with promise or become irrelevant [Sachs, 1993: 2]. Economists and politicians rarely ask themselves about the meaning of development. It appears self evident to them that development is about

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economic growth, efficiency, increased production and consumption. This is the thinking that dominates development practice, development policy and also ‘development studies’. It is institutionalised in the discourses of powerful global agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF as well as in the programmes and knowledge systems of USAID, EC programmes and a plethora of NGOs. Underlying this vision is an implicit belief that all peoples share the same destiny, that they are essentially oriented towards the maximisation of material and social goods, and that this is what ultimately motivates them. On the social and political front development is about the creation or transfer of institutions which are conducive to and support the economic processes and ‘democracy’. The goals of development are taken as given. It follows from this that development work has emerged largely as a rather pragmatic art of development management. Engaged in urgent practical matters policy makers and development practitioners in governments and international agencies, felt little need to question these basic assumptions. The meaning of development could be taken for granted. From the perspective of cultural analysis the meaning of development cannot be taken for granted. Without consideration of culture, which essentially has to do with people’s control over their destinies, their ability to name the world in a way which reflects their particular experience, development is simply a global process of social engineering whereby the economically and militarily more powerful control, dominate, and shape the lives of others for their purposes. Where people’s beliefs, ideas, meanings and feelings - in a word their culture - are not taken into consideration and respected we cannot speak of human development. Development does not mean the same thing for the director of the International Monetary Fund as for a Zambian worker who has had his wages reduced and currency devalued; it does not mean the same for an Iranian Muslim as for an employee of USAID; nor for a Tibetan monk and a Peking government official. Clearly development is more than the simple transference of economic, political and technological processes from one part of the world called ‘developed’ to other parts of the world called ‘underdeveloped’. From a cultural perspective we must consider people’s values, ideas, and beliefs, their identity and feelings, how they view the world and their place in it, and what is meaningful to them. Sardar (this volume), quoting Idiris, points out that ‘development is the pursuit of meaning in an individual’s life as well as the pursuit of material benefits ... the two go hand in hand’. From a cultural perspective development has to do with what is most essentially human. Radical development theorists have also failed to address the meaning of development. Dependency theory constituted a major ‘Third World’ challenge to modernisation theory in both its capitalist and Marxist variants and exposed the ideology of developmentalism which masked processes of domination and

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exploitation. But despite the considerable differences between capitalist ideologues and M arxist critics they nevertheless shared a concept of development as manifest destiny. The radical critics failed to question the normative and metatheoretical underpinnings of their world view [Booth, 1985; Sklair, 1988; Corbridge, 1990]. They restricted their analyses to the economic sphere and, like those whom they criticised, they did not critically question the meaning of development.2 The discussion was confined to a debate concerning means but not the ends. For dependency theorists development had failed, not because its goals and fundamental assumptions were misguided, but because certain regions of the world had been excluded and the benefits of economic growth and increased production and consumption have not been extended to them. The Eurocentrism of development thinking, the Americanisation of modernisation theory, and the Latin Americanisation of dependency theory have tended to result in a body of development theory which is relatively culturally specific, or at least manifests a certain cultural homogeneity. It is significant that dependency theory has never achieved the level of importance in Asia and the Middle East that it achieved in Latin America. The Middle East was acutely concerned with protecting its cultural heritage from militant westernisation. It is for this reason that in significant areas of the Middle East the project of development and modernity has not only been resisted but reversed. Sardar (this volume) argues that development like ‘all social science disciplines are cultural constructions of western civilization and have virtually no meaning or relevance for Muslim societies’. Islam has become one powerful symbol of resistance and the assertion and reassertion of Islamic beliefs has been the medium for expressing and defending identity, authenticity, and dignity. Development theories, whether of the conventional or radical sort have failed to come to terms with this phenomenon and have tended to dismiss it as a regrettable return to ‘traditionalism’ or a regressive form of sacralisation. The assumed superiority of European and American-originated discourses of development and modernisation poses important questions with regard to the power relations involved in the production of knowledge and meanings. The work of Escobar [1984; 1995], who applies Foucauldian discourse analysis to the field of development, is particularly significant here. By analysing development in terms of discourse it becomes possible to retain the focus on domination which is central to Neo-Marxian dependency type analyses but yet expand the analysis to take account of the more persuasive effects of development, that is, the culture of development [Escobar, 1995: 5]. As with economic processes the world of knowledge production is also divided into centres and peripheries. Social scientists such as anthropologists, economists, sociologists and others tend to regard the theoretical knowledge

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which they produce as universally valid while regarding other forms of knowledge as ‘traditional’, local, limited and deficient. Non-western knowledge systems cannot aspire to global relevance, or they may be regarded as a threat if they so aspire. Writing of anthropology, but also referring to the social sciences in general, Moore argues that this is a ... feature of the dominance of western theorising in a variety of disciplines and of the structuring of the academy along the fracture lines of centre-periphery politico-economic relations. Anthropologists from the developing world, for example, may produce theoretically innovative work, but if they claim that it draws on theoretical traditions outside mainstream western social science, they are likely to find that it will be denigrated as partial and/or localised. If they are critical of western social science, they may find that they are sidelined. Western social science consistently repositions itself as the originary point of comparative and generalising theory [Moore, 1996: 3]. This poses a problem for writers and theorists who write from other intellectual traditions, whether these be African philosophers, or Buddhist or Islamic writers. Where they traverse the boundaries of the established academic disciplines, and in particular where they fuse economics with theology or sociology with indigenous philosophy, their work is regarded as strange. Yet, as Escobar [1995: 15] argues, the lack of attention ‘on the part of Western scholars to the sizeable an impassioned critical literature by Third World intellectuals’ and to the ‘number of Third World voices calling for a dismantling of the entire discourse of development’ is disturbing. Some of the most challenging contemporary work on the meaning of development is being done by African philosophers and theologians,3psychotherapists such as Ashis Nandy [1983; 1987] in India and Durre Ahmed [1994] in Pakistan, Fatima Memissi in Morocco [1993] and by Ziauddin Sardar [1977; 1985], who mixes science, economics and theology. It is for this reason that Sardar’s critique of development and of western social science, in this volume, is so challenging. Yet these critiques often thread a thin line between Occidentalism and the tendency to essentialise African, Asian or Middle Eastern perspectives as simple reversals of European and American stereotypes. The dangers and ambiguities of appealing to ‘African Tradition’ are clearly evident in the discussion of the custom of bridewealth or lobola in the paper by Fagan, Munck and Nadasen (see this volume). When a people is stripped of its identity it is no longer capable of selfdetermination, they become subject peoples whose future and whose past is shaped by others, and whose projects, dreams, values and meanings are supplied by others. In the eyes of the developers their societies are stagnant and fossilised, incapable of self-directed development and portrayed as

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obstacles to development. Moreover since development is a normative concept it is also argued that this is for their own good. The world views of other peoples, the ways in which they relate to each other and to the environment, the meaning which they attribute to these relationships, their store of knowledge and wisdom, are all labelled as archaic and must be set aside in face of the economic and political wisdom of the self-proclaimed superior civilisations. Development, thus conceived, is compulsory. In the words of former Vice-President Alier of the Sudan, ‘We will drive them to paradise with a stick if necessary!’. From the perspective of conventional development discourses it is extremely difficult to conceive of other different world views as equally worthy of consideration, or of other ways of life as having equal value or providing fulfilment or satisfaction. As a result of this the lifeways of indigenous peoples throughout the world are under siege. The great diversity of human societies, of ways of solving problems, of creating meaningful existence, of organising human relations, of adapting to different environmental conditions, are threatened by development as conceived and implemented by powerful elites. None the less, as John Tomlinson argues in this volume, westernisation is not as complete or inevitable as it might seem. The resilience of peoples in face of invasive world economic, cultural and military systems must not be underestimated. The forms of this resistance are as diverse as the vast cultural repertoires which have been developed in the global variety of peoples, places and histories. Indeed if development is to be conceived of primarily in terms of the struggle for the control of destinies then the development of most of the peoples of the globe will be largely an account of the ways in which they resisted, manipulated, accommodated and adapted to forces impinging on them. It is this struggle for hegemony and counter hegemony, in which ‘development’ has become a contested site, that is the terrain of cultural analysis. To approach development from the perspective of cultural analysis is to ask questions about the meaning of development, about the production of knowledge, about who decides and who has the greater use of resources, coercive or persuasive, to make their version of reality stick. TH E F A L L A C Y O F M IS P L A C E D C O N C R E T E N E S S

Most writing about culture tends to regard it as a thing, or a collection of things. It is also regarded as a realm or ‘a dimension of development’ somehow distinct from social, economic and political processes. For others culture is everything. By culture is meant ... every aspect of life; know-how, technical knowledge, customs of food and dress, religion, mentality, values,

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language symbols, socio-political and economic behavior, indigenous methods of taking decisions and exercising power, methods of production and economic relations and so on [Verhelst, 1990: 17]. The tendency to reify culture is at the root of much of the conceptual and methodological confusion evident in the culture and development discourse. This leads to discussions of cultures as wholes, as in ‘African culture’, ‘Western C ulture’, ‘traditional cultures’ or ‘indigenous culture’. The anthropological tendency has been to regard culture as a whole and to link it to place. In this view culture is primarily local and, as Collins [1996] argues, the crisis of development studies has reinforced this tendency and has led many to look to the local as the site of authentic development. Globalisation theorists have also demonstrated holistic tendencies, treating global culture as a somewhat undifferentiated whole with lots of movement inside.4 These holistic metaphors which concentrate on ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ suggest vacuum-sealed worlds and leave us with rather blunt analytical tools. There is also a tendency, particularly amongst those writing from the perspective of Marxist political economy, to empty culture of all material content and then to dismiss cultural analysis because it does not pay sufficient attention to the domain of material forces [Roseberry, 1989: 41]. This tension between political economy and cultural analysis is in part due to the fact that culture is erroneously regarded as something ethereal or insubstantial by comparison with the material processes of economic production. Steeped in a realist tradition economists fail to see that economics is itself a cultural discourse [Escobar, 1995: 58]. But the economic and political transformation of a society is inseparable from the production and reproduction of meanings, symbols and knowledge, that is, cultural reproduction. The efficacy of development is rooted in a system of beliefs. We can no more understand the workings of modern capitalist society than we can the so-called ‘primitive’ societies such as the Mbuti Pygmies without understanding the power and potency of belief [Marglin and Marglin, 1990]. One illustration of this is Keynes’ account of the way belief mediates between profit and investment [Banuri, 1990]. Stock markets and money markets are notoriously sensitive to crises of confidence and losses of faith in political leaders. Moral concerns can also play a major role in shaping economic considerations. The reaction of Muslims in Bradford to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses disrupted international beef and oil markets and political relationships. The material has no necessary priority over the perceptual. It is precisely because we assume that belief is efficacious only in ‘traditional’ societies while ‘m odem ’ societies are governed by science, that we so assiduously delegitimise the myths of other societies while failing to deconstruct critically our own myths of development.

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A society is not only constituted by material things such as the territory it occupies, the objects it fashions and uses, and by the actions it performs but above all by its idea of itself - its social imaginary [Maffesoli, 1993: 5]. Cornelius Castoriadis [1987] refers to the underlying mode of interpretation which shapes how a society sees, experiences and shapes its own existence, its world and its relationship to these as the ‘social imaginary’ of a society. The social imaginary is constituted by a series of myths, images, legends, rituals and icons which have emotional as well as intellectual and moral content and play a central role in binding together and also driving or energising social life IHorne, 1994]. Gilbert Rist [1990] speaks of the myth of development as a symbolic engine which drives the socio-economic processes of a society. These constituents of a society’s social imaginary, while not reducible to the material, are nevertheless socially and historically constructed and can be analysed as such. At the root of much conceptual confusion regarding the relationship between culture and development is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Culture as a theoretical concept is regarded as having an objective reality whereas it is really a description of a process of knowing or a way of directing perception adopted by social scientists. Writing in 1958 anthropologist Gregory Bateson put the issue succinctly. If ‘ethos’, ‘social structure’, ‘economics’ etc. are words in that language which describes how scientists arrange data, then these words cannot be used to ‘explain’ phenomena, nor can they be ‘ethnological’ or ‘economic’ categories of phenomena. People can be influenced, of course, by economic theories or economic fallacies - or by hunger - but they cannot possibly be influenced by ‘economics’. ‘Economics’ is a class of explanations, not itself an explanation of anything [Bateson, 1958: 281]. It follows that there is no such thing as cultural data as distinct from economic or sociological data and when we leave behind the epistemological illusion of concreteness we are then better placed to integrate political economy analyses and cultural analysis. The task then is one of devising suitable conceptual and methodological tools for cultural analysis. The concept of culture steers our perception towards the cognitive dimension of experience; towards analysing how knowledge, meaning and understanding are constructed and communicated. It also draws our attention to emotional and moral experiences and concerns; to the ‘structures of feeling’ which have both individual and social or collective aspects; and towards the ways in which moral impulses and ways of understanding are constructed. These are concerns which have not received adequate attention in development studies although they have been of central concern to human needs and human

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rights discourses [Goulet, 1971; Max N eef 1991; Gasper, 1992]. Feminist writing on development has done much to bring concerns about the body, the emotions and the ‘subjective’ into development research. The article by Fagan, Munck and Nadasen in this issue focuses on these considerations and uses ethnographic methodology as a way of incorporating the feelings, concerns and strategies of poor women into a discussion of development in the new South Africa. These concerns will need to play a more central role in attempts at re-imagining development in a more inclusive way, and ethnography can furnish an important methodological tool for doing this. Ideas, meanings, images, consciousness and imagination are not purely internal psychological processes but are primarily public and visible. The visible world is shaped by ideas and imagination. They have a material dimension. Thinking takes place not just ‘inside people’s heads’ but on blackboards, computer monitors, in conversations, in dances, festivals, religious rituals and in all forms of social action and social conflict. Meanings and ideas are visible in landscapes, in buildings, in cities, in consumer products, in music, language, stories and in the structures of feeling of a society. Abstract notions such as private property are embodied in the patterns of enclosure surrounding fields and farms. Skelton (this volume) also uses an ethnographic approach to show how conflict over land is rooted in different universes of meaning; for families descended from slaves land was an integral part of their identity while for North American investors it was ‘a fine piece of real estate’. Cultural analysis is about the critical analysis of processes of meaning construction and deconstruction. The fundamental premise of cultural analysis is that reality is a social construct, it is not natural, given or self-evident. But reality is also multiple. There are diverse versions which converge and conflict with each other in a myriad of ways. Reality is thus not only constructed but contested and negotiated. Some ideas, meanings and ways of seeing predominate and others are submerged or marginalised. In the same way that we can talk of economic and political social cores marginalising or peripheralising other social units so also can we speak of dominant and marginal ways of seeing. In this section I have attempted to clear some of the conceptual fog in which the concept of culture has been enshrouded. I have proposed that culture is neither a thing nor a realm but rather a way of looking at things - a way of knowing - a form of analysis. Our task then becomes one of addressing the methodological challenges posed by cultural analysis, a challenge which includes devising eclectic multidimensional approaches to the study of development which combine cultural analysis with the more established tools of political economy.

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P R O B L E M A T IS IN G T H E L O C A L

Cultural analysis gives particular attention to the production of knowledge and the construction of meaning. Together with Sardar I have argued that development, as generally construed, is the imposition of a particular notion of human destiny on a global scale. It is the imposition of externally constructed meaning and values on a diversity of peoples and location. ‘Development’ poses as a form of globalised knowledge claiming universal validity over submerged and marginalised local forms of knowledge. But the hegemony of development in its present form is increasingly challenged by subaltern forms of knowledge and by counter hegemonic movements whose interests and goals are different from those agents and agencies who currently claim the right to define development. It is important, therefore, to find ways of incorporating those voices and points of view into the development discourses. Anthropologists more than other social scientists have always emphasised the actors’ point of view and their detailed knowledge of local situations was frequently used to challenge the global generalisations and universal claims of a Euro-American centred social science.5 Anthropologists have long been the specialists of the ‘local’. They developed a range of research methodologies such as ethnography, participant observation and ‘fieldwork’ which focused on ‘localities’ and face-to-face encounters, or what is now sometimes called ‘the lifeworld’. They specialised in qualitative research. Anthropologists produced very detailed monographs and attempted to enter the world of meaning of the people they studied. However, with a few notable exceptions, the theoretical and methodological significance of the global processes, which are present in every local situation, were not considered. Working with the blessings of the colonial powers they combined political expediency with a theory and methodology which focused on the ‘local’ in the form of ‘communities’, ‘tribes’ and ‘villages’ rather than on ‘external’ factors. Thus their predilection for turning spaces into places. Ethnographers and anthropologists often construct locality by un­ selfconsciously transform ing a strategic research strategy into an unproblematic notion of place. The notion of place, and its corollary localised pre-existing ‘com m unities’, is too readily taken for granted in much anthropological work and needs to be problematised. It is important that we distinguish between notions of space and place and explicitly address the processes through which space is constructed as place or locality [Gupta and Fergeson, 1992: 8], The construction of place is the result of a cultural process and is not always or necessarily attached to a discretely bounded space, such as ‘homelands’. But on what basis are boundaries drawn? [Clifford, 1992: 97]. Who is a ‘local’? Who decides? On what terms? Collins’ [1996] Brazilian case study shows that even apparently homogenous communities are riven by

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conflicts of interest and linked into national and international networks of commerce and power. The ‘global’ is in the ‘local’; transnational development organisations such as the World Bank can significantly shape the everyday life of peoples even in the most remote localities. In the transformation of space into place the physical landscape is written over with competing layers of historically constructed meaning. This is evident in Skelton’s essay in this volume on the ‘cultures of land’ in the Caribbean where notions of land as real estate compete with notions of land as linked to family and personal identities going back to the days of slavery. Notions of place and of imagined communities, whether in the form of nationalisms, ethnicities or peripheries, are often constructed through processes of resistance to perceived external forces of domination or invasion. James Clifford has argued that ethnography has privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel. Localizations of the anthropologist’s objects of study in terms of a ‘field’ tend to marginalise or erase several blurred boundary areas, historical realities that slip out of the ethnographic frame. Here is a partial list. (1) The means of transport is largely erased - the boat, the landrover, the mission aeroplane, etc. These technologies suggest systematic prior and ongoing contacts and commerce with exterior places and forces which are not part of the field/object. The discourse of ethnography ( ‘being there’) is too sharply separated from that of travel ( ‘getting there’). (2) The capital city, the national context is erased. This is what Georges Condominas has called the ‘preterrain’, all those places you have to go through and be in relation with just to get to your village or to that place of work you will call your field. (3) Also erased: the university home of the researcher ... the coming and going in and out of the field by both natives and anthropologists may be very frequent. (4) The sites and relations of translation are minimised [Clifford, 1992: 100]. But it is not just people who travel so do goods, commodities and media images which are also carriers and shapers of meaning and perception. Pharmaceutical medicines are one example of this (see Tucker in this volume). These questions pose both theoretical and methodological problems for ethnography. Everyday life is now lived out globally, even by those who never travel in the literal sense but who have access to the wider world through television images, travellers’ tales, commodities, etc. Neither history not culture can any longer be wrapped up into neat ethnographic packages, it can no longer claim unproblematically to be a portrait ‘from life’ as ethnography did in the past [Fox, 1991: 95]. This is not to say that intensive studies in particular locations are no longer valuable. Some strategy for approaching questions of location is essential in

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any ethnographic study. Collins’ politics of location is a very good example of how one can do ‘local’ studies - studies which are situated in a particular place but are fully cognisant of the powerful forces impinging on it whether in the form of transnational corporations or the state. She also eschews the populism which often characterises community or ‘grassroots’ studies by analysing the internal class differentiation and the conflicts of interests among different classes. Approached in this way local communities are ‘not pristine repositories of authentic tradition’ nor is ‘culture stored and protected in local communities’ (see Collins in this volume). We cannot do such studies without explicitly and critically interrogating our theoretical and methodological conventions. In this respect I wish to argue that the question of our commitment or stance becomes more important than, and will determine, our approach to location. We must abandon the stance of the objective outsider and recognise with Geertz that we don’t study villages, we study in villages. The conventional approach whereby holistic pictures of ‘village culture’ were produced are no longer credible. All studies are necessarily selective. We do not study villages or communities we study in villages with particular problems or questions in mind. We must face the question of why we are doing a particular study in a particular location or set of locations. The question of perspective must be confronted more directly and explicitly. Where do we stand? This is a political problem and it poses questions of commitment. For whom are we producing knowledge? How will it be used? The problem of ‘fieldwork’, a notion which signifies a discrete place or field, must also be problematised. Ethnography is generally more explicit about specifying a physical location, a village, community, a valley or a barrio in place of an intellectual or a political position [Fox, 1991: 96]. Where we place ourselves is a function of questions we wish to ask - the problems we wish to research, and the point of view from which we wish to research them. Laura Nader [1974] challenged anthropologists to ‘study up’ instead of ‘studying down’. By studying up she proposed that we produce ethnographic studies of government agencies, corporations and macro level social organisations, those sites which in development studies are referred to as the level of the global or of the world system. There is a challenge here for development studies. Can we produce ethnographies of the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO, NGOs, transnational corporations, development studies associations and centres of ‘development’ research? How do they imagine ‘development’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘development work’ or ‘development studies’? What are the dominant discourses and paradigms, and the emergent or ‘alternative’ discourses? What are the myths, legends, icons, rituals that shape the social production of ‘development’? Can development studies switch from ‘studying down’ to ‘studying up’? Can theories of globalisation

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and the tools of cultural analysis help us in this task? In this situation the slogan, ‘Act locally, think globally’, is suggestive. G L O B A L IS A T IO N : A D D R E S S I N G TH E W ID E R P IC T U R E

The notion of the global directs our attention to the wider picture and provides a corrective to overly bounded notions of locality. The local and the global are not separate spheres but rather they represent different but complementary perspectives. Here also the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is a persistent pitfall and as with notions of ‘culture’ and ‘local’ we must resist the temptation to reify ‘the global’. The notion of the global entered popular imagination in the 1960s when Marshall McLuhan [1964] spoke of a ‘global village’. Photos of the earth as a globe taken from space further reinforced this imaginary construction. The notion of the world as ‘one place’ became thinkable. On a more theoretical front the idea of the global has long been central to sociology and was a key component of M arx’s theory of modernity [Waters, 1995]. For Marx capitalism made world history for the first time. It is from M arx’s account of capitalism as a global economic process that later models of world systems emerged. Turner [1990] has argued that the apparently modern question of globalisation had its precursor in notions of ‘the world’ as found in the theology of Abrahamic faiths. Laclau makes a similar point in referring to the ‘necessary logic of history’ so central to modernity as having first emerged in theological garb [Laclau, 1992: 56]. Marxism secularised the notion of ‘the world’ but in the transition from escathology to teleology the underlying normative tendencies and the notion of manifest destiny remained. Weber added a further strand to theories of globalisation. M arx’s version of Hegel’s view of the world was a strange combination of a global vision with a distinctive Orientalist perspective on the origins of rational capitalism. In this regard, there is little to separate M arx’s account of capitalist accumulation in the West from Weber’s perspective on the revolutionary force of Western rational capitalism in the General Economic History [Turner, 1990: 353]. The notion of global capital and its close relative global modernity thus came to constitute the major pillars of sociological analysis. Parsons would later turn this theory of social evolution into the paradigm of culture change which underpinned modernisation theorising. Rostow’s [7960] economic version of modernisation expounded in his Stages o f Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto was an influential American variant of M arx’s theory of modernity. It is almost identical with the notion ‘Westernisation’, itself a rather loose term with associations of global expansion from a central place. While modernisation theory was displaced by world systems theory,

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globalisation has been seen as the return of modernisation by another door [Nederveen Pieterse, 1995]. For Tomlinson [1991: 175] ‘globalisation’ replaces ‘imperialism’. Globalisation theorists draw our attention to the realm of relationships which, in the words of Appadurai [1990: 1], make ‘the modern world’ into an ‘interactive system in a sense that is strikingly new’. World systems theory, drawing on Marx’s notion of global capital, was the first explicit theory of globalisation. Using theoretical tools from economics and sociology it proposed a paradigm of globalisation which was influential within the social sciences until the recently diagnosed ‘impasse’ [Booth, 1985; Sklair, 1988; Corbridge, 1990; Schuurman, 1993]. Globalisation theorists such as Appadurai [1990: 8] have expanded this paradigm beyond the economic and political processes by proposing a range of concepts such as ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘financescapes’, ‘mediascapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’, the latter referring to ideologies, whether state ideologies, or ideologies of ‘democracy’, ‘rights’, and ‘sovereignty’. Yet we must remember that there is no such place as the global. Much globalisation theorising is plagued by metaphors of space. There is no disconnected global sphere floating above or outside ‘local’, ‘traditional’, or ‘indigenous’ societies. Globalisation is another quasi-geographical metaphor which needs to be unpacked. Our closest approximations to imaginary notions of the global are international airport lounges and shopping malls, spaces which a recent anthropological study refers to as ‘non-places’ [Auge, 1995]. Yet notions such as ‘the crystallisation of the entire world as a single place’ [Robertson, 1987a: 3S], the ‘global human condition’ [Robertson, 1987b: 23], ‘world culture’ or ‘world society’ are compelling images which can mobilise significant emotional, moral and intellectual commitment.6 But despite the totalising and deterministic tendencies of global theories they nevertheless point to phenomena which must be considered in studies of social change. Theories of dependency and world systems were significant in that they emphasised the impact of global processes on particular regions, thus generating a paradigm which inspired a whole series of studies. These approaches were important in drawing attention to the structures of ‘global capitalism’, although they generally failed to unpack this notion adequately. They were limited in that they were overly deterministic and functionalist and they focused almost exclusively on economic processes. Gereffi’s [1983] proposal, following Cardoso and Faletto [1979], that we use the notion of situations of dependency as a methodological tool, as a strategic rather than a holistic notion (a point which I return to in my study of the pharmaceutical industry) was an important innovation and a way of unpacking ‘global capital’. This methodological shift is important as with the disappearance of a centre of capitalism the narrative of capitalism is no longer a narrative of the history of Europe [Dirlik, 1994: 350]1 and much of what is referred to as ‘global

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capitalism’ is heavily concentrated in corporations and banks. Under the rubric of world systems and globalisation these approaches draw our attention to the larger picture but they do not in themselves provide us with adequate conceptual or methodological tools to analyse the interpenetration of the lo c a l’ and the ‘global’.8 H Y B R ID IS A T IO N A N D G L O B A L M E L A N G E

The cultural turn in global theorising emerged in response to a crisis of understanding. The old models of centre-periphery, and even models which account for multiple centres and peripheries, failed to provide an adequate understanding of an increasingly jumbled up world, in which ‘Third Worlds’ have appeared in the ‘First World’ and ‘First Worlds’ in the ‘Third World’, and the Self is relocated here and the Other there [Dirlik, 1994: 352]. Theories of post-colonialism, post-modernism, globalisation and hybridisation emerged as attempts to respond to this crisis of understanding. Appadurai challenged the homogenising tendencies of some of the globalising arguments, whether in the form of Americanisation or McDonaldisation. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indiginized in one or another way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions ... But it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanisation, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indinization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic States [Appadurai, 1990: 328]. Appadurai [1990: 337] emphasises the disjunctures between different flows of cultural influence (ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes and ideoscapes) and argues that we need to move towards something like a human version of chaos theory ‘rather than the old images of order, stability and systemacity’. An array of new concepts such as ‘disjuncture’, ‘contingency’, ‘juxtaposition’, ‘creolisation’, ‘global melange’ and ‘hybridity’ have been coined to deal with the interpenetration of global processes and local situations. These terms disturb the certainties of place disrupting fixed notions of centre and periphery and subverting essentialisms and notions of homogeneity. Nederveen Pieterse asks: ‘How do we come to terms with phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls, Asian rap, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos, Mardi Gras Indians, or Mexican schoolgirls dressed in Greek togas dancing in the style of Isidora Duncan’ [Nederveen Pieterse, 1994: 8].

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The diffusion and mixing of traits is not a new phenomenon although it has been given new prominence by theories of postmodernism, postcolonialism and globalisation. Such juxtapositions were a central concern of British anthropologists working in Africa in the 1950s. This was particularly evident in urban situations in Southern Africa which had large and diverse migrant populations. Re-reading Clyde Mitchell’s Kalela Dance [1956] I was struck by how similar the puzzle posed for him by the juxtaposition of the modern and traditional, the urban and the tribal, is to that of contemporary post-colonialism or post-modernism. As he explains it: ‘ ... we are presented with an apparent paradox. The dance is clearly a tribal dance in which tribal differences are emphasised but the language and the idiom of the songs and the dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence which tends to submerge tribal differences’ [Mitchell, 1956: 9]. Like many contemporary post-modern and post-colonial analyses his functionalist approach was not sufficiently attuned to the question of power, in this instance colonial power. Traits do not simply travel and mix like some global cultural DNA; they are shaped by power relations which include political, military and economic imperatives. Cultural analysis must examine ‘the terms under which cultural interplay and crossover take place’ [Nederveen Pieterse, 1994: 9]. Hybridity and multiculturalism are shaped by economic imperatives and by power relations. Dirlik [1994: 335] argues that it is no longer Marxists, feminist radicals and ethnics who spearhead multiculturalism but business school administrators and the marketing managers of multinational corporations who ‘cannibalise cultures all over the world in order to better market their commodities’. Without consideration of the power relations which shape the outcomes, multiculturalism can become a cultural version of the free market. Much of the debate is plagued by generalisations and undifferentiated notions such as ‘global capitalism’ or ‘global culture’. The notion of hybridity was coined to redress the tendency to essentialise identity and place. The focus on bounded entities is replaced by a focus on the relational and on movement. Notions such as ‘global melange’, ‘hybridity’9 and ‘cultural interplay’ tend to focus on the artifacts of culture and in this sense are not too different from the old anthropological notion of the diffusion of traits. Moreover much of the debates are pitched at such a level of generality that they provide little insight into particular situations or problems. With reference to hybridity Ahmad suggests that the basic idea ... is simple enough, namely that the traffic among modern cultures is now so brisk that one can hardly speak of discrete national cultures that are not fundamentally transformed by the traffic. In its generality this idea can only be treated as a truism since generalisations of this order cannot in any sense be wrong [Ahmad, 1995: 13].

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If we are not to resort to notions of the global as some external process arriving like a ship from outside [Ortner, 1984: 143], or to global culture as a global soup, the theoretical debates need to be more firmly grounded in empirical studies of particular processes or sites. The need to complement the theoretical debates with theoretically inspired empirical studies does not mean a return to the local or to ‘community studies’ in the bounded sense. The older anthropological notions of social networks, social situations and situational analysis can be helpful here. A social situation is a site or situation (not necessarily in the spatial sense but nevertheless composed of locations) from which the interplay of economic, political and cultural processes can be observed and analysed. Four of the papers in this collection, Collins, Fagan et al., Skelton and Tucker are illustrative of this approach. The notion of network suggests the organic links constructed through distribution networks through which goods and commodities are channelled, personal and political networks, knowledge networks, and the constraints of power and distance which shape them. This is illustrated in my study of the knowledge networks and global pressure groups, groups which are simultaneously local and global, which were mobilised to challenge the Transnational Pharmaceutical Industry. Where we stand, how we situate ourselves in relation to a particular concern, will determine the sites which we choose. The challenge is one of how to do fieldwork in ways which come to terms with the interpenetration of processes without making the local some appendage of the global and without ignoring the centrality of relations of power in both its coercive and persuasive dimensions.

NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Wolfgang Sachs (ed.) [1993], Arturo Escobar [1995], Serge Latouche [1993], Ashis Nandy [1987] all provide radical critiques of development. It is also worth noting that many of the current critiques were presaged by the negritude movement in Paris in the decades between 1930 and 1950. See, for example Jacque Louis Hymans [1971]. Admittedly general statements like this do not do justice to the varieties and richness of theories of dependency, a point which has been well illustrated by Cristobal Kay [1989]. Nevertheless, I would argue that most dependency theorists did not address the meaning of development and tended to focus more on economic processes. My intention here, however, is not to add to the often facile rejection of dependency and world systems, perspectives, thus making way for the resurgence of theories of modernisation, but rather to revise and extend them by the addition of analyses of cultural dependency. See the debates in the African journal Quest, also Hountondji [1976\, Serequeberhan [1991] and Mudimbe [1988]. Ulf Hannerz [1990: 237], for example, speaks of a ‘world culture’ composed of ‘varied local cultures’ and ‘sub-cultures’. These are clearly holistic notions. Social geographers also give considerable emphasis to the importance of place. Used in this way the notion of the global shifts meaning and becomes a metaphor for ‘humanity’ or for the notion ‘one world’ which is a widely used normative metaphor in development studies. Dirlik [1994] argues that capitalism divorced from its historically specific origins in Europe has

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8. 9.

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now become reconciled with the so-called Confucian values of East Asian societies thus reversing the longstanding conviction in Europe that Confucianism was an obstacle to capitalism. This is evident, for example, in government ideology of the Singapore regime under Lee Kuan Yew. ‘It is noteworthy that what makes something like the East Asian Confucian revival possible is not its offer of alternative values to those of Euro-American origins but its articulation of native culture into a capitalist narrative’ [Dirlik, 1994: 350]. Samir Amin’s [1976] work on social formations was an attempt to conceptualise the way in which different modes of production interacted. Hybridity also refers to a type of subject or person - the post-colonial personality. These are persons who straddle different traditions, different ethnic backgrounds. They are sometimes referred to as ‘halfies’. The study of this phenomenon brings together insights from psychotherapy and cultural analysis. Much of this growing work has been inspired by the revival of the work of Franz Fanon. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [1991].

REFERENCES Abu-Lughold, Lila, 1991, ‘Writing Against Culture’, in Richard Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, School of American Research Press, New Mexico. Ahmad, Aijaz, 1995, ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’, Race and Class, Vol.36, No.3, pp. 1-20. Ahmed, Durre, S, 1994, Masculinity, Rationality and Religion: A Feminist Perspective, Lahore: ARS Publications. Amin, Samir, 1976, Unequal Development; An Essay on the Social Formations o f Peripheral Capitalism, London: Monthly Review Press. Amin, Samir, 1989, Eurocentrism, London: Zed Press. Appadurai, Arjun, 1990, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Auge, Marc, 1995, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology o f Supermodernity, London: Verso. Banuri, Tariq, 1990, ‘Development and the Politics of Knowledge: A Critical Interpretation of the Social Role of Modernisation Theories in the Development of the Third World’, in Marglin and Marglin [1990: 29-72]. Bateson, Gregory, 1958, Naven, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Booth, David, 1985, ‘Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse’, World Development, Vol. 13, No.7, pp.761-87. Cardoso, F.M. and E. Faletto, 1979, Dependency and Development in Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius, 1987, The Imaginary Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Clifford, James, 1992, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Lawrence Gossberg et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp.96-116. Corbridge, Stuart, 1990, ‘Post-Marxism and Development Studies: Beyond the Impasse’, World Development, Vol. 18, No.5., pp.623-39. Dirlik, Arif, 1994, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol.20, Winter, pp.328-56. Escobar, Arturo, 1984, ‘Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of His Work to the Third World’, Alternatives, Vol. 10, No.3, pp.377-400. Escobar, Arturo, 1995, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans, Peter, 1979, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State and Local Capital in Brazil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fox, Richard, 1991, ‘For a Nearly New Culture History’, in Richard Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, pp.93-114. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, 1991, ‘Critical Fanonism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, Spring, pp.457-70.

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Gasper, Des, 1992, ‘Development Ethics: An Emergent Field’, Working Paper No. 134, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Gereffi, G., 1983, The Pharmaceutical Industry and Dependency in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goulet, Denis, 1971, The Cruel Choice, New York: Atheneum. Gupta, Akhil and James Fergeson, 1992, ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.7, N o.l, pp.6-23. Hannerz, Ulf, 1990, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.7, Nos.2-3, pp.237-51. Home, David, 1994, The Public Culture: An Argument With the Future, London: Pluto Press. Hountondji, Paul, J., 1976, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Blooomington: Indiana University Press. Hymans, Jacque, Louis, 1971, Leopold Sedar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kay, Cristobal, 1989, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, London: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto, 1992, ‘God Only Knows’, Marxism Today, Dec. 1991/92, pp.56-9. Latouche, Serge, 1993, In the Wake o f the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development, London: Zed Books. Lehmann, David (ed.), 1990, ‘Modernity and Popular Culture’, The European Journal of Development Research, Vol.2, No.l, pp. 1-120. McLuhan, Marshall, 1964, Understanding Media, Toronto: Signet Books. Maffesoli, M., 1993, ‘Introduction to Special Issue on The Imaginary’, Current Sociology, Vol.41, No.2, pp. 1-5. Max Neef, Manfred, 1991, Human Scale Development, New York: Apex Press. Marglin, Frederique Apffel and Stephen Marglin, 1990, Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Memissi, Fatima, 1993, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, London: Virago. Mitchell, Clyde, 1956, The Kalela Dance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore, Henrietta (ed.), 1996, The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, London: Routledge. Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988, The Invention o f Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, London: James Currey. Nader, Laura, 1974, ‘Up the Anthropologist - Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in Hymes Dell (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Vintage, pp.284-311. Nandy, Ashis, 1983, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nandy, Ashis, 1987, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays on the Politics of Awareness, Dehli: Oxford University Press. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 1994, ‘Globalisation as Hybridization’, Working Paper N o.l52, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 1995, ‘The Cultural Turn in Development: Questions of Power’, The European Journal o f Development Research, Vol.7, N o.l, pp. 176-92. Ortner, Sherry, B., 1984, ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.26, N o.l, pp. 126-66. Rist, Gilbert, 1990, ‘“Development” as Part of the Modem Myth: The Western “Socio-cultural Dimension” of “Development”’, The European Journal of Development Research, Vol.2, N o.l, pp. 10-21. Robertson, Roland, 1987a, ‘Globalisation and Societal Modernisation: A Note on Japan and Japanese Religion’, Sociological Analysis, Vol.47, pp.35-43. Robertson, Roland, 1987b, ‘Globalisation Theory and Civilisational Analysis’, Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 17, pp.20-30. Roseberry, William, 1989, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy, London: Rutgers University Press. Rostow, W.W., 1960, The Stages o f Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, New York: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.), 1993, The Development Dictionary, London: Zed Press.

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Sardar, Ziauddin, 1977, Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World, London: Croom Helm. Sardar, Ziauddin, 1985, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Things to Come, London: Mansell. Serequeberhan, Tsneay (ed.), 1991, African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, New York: Paragon House. Sklair, Leslie, 1988, ‘Transcending the Impasse: Metatheory, Theory, and Empirical Research in the Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment’, World Development, Vol. 16, No.6, pp.697-709. Schuurman, Frans J., 1993, Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, London: Zed Press. Tomlinson, John, 1991, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, London: Pinter. Turner, Brian S., 1990, ‘The Two Faces of Sociology: Global or National?’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.7, Nos.2-3, pp.343-58. Verhelst, Thierry G., 1990, No Life Without Roots: Culture and Development, London: Zed Press. Waters, Malcolm, 1995, Globalization, London: Routledge. Worsley, Peter, 1984, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Cultural Globalisation: Placing and Displacing the West JOHN TOMLINSON The process o f globalisation is frequently assumed to have negative implications fo r developing societies. Certainly in political-economy terms it is a process which distributes its benefits and its risks unevenly; maintaining the fam iliar patterns o f global advantage and disadvantage. However the cultural implications o f globalisation seem likely to be more complex. This study first explores the suspicion that cultural globalisation is merely the extension o f Western cultural power and finds reasons to doubt this. It then examines some contrary arguments to the effect that globalisation, fa r from heralding the cultural triumph o f the West may actually involve its longer term decline, via a general process o f ‘deterritorialisation \ It concludes that globalisation may not be firmly in the cultural grip o f the West and that the prospects fo r the developing world may be less determined than the critical pessimism o f the ‘Westernisation’ thesis predicts. IN T R O D U C T IO N

In its relatively short career, the concept of globalisation has accumulated a remarkable string of both positive and negative connotations without having achieved a particularly clear denotation. Both enthusiasm and suspicion arise from often quite vague associations of the term, rather than from a clear consensus on its meaning. Indeed there are many different narratives of globalisation linked not just with different theoretical positions but with different political stances and positions of discursive power. In this study I explore some sensitive political-cultural issues to do with the globalisation process and start by briefly saying what I understand the process most generally to involve. Globalisation here refers to the rapidly developing process of complex interconnections between societies, cultures, institutions and individuals world-wide. It is a social process which involves a compression of time and space, shrinking distances through a dramatic reduction in the time taken John Tomlinson, Head of the Centre for Research in International Communication and Culture, Nottingham Trent University, UK.

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either physically or representationally - to cross them, so making the world seem smaller and in a certain sense bringing human beings ‘closer’ to one another. As a recent United Nations report puts it, globalisation produces a ‘global neighbourhood’, [Commission on Global Governance, 1995]. At the same time it is a process which ‘stretches’ social relations, removing the relationships which govern our everyday lives from local contexts to ‘distanciated’ global ones. Thus, at a high level of abstraction, globalisation can be understood as a consequence of the institutional arrangements and technological accomplishments of social modernity, enabling and driving towards ever increasing ‘action at distance’ [Giddens, 1990; 1994a; 1994b]. Although this may not be a comprehensive definition, it is sufficiently general to make it reasonably uncontroversial. Grasping globalisation in these rather abstract and general terms first has the other advantage of enabling us to see it as a multidimensional process which, ‘like all significant social processes, unfolds in multiple realms of existence simultaneously’ [Nederveen Pieterse, 1995: 45]. Globalisation is heavy with implications for all spheres of social existence: the economic, the political, the environmental, the cultural. Isolating any one of these dimensions risks misrepresenting the complex interactional effects of the process as a whole but must be done if we are to put flesh on the bones of theoretical abstractions. What I understand as the cultural dimension of globalisation, or ‘cultural globalisation’ for convenience, is the particular effects which these general social processes of time-space compression and distanciation have on that realm of practices and experience in which people symbolically construct meaning. I do not suppose that this cultural realm is in practice separable from other social realms and certainly not from the political-economic. Nevertheless, to argue we have to make, albeit artificial, distinctions whilst not losing sight of the points at which processes and logics in other realms become significantly determining: for example, the point at which cultural experiences depend on material resource distribution. Given these caveats, we can talk of something called ‘cultural globalisation’. But in what sort of effects do we recognise it? The first thing to say here is that the most ‘obvious’ scenario is the least plausible: globalisation does not seem set to usher in a single ‘global culture’ in the sense of the unification and pacification of humankind dreamed of by utopian thinkers. This is clear for a number of reasons. To begin with, we should distinguish the two senses in which the general process of globalisation might be said to be ‘unifying’. One refers to the way in which complex global interconnectedness makes people throughout the world subject to the same broad determining forces and processes. For example, the economic fate of local communities - levels of economic activity, employment prospects, standard of living - is increasingly tied to a capitalist

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production system and market that is global in scope and operation. Similarly, our local environment (and consequently our health and physical quality of life) is subject to risks arising at a global level - global warming, ozone depletion, eco-disasters such as Chernobyl. These aspects of globalisation represent a rapidly growing context of global interdependence that ‘unites’ us all, if only in the sense of making us all subject to certain common global influences, processes, opportunities and risks. But clearly this sort of ‘structural unity’ does not of itself imply the emergence of a common ‘global culture’ in the utopian sense. Even supposing the world were generally grasped in mundane cultural experience as ‘a single place’ IRobertson, 1992] or as ‘a world in which there are no others’ [Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990], it does not follow that this perception will bind people together, even in the face of mutual threats. As Ulrich Beck [7992: 49] puts it, to assume this would involve ‘jumping too casually from the global nature of dangers to the commonality of political will and action’. There are all sorts of factors inhibiting such a commonality: not least of which is the unevenness of the globalisation process itself. Benefits and risks are unevenly distributed and differentially experienced, both geographically and across social divisions of class, gender, age, by what Massey [7994] refers to as the ‘power geometry’ of globalisation. We can add to these deeply structured social divisions the antagonisms which arise as globalising processes, such as labour migration, bring diverse cultural traditions into ‘enforced proximity’. In the long term and in appropriate conditions of cultural dialogue this might make for increased cultural understanding and tolerance, but in the short term it is just as likely to be felt as the violent collision of cultures. As the Commission on Global Governance report [7995: 43] reminds u s ,4neighbourhoods ‘ are defined by proximity not by communal solidarity. We do not choose our neighbours so there is no guarantee that the ‘global neighbourhood’ will be a good, peaceful, integrated, ‘gemeinschaftliche’ neighbourhood. Consequently, there are all sorts of reasons to be sceptical about the emergence of a common global culture in the utopian sense. Yet there is another sense of a movement towards a global culture which seems more plausible to some critics at least. This dystopian version of a global culture supposes the emergence of cultural uniformity (as distinct from unity) as the global expansion of one dominant set of cultural practices and values - one version of how life is to be lived - at the expense of all others. One of the puzzling things about critical responses to globalisation is how this sort of ‘pessimistic master scenario’ [Hannerz, 1991] attracts adherents who would be extremely (and correctly) sceptical of the utopian view, for both are equally speculative and universalising. What seems to make the pessimistic scenario more compelling is that it

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chimes with more general and long-standing critiques of both politicaleconomic and cultural dominance. It is as if the cultural implications of globalisation were prefigured in existing critical discourses, particularly those that conflate global capitalism with Western imperialism. Whilst easy to sympathise with their broad political stance, it is not clear that such critical traditions provide an adequate conceptualisation of the precise cultural ‘power geometry’ that globalisation entails. In what follows I offer some reasons why we should resist reading cultural globalisation as, inevitably, ‘Westernisation’ and why we need a more nuanced critique. G L O B A L IS A T IO N A N D W E S T E R N IS A T IO N

The argument that equates globalisation with Westernisation can be outlined quite briefly though it contains some crucial assumptions which will be unpacked presently. It goes like this. The culture that is currently emerging via globalisation is not a global culture in the utopian sense. It is not a culture that has arisen out of the common experiences and needs of all of humanity and it does not represent a confluence of divergent cultural practices. It does not draw equally on the world’s many cultural traditions. It is neither inclusive, integrative, pluralist, balanced nor, in the best sense, synthesising. Rather, globalised culture is the enforced installation, world-wide, of one particular culture, born out of one particular, privileged historical experience. It is, in short, simply the global extension of Western culture. The broad implications of this, and the causes of critical concern, can be understood in, roughly, four ways. First, the process is seen as homogenising; bringing standardised, commodified culture in its wake and threatening to obliterate the world’s rich cultural diversity. Second, it is argued that it visits the various cultural ills of the West - its obsession with consumption practices, the fragmentation of cultural identity, its loss of central, stable consensual cultural values - on to other cultures. Third, both of these tendencies are seen as particular threats to what are regarded as the fragile and vulnerable ‘traditional’ cultures of peripheral, ‘Third World’ nations. Fourth, the process is viewed as part and parcel of wider forms of domination, such as those involved in the ever-widening grip of transnational capitalism and those involved in the maintenance of post-colonial relations of (economic and cultural) dependency. These arguments will be recognised as belonging to a familiar critical tradition that predates the current discourse of globalisation: the critique of Western ‘cultural imperialism’. Indeed, the discourse of cultural imperialism tended to set the scene for the initial critical reception of globalisation in the cultural sphere, casting the process as, ‘an aspect of the hierarchical nature of imperialism, that is the increasing hegemony of particular central cultures, the

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diffusion of American values, consumer goods and lifestyles’ [Friedman, 1994: 195]. Although, the general concerns of this critique are important and although it established crucial connections between political-economic analysis and cultural critique, the critique of cultural imperialism is a deeply problematic theoretical stance. The various problems arising from this peculiarly ambiguous and often confused critical discourse have since been widely discussed [Boyd-Barrett, 1982; Schlesinger, 1991; Sinclair, 1992; Tomlinson, 1991; 1995; 1996; Thompson, 1995]. In so far as the general stance that casts cultural globalisation as ‘Westernisation’ draws implicitly on the assumptions of the cultural imperialism thesis, it is subject to many of the same objections. There is not space here to recapitulate all these criticisms, many of which are familiar to cultural studies. Instead I will restrict myself to discussing two of the most common objections to the general idea of Westernisation with a view to distinguishing them from the specific, rather different line of criticism I follow later. The first is that ‘Westernisation’ is a rather problematic conceptual category. When people talk about ‘Westernisation’ they are referring to a whole range of things: the consumer culture of Western capitalism with its now all-too-familiar icons (McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi Jeans), the spread of European languages (particularly English), styles of dress, eating habits, architecture and music, the adoption of an urban lifestyle based around industrial production, a pattern of cultural experience dominated by the mass media, a range of cultural values and attitudes regarding personal liberty, gender and sexuality, human rights, the political process, religion, scientific and technological rationality and so on. Whilst all these aspects of ‘the West’ can be found in various combinations throughout the world today, they do not constitute an indivisible package. Although it is correct to argue, as Cornelius Castoriadis [1991] does, that social modernity comes as a package and not as a ‘menu’ from which cultures may select, this does not imply that the transition from tradition to modernity has to follow, slavishly, the pattern of the West. The ‘routes to and through modernity’ [Therborn, 1995] and the ‘strategies for entering and leaving modernity’ [Garcia Canclini, 1995] are clearly not restricted to those taken by Western nation-states. To take but one example, an acceptance of the technological culture of the West and of aspects of consumerism may well co-exist with a vigorous rejection of its sexual permissiveness and its generally secular outlook, as is common in many Islamic societies. Discriminating between various aspects of what is totalised as ‘Westernisation’ reveals a much more complex picture: some cultural goods have a broader appeal than others, some values and attitudes are easily adopted while others are actively resisted or found simply odd or irrelevant. And all

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this varies between societies and between different groupings and divisions within societies such as class, age, gender, urban/rural groups. The first objection to the idea of Westernisation therefore is that it is too broad a generalisation. Its rhetorical force is bought at the price of glossing over a multitude of complexities, exceptional cases and contradictions. This criticism also connects with another one: that ironically the W esternisation /homogenisation/cultural imperialism thesis itself displays a sort of Western ethnocentrism [Hannerz, 1991; Tomlinson, 1991; 1995]. Ulf Hannerz puts this point nicely: The global homogenisation scenario focuses on things that we, as observers and commentators from the centre, are very familiar with: our fast foods, our soft drinks, our sitcoms. The idea that they are or will be everywhere, and enduringly powerful everywhere, makes our culture even more important and worth arguing about, and relieves us of the real strains of having to engage with other living, complicated, puzzling cultures [Hannerz, 1991: 109]. A second set of objections concerns the way in which Westernisation suggests a rather crude model of the one-way flow of cultural influence. This criticism has rightly been the one most consistently made of the whole cultural imperialism idea. Culture, it is argued, simply does not transfer in this linear unidirectional way. Movement between cultural/geographical areas always involves translation, mutation and adaptation as the ‘receiving culture’, brings its own cultural resources to bear, in dialectical fashion, upon ‘cultural imports’ [Appadurai, 1990; Garcia Canclini, 1995; Lull, 1995; Robins, 1991; Tomlinson 1991]. For Latin America, Jesus Martin-Barbero [1993: 149] describes how ‘the steady, predictable tempo of homogenising development [is] upset by the counter-tempo of profound differences and cultural discontinuities’. A number of things follow from this argument. Most basically it implies that the Westernisation thesis severely underestimates the cultural resilience and dynamism of non-Western cultures, their capacity to ‘indigenise’ Western cultural imports, imbue them with different cultural meanings, and appropriate them actively rather than be passively swamped. It also draws attention to the counter-flow of cultural influence from the periphery to the centre, such as the case of ‘world music’ [Abu-Lughod, 1991] or some spheres of media production [Sinclair, 1992]. Indeed, the ‘core-periphery’ model itself tends to disguise such counter-flows of cultural (and even political-economic) influence and it is on this basis that the model has recently been questioned by critics from the ‘periphery’. For instance, Nestor Garcia Canclini [1995: 232] criticises the concentric figuration of power relations in the model as ‘the abstract expression of an idealised imperial system4 and calls for a far more

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nuanced, dialectical view of the processes of cultural interpenetration. This dialectical conception of culture can be further developed so as to undermine the sense of the West as a stable homogeneous cultural entity. As Nederveen Pieterse [1995: 54] puts it: Tt ... implies an argument with Westernisation: the West itself may be viewed as a mixture and Western culture as creole culture’. This is an important, if controversial, argument which I do not have the space to explore fully here. However it is worth noting one aspect of this increasing ‘hybridisation4of cultural experience in the West as it becomes more and more connected, via globalisation, with non-Westem societies. This is the very practical consequences of the globalisation of capital: its displacement of huge numbers of people from their homes in Asia, Africa or Latin America to the West as either refugees or labour migrants. As Stuart Hall puts this: Driven by poverty, drought, famine, economic underdevelopment and crop failure, civil war and political unrest, regional conflict and arbitrary changes of political regime, the accumulating foreign indebtedness of their governments to Western banks, very large numbers of the poorer peoples of the globe have taken the ‘message4 of global consumerism at face value, and moved towards the places where ‘the goodies’ come from and where chances of survival are higher. In the era of global communications, the West is only a one-way airline charter ticket away [Hall 1992: 306-7]. The political-economic impact of such migrations is a much-discussed feature of the general process of globalisation: presenting Western nation-states with both cheap exploitable labour and the threat of demographic ‘invasion’. The growing anxiety in the developed world over these population movements can be seen, for example, in the notoriously heavy policing of the US - Mexican border, and in the current debate about ‘Fortress Europe’. However, the cultural implications of such population flows for the West are likely to be more complex and, eventually, more significant. It has been argued that such flows - and the more general post-colonial diaspora - represent a sense in which the ‘Other has installed itself within the very heart of the Western metropolis, [t]hrough a kind of reverse invasion, the periphery has now infiltrated the colonial core’ [Robins, 1991: 32]. Robins draws the implication that the self-confident, stable cultural identity of the West is being threatened. ‘Through this irruption of empire, the certain and centred perspective of the old colonial order is confronted and confused’ [1991: 33]. The cultural interpenetration that globalisation brings, then, implies a collapse of both the physical and the cultural ‘distance’ necessary to sustain the myths of Western identity (and superiority) established via the binary oppositions and imaginary geographies [Said, 1978] of the high-colonial era.

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While such criticisms take some of the wind out of the sails of the Westernisation argument, at least in its most dramatic, polemical formulations, they do not entirely resolve the issue of the contemporary cultural power of the West. It can still be argued that, when all is said and done and all these criticisms met, Western cultural practices and institutions remain firmly in the driving seat of global cultural development. No amount of attention to the processes of cultural reception and translation, no anthropological scruples about the complexities of particular local contexts and no dialectical theorising can argue away the manifest power of Western capitalism, both as a general cultural configuration (the commodification of everyday experience, consumer culture) and as a specific set of global cultural industries (CNN, Times-Warner, News International), i s not this evidence of some sort of Western cultural hegemony? What ensues from this is a critical stand-off. Both positions are convincing within their own terms but do not seem precisely to engage. This could be read as another instance of the familiar divergence between political-economy and culturalist approaches but I do not believe we inhabit such discrete theoretical universes. It is surely possible to establish a more sophisticated, hermeneutically sensitive account of cultural globalisation whilst maintaining a keen critical sense of the ‘power geometry’ involved. To take the argument a little further, I focus below on one particular, largely implicit, assumption that seems to be embedded in the idea of globalised culture as Westernised culture. This is the assumption that the process of globalisation is continuous with the long, steady, historical rise of Western cultural dominance. By this I mean that the sort of cultural power generally attributed to the West today is seen as of the same order of power that was manifest in the great imperial expansion of European powers from the seventeenth century onwards. Accordingly, this implicit understanding of globalised culture would see the massive and undeniable spread of Western cultural goods - ‘Coca-colonisation’ - as broadly part of the same process of domination as that which characterised the actual colonisation of much of the rest of the world by the West. I do not mean that no distinction is made between the coercive and often bloody history of Western colonial expansion and the ‘soft’ cultural imperialism of McDonald’s hamburgers and Sesame Street. But these and many other instances of Western cultural power are often lumped together - ‘totalised’ - by the term ‘Westernisation’, giving rise to an impression of the inexorable advance of Western culture. This particular totalising assumption needs to be unpacked and critically examined for two reasons. First, because it mistakes the nature of the globalisation process and second because it overstates the general cultural power of the West. I do not deny that the West is in a certain sense ‘culturally powerful’ but I want to suggest that this power, which is closely aligned with technological, industrial and economic power, is not the whole story. It does

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not amount to the implicit claim that ‘the way of life’ of the West is being installed, via globalisation, as the unchallengeable cultural model for all humanity. In furtherance of this argument, I turn to two accounts which suggest that the globalisation process may be actively problematic for the continuation of Western cultural dominance: to signal not the ‘triumph of the West’, but its imminent decline. G L O B A L IS A T IO N A S T H E ‘D E C L IN E O F TH E W E S T ’

This position is advanced in the work of two social theorists, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman. In neither case are the arguments developed at great length. I present them simply as suggestive ways of thinking against the grain of the arguments reviewed so far. Within the broad conceptualisation of globalisation as a ‘consequence of modernity’, Anthony Giddens [1990; 1994a; 1994b] writes of ‘[t]he gradual decline in European or Western global hegemony, the other side of which is the increasing expansion of modern influences world-wide’, of ‘the declining grip of the West over the rest of the world’ or of ‘the evaporating of the privileged position of the West’ [7990: 51-3]. What can he mean by this? Put at its simplest, his argument is that, although the process of ‘globalising m odernity’ may have begun in the extension of Western institutions (capitalism, industrialism, the nation-state system), their very global ubiquity now represents a decline in the differentials between the West and the rest of the world. In a sense the West’s ‘success’ in disseminating its institutional forms represents a loss of its once unique social/cultural ‘edge’. As Giddens puts the point in a more recent discussion: The first phase of globalisation was plainly governed, primarily, by the expansion of the West, and institutions which originated in the West. No other civilisation made anything like as pervasive an impact on the world, or shaped it so much in its own image ... Although still dominated by Western power, globalisation today can no longer be spoken of only as a matter of one-way imperialism ... increasingly there is no obvious ‘direction’ to globalisation at all and its ramifications are more or less ever present. The current phase of globalisation, then, should not be confused with the preceding one, whose structures it acts increasingly to subvert [Giddens, 1994b: 96]. There are various ways in which this ‘loss of privilege’ and even the ‘subversion' of Western power may be understood. It might be pointed out that certain parts of what we were used to calling the ‘third world’ are now actually more advanced, technologically, industrially and economically, than some

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parts of the West. The comparison here might be between the so-called ‘Asian Tiger’ economies and the economically depressed heavy-industrial regions of Europe or the US. And there might be a complex causal relationship between the rise and decline of such regions connected by a globalised capitalist market, as Giddens [1990: 65; 1994a: 65] suggests. Or, it might be argued that capitalism has no ‘loyalty’ to its birthplace and so provides no guarantees that the geographical patterns of dominance established in early modernity - the elective affinity between the interests of capitalism and of the West - will continue [Tomlinson, forthcoming] . There are signs of this in the increasingly uneasy relation between the international capitalist markets and the governments of Western nation-states: the periodic currency crises besetting the Western industrial nations - the so-called ‘black days’ on the international currency markets. And a rather spectacular instance of the global capitalist system’s unsentimental attitude to Western institutions could be seen in the debacle of Britain’s oldest merchant bank, Baring Brothers, in February 1995. Barings, founded in 1762 and bankers to the Queen, was destroyed within a few days’ trading as a result of its high risk globalising speculations carried out via high speed electronically mediated (distanciated) dealings and this, appropriately enough, took place in Singapore on one of the world’s youngest markets, that of South East Asia. The bank was finally sold to the Dutch group ING for one pound. It is hard to resist seeing this as emblematic of the old (complacent?) world of European imperial power finally being overtaken by the new world of decentred global capitalism in which events can be instantaneous and catastrophic. To take a more broadly cultural example, the loss of privilege of the West can be seen in the shifting orientation and self-understanding of the academic discipline which claims ‘culture’ as its special province: anthropology. Giddens [1994b: 97f] offers an interesting discussion here arguing that anthropology in its formative stage was a prime example of the West’s self-assured assumption of cultural superiority. On account of its ‘evolutionary’ assumptions, early taxonomising anthropology established itself as a practice to which the West had exclusive rights: the ‘interrogation’ of all other cultures. Other cultures were there, like the flora and fauna of the natural world, to be catalogued and observed. There was no sense of reflexivity in the project, no thought that they could ever themselves engage in the practice; they were categorised as ‘if not inert, no more than a “subject” of enquiry’ [1994b: 97]. Early anthropology was part of the cultural armoury of an imperialist West during ‘early globalisation’ precisely because it had not developed its inner logic. With the recognition of the integrity of traditions, the knowledgeability of all cultural agents and the growing sense of ‘cultural relativism ’, anthropology has become both a more modest and humble undertaking and, significantly, a globalised practice. Present-day anthropologists, Giddens

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suggests, have to approach their study in the role of the ingenu - the innocent abroad - rather than as the confident explorer and taxonomist. Without the assurance of a taken-for-granted superior cultural ‘home-base’, anthropological study becomes a matter of ‘learning how to go on’ rather than of detached, de haute en has interrogation. Not only this, it becomes clear that in this later phase of globalisation, all cultures have a thoroughly reflexive anthropological sensibility: i n British Columbia the present day Kwakiutl are busy reconstructing their traditional culture using [Franz] Boas’s monographs as their guide, while Australian Aboriginals and other groups across the world are contesting land-rights on the basis of parallel anthropological studies’ [Giddens, 1994b: 100]. The trajectory of the development of anthropology which ‘leads to its effective dissolution today’ [ibid.: 97] could stand more broadly for the way in which current globalisation subverts and undermines the cultural power of the West from which it first emerged. Whilst holding on to these ideas, I now want to comment briefly on an interesting distinction that Zygmunt Bauman makes between the ‘global’ and the ‘universal’: Modernity once deemed itself universal. Now it thinks of itself instead as global. Behind the change of term hides a watershed in the history of modern self-awareness and self-confidence. Universal was to be the rule of reason - the order of things that would replace the slavery to passions with the autonomy of rational beings, superstition and ignorance with truth, tribulations of the drifting plankton with self-made and thoroughly monitored history-by-design. ‘Globality’, in contrast, means merely that everyone everywhere may feed on McDonald’s hamburgers and watch the latest made-for-TV docudrama. Universality was a proud project, a Herculean mission to perform. Globality in contrast, is a meek acquiescence to what is happening ‘out there’ ... [Bauman, 1995: 24]. Mapping this on to the distinction which Giddens and others [Hall, 1991] make between early and late phases of globalisation, the key difference becomes that between a Western culture with pretensions to universalism and one without. The globalisation of the West’s cultural practices is now simply occurring without any real sense that this is part of its collective project or ‘mission’, or that these practices are, indeed, the tokens of an ideal human civilisation. Early globalisation involves the self-conscious cultural project of universality, whilst late globalisation - globality - is mere ubiquity. It may be argued that Bauman erects a rather contrived dualism here between the ‘high cultural’ project of enlightenment rationalism and some rather specific ‘popular cultural’ practices. The specific doubts he detects that now ‘sap the ethical confidence and self-righteousness of the West’ tend to be the preoccupations of the intellectual. These doubts echo those of the Frankfurt

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School [Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979] about the capacity of the Enlightenment project ever to deliver full emancipation for all human beings; doubts about ‘whether the wedlock between the growth of rational control and the growth of social and personal autonomy, that crux of modern strategy, was not ill-conceived from the start ... ’ [Bauman, 1995: 29]. Whatever reservations we may have about centring the discourse on one particular Western high-cultural narrative, Bauman’s stress on the declining cultural self-image and self-confidence of the West is an important one. We can read the idea of the loss of Western self-confidence in more general and mundane ways. Baum an’s description of globality as ‘a meek acquiescence to what is happening “out there’” may be a little overstated, but it does grasp something of the spirit in which ordinary people in the West probably experience the global spread of their ‘own’ cultural practices. Indeed a lot probably hangs on the extent to which Westerners actually feel ‘ownership’ of the sorts of cultural practices that, typically, get globalised. This is an immensely complicated issue but my guess is that there is only a very low level of correspondence between people’s routine interaction with the contemporary ‘culture industry’ and their sense of having a distinctive Western cultural identity, let alone feeling proud or proprietorial about it. It seems more likely that things like McDonald’s restaurants are experienced as simply ‘there’ in our cultural environments: things which we use and have become familiar and perhaps comfortable with, but which we do not - either literally or culturally - ‘own’. In this sense the decline of Western cultural self-confidence may align with the structural properties of globalising modernity referred to in the introduction; the ‘disembedding’ (to use another of Giddens’ terms) of practices and institutions from contexts of local to global control. In a world in which increasingly our mundane ‘local’ experience is governed by events and processes at a distance, it may become difficult to maintain a distinctive sense of (at least ‘mass’) culture as ‘the way we do things’ in the West; to understand these practices as having any particular connection with our specific histories and traditions. Thus, far from grasping globalised culture in the self-assured, ‘centred’, proprietorial way that may have been associated with, say, the Pax Britannica, late-modern Westerners may experience it as a largely undifferentiated, ‘de-centred’, ‘placeless’ modernity to which they relate effortlessly, but without much sense of either personal involvement or of ‘local’ cultural control. Here I would connect both Bauman’s and Giddens’ perspectives with a broader perception that globalisation now increasingly ‘displaces’ or ‘deterritorialises’ cultural practices and experiences. In Nestor Garcia Canclini’s [1995: 229] description, deterritorialisation refers to ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’. This, of

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course, refers to the general ‘global’ case and, in Garcia Canclini’s work, to the hybrid cultures of ‘border zones’ straddling the first and third worlds. But it also has a particular implication for the cultural career of the West. For though cultural production may remain concentrated and centred in the West, and though Western cultural commodities may be globally ubiquitous, it does not follow - as it may have done in an earlier period - that these production and consumption practices serve to reinforce territorially-based identities. In so far as the cultural hegemony of Western nation-states has historically depended on such robust constructions of territorial (national-cultural) identity, it could be argued that in one sense they have most to lose from globalisation. C O N C L U S IO N

The arguments reviewed in the preceding section are suggestive rather than conclusive ones and they leave many issues unresolved. In particular the complex issue of the phenomenology of cultural identity in a globalised world - and the implications of this for transformations in cultural power - requires far more extensive and nuanced treatment than has been possible here. What has been offered is simply a general sketch of alternative ways of thinking about the difficult cultural issues forced upon us by the globalisation process. At the risk of labouring the point, it is worth stressing the limitations of the position advanced here. Nothing stated here is meant to deny - or wish away - the present manifest economic dominance of Western nation-states, nor even that particular, limited; sense of ‘cultural’ power that proceeds from this: the power of Western transnational capitalism to distribute its goods around the world. Nor do these arguments entail the idea of a simple ‘turning of the tables’: the ‘decline of the West’ does not mean the inevitable ‘rise’ of any other particular hegemonic power (no matter how tempting it is to speculate about the ‘Asian Tigers’ and so forth). In the short term at least, much of the ‘Third World’ will probably continue to be marginalised in the globalisation process [Massey, 1994; McGrew, 1992], Given this, the idea of the ‘decline of the West’ might well seem rather premature. But, looking beyond the short term, these reflections do suggest that what is happening in globalisation is not a process firmly in the cultural grip of the West and that the global future is much more radically open than the discourses of homogenisation and Westernisation suggest. Moreover, the processes of global modernity seem to possess an inbuilt ‘accelerator’ - a feature of the reflexivity of modem institutions - which makes cultural transformations much more rapid in their impact: exponentially more rapid than the ‘glacial time‘ of cultural transformation in ‘traditional societies’. This amounts to a present historical context of great uncertainty, one in which speculation is particularly risky. But it also suggests that we should not assume that the same

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patterns of domination of the West over the rest are set to continue, even in the proximate future.

R EFERENCES Abu-Lughod, J., 1991, ‘Going Beyond Global Babble’, in A.D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System, London: Macmillan, pp. 131-8. Adomo, T. and M. Horkheimer, 1979, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso. Appadurai, A., 1990, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture, London: Sage, pp.295-310. Bauman, Z., 1995, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell. Beck, U., 1992, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Boyd-Barrett, O., 1982, ‘Cultural Dependency and the Mass Media’, in M. Gurevitch et al. (eds.), Culture, Society and the Media, London: Methuen, pp. 174-95. Castoriadis, C., 1991, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Commission on Global Governance, 1995, Our Global Neighbourhood: The Report o f the Commission on Global Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Featherstone, M., Lash, S. and R. Robertson (eds.), 1995, Global Modernities, London: Sage. Friedman, J., 1994, Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage. Garcia Canclini, N., 1995, Hybrid Cultures, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Giddens, A., 1990, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A., 1994a, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A., 1994b, ‘Living in a Post-traditional Society’, in U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash (eds.), Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.56-109. Hall, S., 1991, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicities’, in A.D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, London: Macmillan, pp. 19-30. Hall, S., 1992, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Hall et a l [1992: 274-316]. Hall, S., Held, D. and T. McGrew (eds.), 1992, Modernity and Its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hannerz, U., 1991, ‘Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures’, in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System, London: Macmillan, pp. 107-28. Lull. J., 1995, Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach, Cambridge: Polity Press. McGrew, T., 1992, ‘A Global Society?”, in Hall etal. [1992: 61-116]. Martin-Barbero, J., 1993, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, London: Sage. Massey, D., 1994, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity. Nederveen Pieterse, J., 1995, ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in Featherstone et al. [1995: 45-68]. Robertson, R., 1992, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Robins, K., 1991, ‘Tradition and Translation: National Culture in its Global Context’, in J. Comer and S. Harvey (eds.), Enterprise and Heritage, London: Routledge, pp.21-44. Schlesinger, P., 1991, Media, State and Nation, London: Sage. Sinclair, J., 1992, ‘The Decentering of Globalization: Televisa-ion and Globo-ization’, in E. Jacka (ed.), Continental Shift: Globalisation and Culture, Double Bay, NSW: Local Consumption Publications, pp.99-116. Said, E., 1978, Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Therbom, G., 1995, ‘Routes to/through Modernity’, in Featherstone et al. [1995: 124-39]. Thompson, J.B., 1995, The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tomlinson, J., 1991, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, London: Pinter. Tomlinson, J., 1995, ’Homogenisation and Globalization’, History of European Ideas, Vol.20, Nos.4—6, pp.891-97. Tomlinson, J., forthcoming, ‘Cultural Globalization and Cultural Imperialism’, in A. Mohammadi and R. Johnson (eds.), International Communication in a Postmodern World, London: Sage.

Beyond Development: An Islamic Perspective Z IAUDDIN SA RD AR The notion o f development is deeply entrenched in an imperialistic and conflict-ridden world view o f the west. It is totally unsuited to both the needs and requirements as well as the visions and aspirations o f non-western cultures no matter how it is changed, modified and rethought. As such development would become obsolete in the future. The future itself will be dominated not by the single, global civilisation o f the west, but by a number o f different civilisations most notably those o f Islam, India and China. In a multi-civilisational world, the west would not only lose its power to define and enforce its own definitions o f what it means to be free, civilised, rational etc. on the non-west, but each non-western civilisation would rediscover and put into practice its own way o f knowing, being and doing. As such, each civilisation will define its own notion o f social transformation and produce its own unique method fo r moving forward to a more humane, economically viable and socially ju st society. This contribution briefly discusses the contours o f this process in the Muslim civilisation. It illustrates how the notions o/tazkiyah ( ‘growth through purification’) and falah ('human well-being’) are replacing the idea o f development and how they can become the key concepts fo r a Muslim civilisation o f the future. DEVELOPM ENT

The word itself contains a notion of superiority. Since its inception in the late 1950s and early 1960s, development has been synonymous with ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’. But progress is always a movement away from something that is considered inferior: one progresses from a (perceived) lesser state to a (perceived) higher state of existence. The basic assumption of development, no matter how it is defined, is of a linear teleology vis-a-vis the standard yardstick of measurement: western civilisation. The western nations are thus the model of ‘developed’ states with their industrial policies, free market economies, Ziauddin Sardar, Consulting Editor of Futures, the monthly journal of forecasting, planning and policy, and Visiting Professor of Science Policy at Middlesex University, UK.

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technological advancement, political, social and cultural institutions providing the best examples of all that constitutes human endeavour; other nations and cultures are simply there to follow this example, ‘progress’ and ‘develop’ along a straight incline with the goal of becoming as good as the west. The inferior baggage that the non-western nations are supposed to abandon, in the quest for development, is their cultural and traditional heritage, sacred and religious values which interfere with ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’. However, the experience of over four decades of development reveals this baggage to be much more resilient then first imagined; and that there is something rotten at the core of the very concept of development. There is, as Claude Alvares [1992: 5] has argued so powerfully, an ‘intrinsic link between development and him sa’ (violence), and the ‘intensity of himsa' seems to increase ‘with the expansion of the development thrust’. The violence inflicted on non-western societies by development is both direct and indirect: in the name of development more people are consciously deprived of their rights and livelihood in the South today than in colonial times ... people’s rights are taken away and substituted by a litany of people’s needs, which are defined by westerners. In the name of development, science and technology, modernisation and foreign exchange, a justification is provided for bartering one’s dignity and self-respect, and the country’s valuable resources; even while modern economic theory continues to preach that the people of the South can only be helped by catering first to the affluent of the planet [Alvares, 1992: 108]. Development strategies have devastated the agriculture of non-western societies (most notably by the ‘Green Revolution’ in India and Pakistan) [Vallianatos, 1994]; impoverished and further marginalised the poor in Africa and the Middle East [Jazairy, Alamgir and Panuccio, 1992]\ and transformed independent states into serfdom’s of international banks and multinational corporation [Kothari, 1993]. Relief from the violence of development has often come from traditional sources: from indigenous agricultural practices that produce better yields, are ecologically sound and far superior to imported, ‘m odern’ methods [Congress on Traditional Sciences and Technologies o f India, 1993] \ from traditional and generic medicines that are accessible to poor rural folks, as well as cheaper and more effective in curing and preventing common diseases [Chowdhury, 7995]; from banking practices that rely on the traditional notion of communal trust rather than the imported idea of collateral [Institute o f Policy Studies, 1994]; and from indigenous institutions, including religious institutions, that have not only provided support for the poor but defended their dignity and rights in the face of ruthless development policies.

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U N D IS C IP L I N E D D I S C IP L IN E S

My aim here is not to provide a litany of development’s woes or to demonise development: a considerable literature already exists which does just that. Neither am I interested in listing the successes of indigenous resources and institutions and romanticising tradition. I intend only to point out that for the non-west development is largely a superfluous concept. It is like the imported ‘Banyan’ in the popular Punjabi poet Anwar Massod’s poem of the same name: You go out to buy a vest; you come back with a vest When you try to put it on, you can’t get it on If you get it on, you can’t get it off If you get it off, you can’t use it again. No matter how you define and redefine development, it just does not fit non­ western countries; and when it is imposed on them, it fragments, dislocates and destroys societies based on-traditional world views. It is almost a truism to say that development is not a universal concept, applicable to all societies at all times. It is a product of a specific culture that happens to be the dominant culture in this particular phase of human history. But this truism, like much traditional wisdom that comes wrapped in self-evident maxims, is often forgotten. The dominance of western culture, and its globalisation through this dominance, is often confused with universalism. But just because a notion, or a particular discipline, is accepted or practised throughout the world, it does not mean that that notion or that discipline is universally valid and applicable to all societies. After all, burgers and coke are eaten and drunk throughout the world but one would hardly classify them as a universally embraced and acceptable food: what the presence of burgers and coke in every city and town in the world demonstrates is not their universality but the power and dominance of the culture that has produced them. Disciplines too are like burgers and coke: they are made not in heaven nor do they exist out there in some ‘reality’ but are socially constructed and develop and grow within specific world views and cultural milieux. Neither nature nor human activities are divided into watertight compartments. All those disciplines from which development is derived and obtains its sustenance - economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, history are culturally specific: they are products of a particular culture and a particular way of looking at the world and are hierarchically subordinate to that culture and world view. They do not have autonomous existence of their own but have meaning largely in the world view of their origins and evolution. The division of knowledge into various disciplines as we find them today is a particular manifestation of how the western world view perceives reality and how

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western civilisation sees its problems. For example, the discipline of orientalism evolved because western civilisation perceived Islam as a ‘problem’ to be studied, analysed and controlled. Anthropology emerged because non-western, cultures, had to be managed, controlled and kept subordinate. Economics is based on the vision of eighteenth century England, incorporating both the religious as well as the philosophical beliefs of the period which promoted a ‘whatever is, is Right’ world view. As Ali Mazrui notes: Adam Smith took this optimism about the religious, philosophical universe and focused it on economics. If you let economical market forces operate unimpeded, all discord would in reality be harmony ... All partial evil would become common good, an invisible hand will see to that. This optimism about the benevolent consequences of unimpeded market forces (has) dominated economic thought in the west ... ’ IMazrui, 1995: 35]. Economics has maintained the facade of a creditable discipline by pretending a value neutrality that is dangerously obsolete [Ormerod, 1994; Buarque, 1993; Henderson, 1991]. It has evolved within ‘a paradigm that was explicitly modelled on classical physics’ and has been ‘a “normal” science in the sense articulated by Thomas Kuhn’ [1962]. But it is no longer tenable to maintain ‘the fiction of a “normal” economic science’. Complex situations involving ethical choices, ecological variables, and the goals and aspirations of traditional, non-western societies ‘cannot be measured by simple analogy with the cloth fairs of Adam Smith’s day. If the valued goods that give richness to our lives are reduced to commodities, then what makes those lives meaningful is itself betrayed’ [Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994: 197]. Development economics too has pretensions of being a ‘normal’ science; but, from the perspective of the South it is nothing more than a new apologia for the civilising mission [Sardar, 1977]. As Ashis Nandy writes: development is not merely a process having historical parallels with the growth of science and colonialism, both of which reached their apogee in the 19th century. It is an idea contextualized by the ideological frame within which the social changes that we retrospectively call development took place between the 17th and 19th centuries in European societies. The ideology of development has come to faithfully mirror the key ideas of the colonial worldview and Baconian philosophy of science, as many in the South have come to experience these ideas, either as beneficiaries or as victims. The origins of development may be in the Judaeo-Christian worldview, in the sense that development has shown a historical correlation with the emergence of Protestantism, especially of the

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Calvinist variety. But the idea of development is grounded in a concept of science, that promises not only absolute human mastery over nature (including human nature) but even human omniscience, and in an edited version of the white man’s burden vis-a-vis those living with ‘Oriental despotism’ and the ‘idiocy of rural life’ in the backwaters of Asia and Africa [Nandy, 1994: 7], Indeed, western imperialism and notions and values of superiority and conflict are so deeply entrenched in economic, and therefore development, theory, that even the scholarly efforts to produce ‘new economic order’, or ‘rethink Bretton Woods’, or develop models of the much vaunted ‘sustainable development’, cannot expunge them. For example, the model of development offered by Alain Lipietz [1992: 2] in Towards A New Economic Order, involves an acceptance of ‘the logic and laws of macroeconomics’, adjustment of ‘the contradictory and conflictual behaviour of individuals’ and the ‘rules of the market’. Apart from assuming that economic activity in non-western cultures is dominated by adversarial behaviour on the part of the individuals, this sort of analysis presumes that we can tinker with the notion of development to produce a just economic order and that the notion itself is not fundamentally flawed. It takes the western values that form the axioms of development for granted and suggests that the problems of the Third World can be solved simply by introducing certain codes of conduct and legislation; indeed, the price mechanism would itself see to that! This kind of blind faith in the free market ignores the overwhelming evidence that it has not only failed to bring about equitable distribution of wealth in non-western countries or to protect their economies, but also to protect the planet. The idea that human behaviour is necessarily conflictual, that there is some inescapable logic of macroeconomics and the whole notion of ‘free market’, are all assumed to be universal norms of economic development, yet they are essentially western values that, in the guise of a discipline, are being imposed on non-western societies. The overall development baggage, as can be seen from Lipietz’s analysis, comes complete with the basic maxims of the ideology of capitalism. The notions that the sole goal of economic activity is to maximise profit, that individual preferences are the most important aspects of human well being, that individuals should be given total freedom - unhindered by government or by collective value judgements, to pursue their self-interests, and that selfish individual self-interest will unselfishly end up serving the whole community, are central not just to capitalism but also to the discipline of development economics. This kind of unbridled individualism which is a fundamental component of the western Weltanschauung is quite contrary to the communal outlooks of most non-western countries. Thus in the guise of development

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policies, naked capitalism is imposed on the countries of the South. Elites of non-western societies often collaborate in this disciplinary imperialism for they stand to benefit considerably from a system that exploits their own people. Capitalism and development go hand-in-hand; and the globalisation of the former, including the cultural products of capitalism, is a product of the hitherto unquestioning acceptance of development by the nations of the South. While the values of eighteenth century Europe and the ideology of capitalism continue unabated in the very axioms of economic and development theories, new western values are being constantly added to new models of development. For example, the well meaning ‘Rethinking Bretton Woods Project’ of the Washington, DC-based Centre of Concern, places strong emphasis on ‘development that is equitable, participatory and sustainable’ and that has ‘the empowerment of the poor and disadvantaged as one of its strategic aims’ [Griesgraber and Gunter, 1995: 24]. Development is now defined as ‘a healthy growing economy which (a) distributes the benefits widely, (b) meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future generations, and (c) provides for human rights and freedoms, effective governance, and increasing democratisation’ [ibid., 1995: 124]. ‘We are discovering’, wrote Jo Marie Griesgraber and Bernhard G. Gunter, the essential truth that people must be at the centre of all development. The purpose of development is to offer people more options. One of their options is access to income - not as an end in itself but as a means of acquiring human well being. But there are other options as well, including long life, knowledge, political freedom, personal security, community participation and guaranteed human rights [Griesgraber and Gunter, 1995: 105-6]. Apart from the fact that the ‘essential truth’ that people matter above everything has taken some five decades to discover, this rethought model of development presents what non-western cultures took for granted as ‘development options’. So non-western people do not haye an innate right to long life, personal security and community participation but these rights now come as ‘options’ under the umbrella of development! It is worth noting that all traditional societies enjoyed these rights: indeed traditional lifestyles are all about community participation, security within the framework of communal existence, and long life based on healthy and ecologically sound lifestyles. First, development undermines these rights by demeaning and suppressing tradition, breaking up rural communities by promoting urban development, increasing insecurity by displacing traditional agriculture and introducing debt finance; then, to add insult to injury, a rethought notion of development offers these very things as ‘options’. But there is another dimension to this new

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notion of development that brings hitherto hidden western values right to the fore: the linking of ‘development’ with democracy and ‘human rights’. The discourse of democracy and human rights, as so many non-western writers have argued, is the most evolved form of western imperialism [Panikkar, 1989; Kothari and Sethi, 1989; Lai, 1992; Parekh, 1993; Manzoor, 1994; Muzaffar, 1996]. Development now becomes a function of a particular type of political order and notion of what it means to be human: to develop non-western cultures have to accept that western style liberal democracies are the only type of good governance there is and that a society is nothing more than a collection of individual autonomous human beings, who have rights and absolute freedoms but no responsibilities. During the 1980s and 1990s, both democracy and human rights have been used by the west as a stick to beat the non-west and to force patterns of development that would ensure and encourage dependency of Third world economies. Griesgraber and Gunter [1995: 90] acknowledge that ‘in practice human rights rhetoric leads to the imposition of free-market and electoral ideology’; indeed the World Bank and the IMF have been doing just that. But this acknowledgement does not lead to a questioning of the link between development and human rights; on the contrary, Griesgraber and Gunter [1995: 90] argue that ‘new substantive and procedural standards for the realization of human rights by development finance agencies’ should be developed. Once again, faith is placed on codes of conduct and the fundamental flaws in the notion of development are overlooked. One can make a similar critique of ‘sustainable development’. Here ‘sustainable’ codes of behaviour are appended to the notion of development. What turns development into sustainable development according to Richard Welford, for example, is the principle that it should meet ‘the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ [Welford, 1995: 6]. But this is, in effect, the essence of traditional lifestyles which are intrinsically future conscious: life enhancing tradition has always been about preserving resources for posterity. So what need is there for sustainable development; we should simply allow traditional lifestyles to continue, adjust to change according to their own criteria and thrive. But to do this would be to act against a cardinal principle of development: that it is the west which must dictate what the non-west should do and how it should do it, even if the non-west has been doing what the west is asking it to do for centuries. One of the parameters of ecologically and environmentally sound sustainable development is recycling. It has now become imperative for the sustainable development lobby to exhort the non-western countries to recycle their resources, preserve the rainforests and be more environmentally conscious. But the idea that development can be attained through sustainability

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only brings out the contradiction in combining the terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’ in the first place. This contradiction emphasises the fact that perpetual development has now become a necessary component of modernity. To be modern, one must develop, and continue to develop but how can one be sustainable at the same time? Either the non-western countries can become sustainable and move forward in their traditional lifestyles; or they can develop along the lines of the west, embrace free markets and its natural consequence, insatiable consumption. Non-western societies were sustainable and ecologically aware centuries before the west discovered the notion of sustainable development. Even today, the people in the Third World are practising recycling on a much bigger scale than recognised. It is a common practice in India and Pakistan for people to return yesterday’s newspaper to the newsagent and exchange it for today’s paper at a discount; for the pile of old newspapers to be picked up by school­ children on their way home for their mothers to convert them into paper bags to be resold to the grocers. This simple practice, and so many unconsciously carried out traditional activities, means that paper consumption in the Indian subcontinent is only five per cent that of Britain with a population that is 25 times larger than Britain! Walking through any bazaar one can find people making and selling small cartons and containers made of recycled coca-cola cans on which labels could still be seen: a container for a western drink often ends up as a vehicle for carrying water to the toilet! What this means is that non-western societies do not need lessons in sustainability from the west, one of the most unsustainable of all civilisations. What non-western societies need, and what post-colonial writers and thinkers and poets like Anwar Masood are now powerfully articulating, is for the imperialistic notion of development to be replaced by their own notions and categories of what it means to be a dynamic, thriving society. M asood’s poem, ‘B a n ya n \ quoted earlier, continues: Take my vest: when you want to put it on, you can put it on; when you take it off, you can take it off. And when you take it off, you can use it again. My vests are superb; my vests are top class Authenticity speaks for itself It catches the sun, And sits like a new bride on the washing line. You can wear them as long as you wish Then turn them into nappies and knickers for the kids. Cultural authenticity speaks its own language that addresses the deepest hopes and desires of a people and articulates ways and means by which these

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hopes and desires can be realised. Any vocabulary is itself a system of analysis. As long as development remains the catchword for the dreams of non-western societies, they cannot articulate their own desires nor produce viable, authentic ways of moving forward. As long as non-western countries seek to ‘develop’, western logic and social grammar will continue to dominate them. Cultural authenticity, on the other hand, does not mean being glued to a romanticised notion of the past; on the contrary, traditional cultures are dynamic entities, they are constantly renewing themselves and changing, but they change according to their own logic and grammar. What cultural authenticity requires is a deep respect for norms, language, beliefs, knowledge systems, and arts and crafts of a people - the very factors which give richness and meaning to their lives. It requires appreciating the fact that traditional cultures are capable of solving their own problems within their own systems of beliefs and knowledge, with their own categories and notions and within their own civilisational parameters. This, I believe, is the wave of the future. M U L T IC IV IL IS A T IO N A L F U T U R E S

The future, the century around the comer, will be a multicivilisational future. It will not be a world of ‘civilisation as we know it’. ‘Civilisation as we know it’ has always meant western civilisation: civilised behaviour and products of civilisation have been measured, up to now, by the yardstick of the west. But the twenty-first century will mark the end of civilisation as we know it; and herald the beginning of a world of civilisations - Indian, Islamic, Chinese and Western, to name the most obvious - as non-western civilisations rediscover and renovate themselves and enrich and enlighten each other with synthesis, mutual respect and co-operation. There are two fundamental reasons for the emergence of a multicivilisational world. The first reason is provided by global demographic trends. At present only one-sixth of the world’s population is white - that is, lives in the North and forms the human capital of western civilisation. If present demographic trends continue, as predicted by Paul Kennedy [1993] in Preparing fo r the TwentyFirst Century; by the mid-twenty-first century westerners will constitute around one to five per cent of the world’s population. What this means, and what western writers like Kennedy fear to articulate, is that within the next few decades, the white man will become an endangered species. So what happens to western civilisation? As Jim Dator [1992: 48] asks: ‘how will it - why should it - survive if the peoples who created it are such a tiny fraction of the future?’. The present dominance of western civilisation and the globalisation of the ideas and the cultures of the west is not just due to its undisputed technological and economic power, its clearly superior imperialistic and subjugating culture, the centuries of colonialism and neo-colonialism

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generated by it, its appropriation of most of the global resources both in history and the modern world, and its absorption of the histories of all other cultures, but also - and this is a vital point - because ‘there were so many westerners on the globe to spread their culture around’. But not for long! Even in the United States, as William Henry III [1994: 62] tells us so alarmingly, ‘sometime within the next fifty or so years, non-Hispanic white people will become demographically just another minority group. They will be collectively outnumbered by Hispanics of all races, blacks, Asians, Indians (in both vernacular meanings), and assorted other ethnic groups not associated with western Europe.’ Alas! The constellation of ideas derived from the myths and fears of western civilisation and its culture will be ‘imperilled by these demographic changes, and new ideas and projects based on the worldviews of different cultures, may leap forward’ [Dator, 1992: 48]. Thus the future is set to change by default. Such pronouncements as the much trumpeted ‘end of history’ and clarion calls for a return to ‘western elitism’ from writers like William Henry III are the last hurrah of the white man. The predominantly young populations of non-western civilisations will articulate their desires on their own terms, based on their own individual histories, and will shape a world that is distinctively different, markedly more diverse and multicultural than the one dominated currently by western civilisation. The second reason for the emergence of a multicivilisational world concerns the west’s source of power. The power that the western civilisation exercises over other cultures derives not from its military or technological might, nor even from its economic strength or political muscle and stability. The real might of the west resides in its power to define. The west defines everything - and the rest of the world is expected to accept and embrace these definitions. The west defines what is science, rationality, religion, civilisation, freedom, democracy, human rights, development and so forth. Other cultures must accept these definitions and the enslavement and cultural subservience that inevitably follows; they can only reject these definitions at the expense of being demonised, branded as fundamentalists and labelled as deviants, barbaric, uncivilised. But the west’s power to define is now being directly challenged. At present this challenge comes from Asia; but soon other civilisations will also begin to make their mark. As Richard Halloran writes, the turn of the century will register the opening of an age in which the Rising East will acquire the political, economic, and military power to rival that of North America and Western Europe. That power, much of which has already been accrued, will enable Asians to exert influence not only in their own region but throughout the world. They will become peers with American

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and Europeans in the high councils where decisions are made on war and peace. Asians will not only play in the center court but, as a Malaysian scholar put it, ‘have an equal say in writing the rules’. The twenty-first century will thus be shaped by new racial and cultural forces. For several hundred years, the world has been dominated by white European and Americans who hold to Judeo-Christian traditions. They will soon be obliged to accept as equals yellow and brown Asians who adhere to the tenets of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Islam. Not only will Asian strength be felt on international decisions, but the way they exert influence will differ. Westerners, for instance, tend to be logical and analytical; Asians are more intuitive and sometimes more emotional. Westerners assert rights, Asians respond to obligations. In the West, the individual takes priority, in Asia, the community. Westerners, especially Americans, are governed by law and contract, Asians by custom and personal relations. In the West, decisions are made by voting; Asians decide by consensus [Halloran, 1996: 3 -4 ]. Of course, Halloran is (unwittingly?) orientalising: they are emotional, we are rational; we do things by the book, they by the hook, etc. But the point he is rightly making is that the power shift towards Asia will introduce different non-western ways of doing things into the international arena; in other words, the definitions of the west will not be the only definitions around in the future. Indian, Chinese, Islamic and other non-western civilisations will redefine the globe according to their own notions and categories, and a genuinely multicivilisational will would be created: there will be more than one, dominant way of being human, of being free, and there will be more than one way to ‘develop’. The western idea of development is therefore set to become quite obsolete. In a multicivilisational world, each civilisation would produce its own notion of advancement, its own idea of movement forward to a desirable state, according to the principles of its own world view. This is not to say that each civilisation will exist in its own vacuum sealed space; of course, there will be constant and continuous interaction between civilisations. Civilisational boundaries will often become diffuse and there will be considerable synthesis and consequent emergence of totally new ideas. But the identity of each civilisation will be shaped by its unique epistemology, historiography, and philosophy of life. Substitutes for the idea of development will come from the effort and the struggle that each civilisation undertakes to define its own identity in terms of its own notions and categories. TH E D IS C O U R S E O F IS L A M IS A T IO N

The way in which the idea of development will give way to indigenous notions and categories of other civilisations can be illustrated by briefly examining the

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discourse of islam isation of knowledge’. This discourse, which has its origins in the early 1980s, is based on the realisation that all social science disciplines are cultural constructions of western civilisation and have virtually no meaning or relevance for Muslim societies [Al-Faruqi, 1982; Arif, 1987; HIT, 1988; Davies, 1988; Sardar, 1989; AbuSulayman, 1993]. The purpose of Islamisation of knowledge, which has now become a world wide movement and an international discourse, is to generate disciplines that are a natural product of the world view and civilisation of Islam; and hence use Islamic categories and notions to describe goals and aspirations, thought and behaviour and problems and solutions of Muslim societies [Davies, 1991]. The discourse of Islamisation has been led by Islamic economics which has now produced a vast literature on both the theory and practice of economics within the world view of Islam [Siddiqui, 1981; Khan, 1987. Considerable work has also been done during the last decades on anthropology (which, according to Islamic criteria should not exist), sociology, psychology and political science. What Islamisation of disciplines has meant in actual terms for development can be judged by looking at the work of Muslim economists who first tried to undermine the western connotations of development by hedging it with Islamic terminology and ideas and then replaced it totally with Islamic categories. The ideas of Jafar Shaykh Idris and Khurshid Ahmad are good examples. Idris equates development with ‘service to God’ and describes it as a category of a person’s existence and life [Idris, 1982]. For Islam, the essence of a human being is a faculty with which everyone is naturally endowed: to be a complete human being, an individual must direct all his or her activities towards the service of God. This internal reality of a Muslim, argues Idris, must be reflected in the external organisation of human society, the pursuit of which is seen by Idris as ‘development’. Within the framework of the Islamic way of development, material and spiritual aspects of life are complementary. ‘To be able to live the good life of devotion of God, we have, therefore, to make the best use of the material resources of our world’ [Idris, 1982:16]. Talking about development without considering the spiritual side of people is meaningless; development must preserve the essence of our humanity. The qualities which make (humans) human are the cement which binds them together in a human society, and which keeps them wholesome as individual persons. Once they are lost, the individual starts to disintegrate, and the disintegration of society follows as a matter of course. When the individual finds no meaning to his(/her) life...then the society of which those individuals are members is sure to decline and fall. Why should one who does not care for his(/her) own, care for others? Why should one who sees no meaning in life defend the people to whom he(/she) happens to belong? [Idris, 1982: 16].

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Thus, for Idris, development is the pursuit of meaning in an individual’s life as well as the pursuit of material benefits: for him, the two go hand in hand. This approach to development, he argues, will free Muslim societies from being an annex of western civilisation where they have to borrow everything they have including ‘the worms in their intestines’ and allow them to flourish with their own identity and culture intact. Khurshid Ahmad [1980] offers a much more conceptual analysis. He argues that the philosophic foundation of the Islamic approach to development is based on four fundamental concepts: tawhid (the unity of God); rububiyyah (divine arrangements for nourishment, sustenance and directing things towards their perfection); khalifah (a person’s role as the trustee of God on earth); and tazkiyah ( ‘purification plus growth’). Tawhid and khalifah are two of the fundamental concepts of Islam and define the basic relationship between God and person, person and person, as well as the person’s relationship to nature and his/her terrestrial environment. Rububiyyah is ‘the divine model for the useful development of resources and their mutual support and sharing’. Tazkiyah is the concept that relates to the growth and development of people in all their relationships: the ultimate goal of tazkiyah is to purify and mould an individual, that holistic aggregate of individuals which form a society, and the envelope of material things and products that constantly interact with the individual and collective elements of society. Ahmad’s definition of tazkiyah focuses on individuals and relationships. Tazkiyah in all its dimensions, he writes, ‘is concerned with growth and expansion towards perfection through purification of attitudes and relationships’. In another essay, Ahmad [1970] isolated six ‘instruments’ of tazkiyah: dhikr or remembrance of God; ibadah or acts of servitude to God; tawbah or seeking the forgiveness of God; sabr or the spirit of perseverance; hasabah or criticism and self-criticism; and dua or supplication. All these instruments of tazkiyah essentially operate on the individual leading to his/her falah - prosperity in this world and the hereafter. This understanding of tazkiyah leads Ahmad to identify five essential features of development within an Islamic framework: (a) The Islamic concept of development has a comprehensive character and includes moral, spiritual and material aspects. Development becomes a goal- and value-orientated activity, devoted to optimisation of human well-being in all these dimensions. The moral and the material, the economic and the social, the spiritual and the physical are inseparable. It is not merely welfare in this world that is the objective. The welfare that Islam seeks extends to the life (in the) hereafter and there is no conflict between the two. This dimension is totally missing in the western concept of development.

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(b) The focus for development effort and the heart of the development process is man. Development, therefore, means the development of man and his physical and socio-cultural environment. According to the western concept it is the physical environment - natural and institutional - that provides the real area for development activities. Islam insists that the area of operation relates to man, within and without. As such human attitudes, incentives, tastes and aspirations are as much policy variables as physical resources, capital, labour, education, skill, organisation, etc. Thus, on the one hand, Islam shifts the focus of effort from the physical environment to individual and communities in their social setting and on the other enlarges the scope of development policy, with the consequent enlargement of the number of targets and instrument variables in any model of the economy. Another consequence of this shift in emphasis would be that maximum participation of the people at all levels of decision-making and plan-implementation would be stipulated. (c) In an Islamic framework, development is nothing but a multi-dimensional activity. As effort would have to be made simultaneously in a number of directions, the methodology of isolating other key factors and almost exclusive concentration on that would be theoretically untenable. Islam seeks to establish a balance between the different factors and forces. (d) Economic development involves a number of changes, quantitative as well as qualitative. Involvement with the quantitative, justified and necessary in its own right, has unfortunately led to the neglect of the qualitative aspects of development in particular and of life in general. Islam seeks to rectify this imbalance. (e) Among the dynamic principles of social life Islam has particularly emphasised two: firstly, the optimal utilisation of resources that God has endowed man and his physical environment; and secondly, their equitable use and distribution and the promotion of all human relationships on the basis of rights and justice. Islam commands the value of shukr (thankfulness to God by availing of His blessings) and adl (justice) and condemns the disvalues of kufr (denial of God and His blessings) and zulm (injustice) [Ahmad, 1980: 179-80]. These essential features of development in an Islamic framework lead Ahmad to define six goals of development policy in an Islamic society: human resource development, expansion of useful production, improvement of the quality of life, balanced development in different regions within a country, evolution of indigenous technology, reduction of national dependency on the outside world, and greater integration within the Muslim world. Both Idris and Ahmad were writing in the early 1980s when it was still

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thought that the western notion of development could be islam ised’ - that is, changed and modified to fit the world view of Islam. But, as critics later pointed out, what was actually happening was that Islamic ideals were being unwittingly accommodated to certain implicit axioms in the notion of development itself [Sardar, 1985]. Thus we find Ahmad’s analysis of tazkiyah to be rather limiting. Just as development economics emphasises individual producers and consumers, with supply and demand being the sum of their respective activities, so Ahmad confines tazkiyah to the role of personal piety and individual salvation: in his scheme, development is achieved through personal salvation rather than societal transformation. The focus of tazkiyah is not just the individual; Islam also seeks to build a society which enables its various elements and components to practise tazkiyah in a positive atmosphere. The literal meaning of tazkiyah is purification. It is a process of purification that all Muslim individuals and societies have to apply if they seek to be in a constant state of Islam. However, tazkiyah is not a static state of purification: it is a dynamic concept that seeks to motivate individuals and societies to grow by a constant process of purification. The Islamic institution of zakah, purification of one’s earnings by giving a fixed proportion of it to the less fortunate or by using it to promote works of public benefit, which is regarded as the third pillar of Islam and is a religious duty incumbent on every Muslim, is etymologically derived from tazkiyah. The idea of growth through purification is particularly unique to Islam; it incorporates the strange notion (to western minds) of increasing one’s wealth by actually subtracting from it: that is, giving it away to less fortunate members of society. Moreover, the process of purification acts as a rein on unchecked growth which could indeed make it impossible for societies and individuals to practise the instruments of tazkiyah. On the other hand, static or declining societies which could not even meet their basic needs would be unable to practise tazkiyah in its totality. Tazkiyah, therefore, demands that individuals and societies should grow within particular limits which provide them with time, ability and the environment for self-reflection and introspection, criticism and self-criticism, promotion of values and cultural authenticity - the societal elements that give living form to the process of purification. Tazkiyah, then, is that quality which ensures that Islamic society maintains critical variables within limits acceptable to its social and cultural values and its organisational and institutional structures. It is a steady, selective growth that requires Muslim societies to maintain their fundamental, internal balances while undergoing various processes of change. It requires Muslim societies to grow as far as is necessary to meet their basic requirements but it also demands a pace of change that makes it possible for people to match genuine needs with available resources and potentials and to find acceptable means for the

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realisation and implementation of feasible alternatives. Tazkiyah applies growth with the consensus of the people (otherwise the process of purification would be nullified) allowing no change without the full backing from the entire society and without the firm conviction of its necessity. It requires preservation of the natural and cultural heritage of Muslim societies as a living, dynamic environment from which they can draw their sustenance and aesthetic pleasure: this is purification in total action. Analysis of Islamic concepts such as tazkiyah brought Muslim scholars and economists who tried to ‘Islamise’ development during the 1980s - most notably, Umar Chapra, Nejatullah Siddiqi, Muhammad Abdul Mannan and Monzar Kahf - to the realisation that development could not be islam ised’ any more than alcohol can be declared an Islamic beverage. The notion of development just could not be applied to Muslim societies, no matter how the coy Muslim academic redefined it to placate Islamic sensibilities, without doing violence to the world view of Islam and placing Muslim societies in a linear teleology vis-a-vis the west. In a classical study, Lucian Pye [1966] defined development as being a multi-dimensional process of social change. The idea of social change, of movement of a society from one state of organisation, one system of ideas, beliefs and traditions and one stock of equipment to another, is central to the concept of development. Thus, Muslim scholars and economists have come to realise that to ask or motivate Islamic societies to develop is to ask them to abandon their system of ideas, beliefs and traditions for another system that is perceived to be higher up on the scale of development. There is just no way of shirking the issue: development can never have any meaning for Muslim societies. But the wrapping of development in Islamic terminology does perform a very important function for both traditional and modern elites in Muslim societies: it provides an Islamic justification for propagating capitalism (indeed, Islamised development has been uncharitably described as ‘capitalism minus interest’); it serves as a useful instrument to whip up sentiments and support for obscurantism; and it can be used to legitimise the power base of certain leaders with allegedly Islamic credentials. Not surprisingly, concerned Muslim scholars are now becoming coy about Islamising western concepts and categories. In recent Islamic economics literature, the concept of development is conspicuous by its total absence. Muslim economists are now increasingly using Islamic categories to describe the process by which Muslim societies move from a dependent state to a fully self-sufficient one. The most common notion for describing this process is not tazkiyah but falah, which is loosely translated as ‘human well being’. In his seminal work, Islam and the Economic Challenge, Umar Chapra [7992; 6] describes falah as the fundamental goal of a Muslim society; the notion offalah, he argues, gives ‘utmost importance to brotherhood and socio-economic justice

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and requires a balanced satisfaction of both the material and the spiritual needs of all human beings’. Muhammad Akram Khan describes falah as a comprehensive state of spiritual, cultural, political, social and economic well-being in this world and God’s pleasure in the hereafter. Because of its eternal nature falah is primarily a state of bliss in the hereafter. But it is also applicable to conditions of survival, economic well-being and human dignity in this world. At the micro level, it refers to a situation where an individual is gainfully employed, free from want, enjoys freedom, participates in social and political life and has opportunities to grow spiritually and culturally ... At the macro level, a society can achieve falah, for example, if it is politically and economically independent, has institutional arrangements to establish economic justice, involves its people in decision-making and provides environments congenial to physical and spiritual health. Its GNP may not match any of the present-day industrially developed societies. It can still be at a state of falah [Khan, 19911 It is important to note that falah does not incorporate the ideas of perpetual growth or continuous, linear movement towards more and more material prosperity: indeed, overabundance and wastefulness would negate falah; and falah can be had without material prosperity. The idea of balance and harmony is deeply embedded in the concept of falah. Given the power of authentic Islamic notions such as falah and tazkiyah, it is not surprising that attempts to build a contemporary Islamic economics now rely exclusively on Islamic categories and notions not just for theory building but also for devising pragmatic policies and practical societal solutions. The abandonment of the concept of development in recent Islamic economic and political thought is an indication not just of the confidence that Muslims are acquiring about their own culture and civilisation and about their own ways of knowing, but also of the re-emergence of a thriving, dynamic Muslim civilisation of the future. What is happening in Muslim civilisation is also happening in Chinese and Indian civilisations [Goonatilake, 1992]. It will be a few decades before we witness genuine plurality on a global scale, before authentically different ways of knowing, doing and being human become the norm. But that future, as they say in Muslim societies, is written: written in non-western concepts and categories that are now coming to the fore. Of course, a multicivilisational world could lead, as Samuel Huntington [1993] has argued, to a ‘Clash of Civilisations’. But that, as Huntington’s own analysis shows, is purely a western worry. Our concern must be that such standard and hollow thought could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only alternative is a determined commitment to overcome the fear that is inherent in the western psyche, to embrace the emergence of true diversity and plurality,

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not as a loss of the west’s own definitional power but as an opportunity for a new kind of recovery and expression of its better self. As Ashis Nandy has written: the flip-side of any cultural self-expression outside the west has to be an archaeology of knowledge which excavates and fights for the lost or repressed west. Knowledge, too, like suffering, is an indivisible human experience. Self-aware, self-critical knowledge has to realise its own indivisibility by reaffirming the indivisibility of human and social choices in the matter of human happiness and suffering and human ends and means [Nandy, 1987: xvii]. The recovery of the ‘repressed west’ involves the abandonment of the concept of development with its embedded implications of a struggle for superiority and an onslaught of imperial aspirations. A development free multicivilisational world could generate a more companionable concept of distributive well being, of new kinds of growth that can be shared, or new alliances of interests and common aspirations that can collaborate across civilisational lines without demanding the denial of anyone’s identity either in the non-west or the west. Development-led imperialism required the west to stand behind it own, self made barricades of bravado. It has brought the west affluence, but it has also exacted considerable costs. A development free world of numerous big and small civilisations, each working out its distinctive way of knowing, doing and being, offers the prospect of discovering that the highest human aspirations are shared values, whose expression through difference makes their realisation more attainable for all people - in the non­ west as well as the west. Humility is just as central to the western value system as any other, although it has seldom been employed. Beyond development, it might work wonders for us all.

REFEREN CES AbuSulayman, AbdulHamid, 1993, Towards an Islamic Theory of International Relations: New Directions for Methodology and Thought, Hemdon, VA: HIT. Ahmad, Khurshid, 1970, ‘Some Aspects of Character Building’, The Muslim, Vol.8, N o.l, pp.9-15 and Vol.8, No.2, pp.39-42. Ahmad, Khurshid, 1980, ‘Economic Development in an Islamic Framework’, in Khurshid Ahmad (ed.), Studies in Islamic Economics, Leicester: Islamic Foundation. Al-Faruqi, Ismael, 1982, Islamization o f Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan, Herndon, VA: HIT. Alvares, Claude, 1992, Science, Development and Violence, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Arif, Muhammad, 1987, ‘Islamization of Knowledge and Some Methodological Issues in Paradigm Building: The General Case of Social Science with a Special Focus on Economics’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol.4, N o.l, pp.51-72. Buarque, Cristovam, 1993, The End of Economics: Ethics and the Disorder of Progress, London: Zed Books.

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Chapra, M. Umar, 1992, Islam and the Economic Challenge, Leicester: Islamic Foundation. Chowdhury, Zafrullah, 1995, The Politics of Essential Drugs, London: Zed Books. Congress on Traditional Sciences and Technologies of India, 1993, Proceedings of the Congress on Traditional Sciences and Technologies of India: 28 November-3 December 1993, Bombay: Indian Institute of Technology, (2 volumes). Dator, Jim, 1992, ‘Surfing the Tsunamis of Change’, Futura, Vol.2, No.2, pp.47-55. Davies, Merryl Wyn, 1988, Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic Anthropology, London: Mansell. Davies, Merryl Wyn, 1991, ‘Rethinking Knowledge: “Islamization” and the Future’, Futures, Vol.23, No.3, pp.231-47. Funtowicz, S. and J.R. Ravetz, 1994, ‘The Worth of a Songbird: Ecological Economics as a PostNormal Science’, Ecological Economics, Vol. 10, pp. 197-207. Goonatilake, Susantha, 1992, ‘The Voyages of Discovery and the Loss and Re-discovery of “Others” Knowledge’, Impact of Science on Society, No. 167, pp.241-64. Griesgraber, Jo Marie and Bernhard G. Gunter (eds.), 1995, Promoting Development: Effective Global Institutions for the Twenty-First Century ( ‘Rethinking Bretton Woods’ series), London: Pluto Press. Halloran, Richard, 1996, ‘The Rising East’, Foreign Policy; No. 102, pp.3-21. Henderson, Hazel, 1991, Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics, Indianapolis, IN: Knowledge Systems. Henry III, William A., 1994, In Defense o f Elitism, New York: Doubleday. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, Vol.72, No.3, pp.22-49. Idris, Jafar Shaykh, 1982, ‘The Islamic Way of Developing Nations’, in Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Convention of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, Plainsfield, IN: Association of Muslim Social Scientists. Institute of Policy Studies, 1994, Elimination of Riba from the Economy, Islamabad: Institute of Policy Studies. International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), 1988, Islam: Source and Purpose o f Knowledge, Herndon, VA: IIIT. Jazairy, Idriss, Alamgir, Mohiuddin and Theresa Panuccio, 1992, The State of World Rural Poverty: An Inquiry into Its Causes and Consequences, London: IT Publications for International Fund for Agricultural Development. Kennedy, Paul, 1993, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, London: HarperCollins. Khan, Muhammad Akram, 1987, Islamic Economics: Annotated Sources in English and Urdu, Leicester: Islamic Foundation. Khan, Muhammad Akram, 1991, ‘The Future of Islamic Economics’, Futures, Vol.23, No.3, pp.248-61. Kothari, Rajni, 1993, Poverty: Human Consciousness and the Amnesia of Development, London: Zed Books. Kothari, Smitu and Harsh Sethi (eds.), 1989, Rethinking Human Rights, New York: New Horizon Press. Kuhn, T.S., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lai, Vinay, 1992, ‘The Imperialism of Human Rights’, Focus on Law Studies, Vol.8, No.l, pp.5-11. Lipietz, Alain, 1992, Towards A New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Manzoor, S. Parvez, 1994, ‘Human Rights: Secular Transcendence or Cultural Imperialism?’, Muslim World Book Review, Vol. 15, No.l, pp.3-10. Mazrui, Ali, 1995, ‘Understanding Africa at the Turn of the Century’, RSA Journal, pp.32-40, April. Muzaffar, Chandra, 1996, Rethinking Human Rights, Penang: Just World Trust. Nandy, Ashis, 1987, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nandy, Ashis, 1994, ‘Culture, Voice and Development: A Primer for the Unsuspecting’, Thesis Eleven, Vol.39, pp. 1-18. Ormerod, Paul, 1994, The Death of Economics, London: Faber & Faber. Panikkar, Raimundo, 1989, ‘Is Human Rights a Western Concept?’, Breakthrough, Vol. 10, Nos.2-3, pp.30-4. Parekh, Bhikku, 1993, ‘The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy’, in David Held (ed.),

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Prospects for Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pye, L. W. et al., 1966, Aspects of Political Change, Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Sardar, Ziauddin, 1977, Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World, London: Croom Helm. Sardar, Ziauddin, 1985, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come, London: Mansell. Sardar, Ziauddin, 1989, ‘Islamization of Knowledge: A State-of-the-Art Report’ in Z. Sardar (ed.), An Early Crescent: The Future of Knowledge and the Environment in Islam, London: Mansell. Siddiqui, Nejatullah, 1981, Muslim Economic Thinking, Leicester: Islamic Foundation. Vallianatos, E.G., 1994, Harvest of Devastation: The Industrialisation of Agriculture and its Human and Environmental Consequences, New York: Apex Press. Welford, Richard, 1995, Environmental Strategy and Sustainable Development, London: Routledge.

Development Theory and the Politics of Location: An Example from North Eastern Brazil JANE L. COLLINS This contribution contrasts the ways that two distinct intellectual traditions conceptualise the role o f global forces in local environments. It briefly traces the history o f both ‘grassroots' or populist development and a \politics o f location ’ and examines their application to a single ‘development’ context: the introduction o f large-scale irrigation to drought-stricken regions o f north-eastern Brazil The two approaches produce radically different accounts o f development processes in the newly irrigated regions. While grassroots approaches emphasise the incursion o f new global forces into local communities, approaches derived from a politics o f location emphasise existing local inequalities and the ways they are altered by new investments and form s o f production. The study argues that populist approaches to development ignore the ways that global forces have long shaped daily life in most parts o f the world, and that they rely on a static and impoverished notion o f local culture. It advocates a politics o f location that analyses local practices and meanings in terms o f their relation to power. IN T R O D U C T IO N

Much has been written in the 1990s about the demise of the grand paradigms of development, the growing irrelevance of modernisation and dependency theories, and the movement away from Marxist and structural-historical approaches. For many researchers and practitioners, there no longer appears to be a coherent way of organising thinking about development process, of describing trends or conceptualising the changes occurring. New models that can apprehend the international dimensions of development are essential for researchers and social movements attempting to analyse and act in a global Jane L. Collins, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. The author gratefully acknowledges the research collaboration of Jose Ferreira Irmao and Andrea Melo of the Department of Economics, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Research was funded by the National Science Foundation (USA).

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context, and many researchers are rightfully engaged in their reconstruction. In the interim, attention has shifted away from totalising frameworks to the local level, and researchers have placed greater weight on our ability to understand development in local communities. Within academic circles, it has become an extremely popular move to gesture toward the local as the place where we really know what we know - where direct experience guarantees the efficacy of our analysis. This shift has made the ‘local’ and how to theorise it contested terrain. In this study I will address two perspectives that have contended for interpretation of local development processes. One is the paradigm of ‘grassroots’ development, a populist approach that argues for the adoption of the goals and visions of ‘local populations’.1 The other is a more recent ‘politics of location’, espoused by feminist and post-modern theorists as an alternative way of conceptualising local realities.2 1 aim to think through the differences in these two approaches, assess their politics, their analytical cogency, and their ability to trace links between local and global events. I will then present an example of the different conclusions reached by the two approaches in the context of a specific local development process: the introduction of large-scale irrigation projects to parts of north-eastern Brazil. The concept of the local, as deployed in the 1990s, has much in common with Habermas’ notion of lifeworld. For Habermas, the lifeworld is a space of primary affiliation, a private space of family and community counterpoised to the ‘system’, or public sphere of state and market economy. Habermas argued that the colonisation of lifeworld by system was a central dynamic of the modem era, and that the social movements of our day have largely been called up in resistance to that intrusive force [Habermas, 1984]. The lifeworld is thus a site of agency and resistance to hegemony, the home of social movements, and the place where authentic culture lives. As Tucker points out in his introduction, our thinking about development is a sign system that requires unpacking. Romantic invocations of the local share with Habermas’ lifeworld the desire to define a sphere of innocent sociality. Grassroots communities become defined as repositories of tradition to be defended against the depredations of global economy.3 Gemeinschaft survives in such communities [Illich, 1981]. In discourse critical of mainstream development programmes, the local is often associated with heterogeneity and vitality, and is counterpoised to the homogenising and repressive forces of the global economy. Nancy Fraser [1989:134] has cogently criticised Habermas’ concept of the lifeworld, arguing that for women living within the patriarchal family, ‘colonisation’ by the state or market can bring elements of liberation. The lifeworld is no free space, she argues, but possesses its own power relations. In this study, I seek to extend Fraser’s critique to the usage of the concept of

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the local in discussions of development. While the discourses within which local is invoked are almost always counter-hegemonic, critical of power, and supportive of social movements for change, I argue that some invocations of the local are more useful, both theoretically and politically, than others. Specifically, populist concepts of the local are utopian, rather than analytical, projecting a desired reality rather than an existing one. In particular, they ignore the ways in which global forces have long shaped daily life in most parts of the world, and they rely on a static and impoverished notion of culture. Global forces do not assail local communities from without; they are already present within them. Culture is not stored and protected in local communities, but is the idiom through which both domination and resistance occur. G R A S S R O O T S D E V E L O P M E N T A S A P A R A D IG M

Grassroots development is a concept with a long history. It can perhaps most reasonably be traced back to the ‘community development’ movement immediately following the Second World War. In Britain, it can be traced to 1948 and the initial efforts by the British Colonial Office to prepare for African independence, as well as to the Village Development Programme for India, begun in the 1950s [Long, 1977]. In the United States, the first major community development programmes were initiated by the Ford Foundation in India in 1952 and extended to Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, Jordan and Thailand by 1956. The Community Development Division of the US State Department was established in 1954 and by 1959 it had 105 staff and projects in 25 countries [Holdcroft, 1984]. Through these programmes, teams of development experts were deployed to ‘democratise’ Third World communities in order to prepare them for modernisation and the market. From Hacienda Vicos in Peru to the Etawah Project in India, the goal was to build local democratic institutions and to develop an egalitarian citizenry ready for market transactions and sympathetic to the West [Holdcroft, 1984]. The goals of the community development movement in the United States resonated with those held by many citizens who supported the movement with their tax dollars. It invoked images of the New England town meeting, and rhetorics of states’ rights and local control. The movement was consistent with values that many in the US held dear and perceived to have been struggled for in two World Wars; the Community Development Programme was presented as extending these values to the rest of the world. As new cold war rhetoric emerged, such values became the territory to be defended against Soviet expansion. US hegemony in the Third World could then be pursued under the banner of ‘making the world safe for democracy’. The growth of US development agencies in the 1960s and 1970s and their role in financing Third World states, and the strategic deployments of military

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and food aid as dominant practices for achieving US goals, placed grassroots issues of the 1950s on a back burner. Big projects using machinery and technical expertise imported from the first world became dominant [Payer, 1982; Tendler, 1975]. By the 1970s, populism had become a contestatory rhetoric for challenging development bureaucracies, adopted by leftist social scientists and social movement activists opposing mega-development projects and advocating self-determination for disempowered groups. Making populist claims was tactically effective, in the sense that it appealed to values that development agencies in the US were supposed to be pursuing, thereby enabling grassroots advocates within these agencies to gain some attention. Proportionately small amounts of funding were set aside for ‘basic needs’ projects, for ‘integrated rural development’ or for women’s income generation. Meanwhile, other proponents of populist approaches worked outside the development establishment (though often under contract to it) in non­ governmental organisations whose growth exploded during the 1980s. While advocates of grassroots development were able to achieve a measure of success in advocating for disenfranchised groups during the 1970s and 1980s, their strategic elision of ‘less-powerful’ with ‘local’, of ‘impoverished’ with ‘grassroots’ and of contestatory social mobilisation with democracy made their populism a blunt tool for achieving social change. Local communities were painted with the brush of small-town USA, portrayed as repositories of good values and hard work. Gestures toward the local argued that communities and localities could make good (and presumably democratic) decisions for themselves, side-stepping questions of power relations within local communities, the continuation of old patterns of patronage, and new forms of market domination. TH E P O L IT IC S O F L O C A T IO N

In current usage, the term ‘politics of location’ has come to mean being involved in local issues, starting from what you know best; your own community or home base. It became an important part of political movements, particularly Green movements, in the 1980s. As a philosophy, or a politics, it reflects disillusionment with larger-scale, more all-encompassing political movements. One theorist has paraphrased the impulse behind a politics of location in the following way: i don’t know anything about that anymore. I can’t control it. I know no politics which can get hold of it. Its too big. Its too inclusive. Everything is on its side. There are some terrains in between, little interstices, the smaller spaces within which I have to work’ [Hall, 1991: 34]. Proponents of a politics of location argue that in order to mobilise people around issues such as those posed by GATT and NAFTA, these trade agreements must be linked to developments in people’s own communities,

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such as job loss or gain or changing environmental regulations. As originally formulated by the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich [1986], however, the concept of ‘politics of location’ had a somewhat harder edge. Rich wrote the influential essay in which she coined the term in 1984, upon returning from a visit to Nicaragua. She begins this essay by reflecting on a game she had played as a child, in which she had mentally placed herself at the centre of an ever-expanding set of landscapes or contexts: Adrienne Rich, Edgevale Rd., Baltimore MD, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Universe. In the essay, she questions why it seemed so natural to her to see herself at the centre of all this, and asks, ‘at the centre of what’? For Rich, a politics of location was not an affirmation of one’s own experience as a basis for knowledge. Rather, she demanded that people critically evaluate what they consider their own iocal knowledge’. She asked, for example, what role white racial privilege played in shaping her experience of being at the centre. Thinking of her experiences in Nicaragua, she took issue with Virginia Woolf’s famous claim that ‘as a woman I have no country’. She said instead, ‘as a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or saying three times, “as a woman my country is the whole world’” . Rich drew on a tradition of feminist thought that demands that what counts as experience be critically evaluated. This tradition does not take locality and ‘home’ as the site of foundational knowledge outside politics, but as the place where our politics are constituted. Still, Rich fully endorsed ‘beginning with the material’ texture of everyday life (p.212) and locating the grounds upon which we understand and are connected to things we speak about. Such a view contrasts sharply with a populism that simply insists that small, or local, is better, more authentic or innocent of power. TH E A P P R O A C H E S C O N T R A S T E D

I would argue that a politics of location can be distinguished from a more traditional grassroots populism in four ways. First, a politics of location does not see local communities as isolated from global processes but as embedded within them. An older populism conceptualised the local communities it studied as pristine repositories of authentic traditions drawn into trajectories of development emanating from the West.4 Proponents of a politics of location have not seen history in this way, as a progressive tightening of integration processes which erode the autonomy of local level social organisation. Rather, they have asked what kinds of historical changes open spaces for decentralised forms of social and economic organisation, and what kinds destroy them. In a series of lectures presented at the Fernand Braudel Centre in

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Binghamton, New York, British culture theorist Stuart Hall argued that the present emphasis on local political possibilities has itself been engendered by globalisation. It is a direct response, he says, to processes that have undermined the significance of nation-states. ‘Global and local are two faces of the same movement from an epoch of globalisation dominated by the nation-state ... to something new’ [1991: 27]. This new epoch differs from more traditional international trading patterns that were based on the nation­ state in its degree of functional integration, with th e, fragmentation of production processes and their relocation on a global scale. It is also characterised by the growth of new regional and supranational monetary and financial arrangements. These new arrangements, in Hall’s words, ‘go above and below’ the nation-state, with some ‘tendencies pushing nation-states toward supranational integration’ and others strengthening iocal allegiances and identities within nation-states’ [1993: 354]. Hall sees the very possibility of local community and of ethnic identity in the 1990s as conditioned by regimes of accumulation and the relative strength of the nation-state. Second, following Dorothy Smith [1987] and Foucault, a politics of location recognises that power does not emanate from a single source such as the modern nation-state but that ‘multiple, fluid structures of domination’ shape the life of every community [Mohanty, 1991: 13]. Mohanty has eloquently argued for a conceptual framework capable of linking institutions and structures to the politics of everyday life. She borrows the concept ‘relations of ruling’ from sociologist Dorothy Smith to discuss these structures of domination because, she argues, Smith’s concept ‘grasps power, organization, direction and regulation as more pervasively structured than can be expressed in traditional concepts’. According to such a view, local communities are neither ‘in’ nor ‘outside’ of the domination of the nation-state and global forces, which proceed on a single front and at a single pace. They are tied to powerful interests by a variety of structures of domination, including schools, health care systems, military forces, immigration laws, judicial systems, markets, media, some of which eradicate local practices and institutions and some of which work through them (p.39). Third, a politics of location not only recognises that power is diffuse, but also understands that it is differentially distributed within local communities. Individuals within a locality relate to globalising forces in different ways. Opportunities are provided for some but not others to take advantage of, and to participate in, power. While proponents of grassroots development approaches have often tended to portray local communities as defending their ways of life, their production of subsistence foods, and their land tenure systems against encroachments by the state or international development agencies, they have often failed to recognise the different relationships that local groups may have to such processes, and the local conflicts they may unleash.

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Fourth, a politics of location forces the individual studying local development processes to acknowledge the partiality of his or her own account and the ways in which it is linked to power. That power includes the agencies that fund us, the local institutions with which we affiliate, the disciplinary discourse that shapes our questions. A politics of location does not insist that we divest ourselves of the effects of these factors, but that we acknowledge how they shape and limit our vision, and that we name the limitations and special nature of our perspective. P O L IT IC S O F L O C A T IO N V S . G R A S S R O O T S D E V E L O P M E N T IN N O R T H E A S T E R N B R A Z IL

The difference between a politics of location and a grassroots populism was raised for me in vivid terms in the context of research I conducted in the Sao Francisco River Valley of North Eastern Brazil in 1991 and 1993. I was studying large fruit farms in that region which produce mangoes and grapes for export to Japan, western Europe and the United States. Working with Brazilian researchers from the Universidade Federal do Pernambuco in Recife, I conducted interviews with state-run development agencies, owners of small and large farms, exporters, bankers, union members and organisers and extension workers. I conducted a systematic survey of large farmers in the region regarding their labour practices, and visited farms and packing houses in order to observe such practices and to hear about them from workers. Using these techniques, I attempted to construct an understanding of the transition between the period of fazenda (large estate) domination and a new era of irrigated agro-export production. In particular, my goals were to examine the new forms of labour market segmentation emerging in the export era. In the 1970s, the Brazilian government built a large hydroelectric dam on the Sao Francisco River with support from the World Bank and a number of bilateral development agencies. The dam created a reservoir of 4,150 k m , flooding several small towns and forcing the relocation of some 65,000 residents [Duque, 1984; Sigaud, 1988]. The state appropriated the flooded lands, as well as large sections along the river in order to bring the land under irrigation in public projects. Most of this land was previously owned by the local elite and was used for low productivity cattle operations. Until the 1970s, cattle ranching was the predominant economic activity in the region, along with small-scale agricultural production in the river’s flood plain. Land tenure was highly unequal, with 52.4 per cent of the land held by the 2.5 per cent of owners with more than 100 hectares, and 10.5 per cent in the hands of the 61.2 per cent with less than 20 hectares [Fundacao Joaquim Nabuco, 1988]. Sharecropping was the most common way for elite town-dwellers to work their riverside

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properties (granjas or sitios) and the predominant way for poor families to gain access to land. Both large and smallholders lost access to land when the state appropriated it for the reservoir and irrigation district and both were, theoretically, to be accommodated with new land in the large projects. This is a situation where traditional constructions of ‘the local’ as a repository of shared values and democratic processes do not work well. The riverine communities of Petrolina and Juazeiro were dominated in the pre-dam period by elite families, descended from the famous coroneis, or local bosses, of the north-east. Members of these families held high political office in the states of Pernambuco and Bahia, were influential in national politics, and sent their children to school in Sao Paulo or Paris. They entertained important international dignitaries when they visited the region [Chilcote, 1990]. Their lands provided them with a financial base not because of their productivity but because they gave access to state-subsidised credit and to an array of lucrative benefits unleashed by the state through drought relief programmes. Any analysis that wishes to privilege ‘local’ social process has to come to terms with the tremendous inequalities of such a system, its patterns of patronage and exclusion, and the ‘multiple, fluid structures of domination’ implicated in its reproduction. As the Brazilian scholar Otamar de Carvalho [1988] has demonstrated, the elite families of the region adamantly opposed large-scale irrigation for many years because of the disruption it would pose to the benefits they derived from the industria das secas, or drought industry. Only when the state was able to convince the most forward-looking fractions of commercial capital that irrigated production would be viable, and that they would get their lost lands back with valuable irrigation infrastructure in place, could it move ahead with irrigation in this region. Although, the state introduced legislation requiring that 80 per cent of expropriated land be reallocated ‘in the social interest’, that is to smallholders, in the end only 20 per cent of land was set aside for smallholders, and 80 per cent went to the larger agricultural enterprises [Carvalho, 1988: 362, 364]. The elite families of Petrolina/Juazeiro retained their dominance of the local economy under irrigation, and in 1993 they farmed a significant proportion of the 100,000 hectares of irrigated land under production. In addition, they control a large proportion of the construction and processing industries that have grown up to support irrigated production. They were joined, however, by investors from outside the region, many from the prosperous regions of southern Brazil and others from Japan, France, and the United States. Grocery chains, export firms, hotel chains and others flocked to the region. Predictably, smallholders and sharecroppers who lost their land did not fare well in the shuffle of the booming economy. Most were unable to wait the

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several years it took to receive new land on the state-run irrigation schemes. Many were insufficiently remunerated for the land and houses they lost due to flooding or expropriation. Most left the region, or were absorbed into a growing army of wage workers and service sector employees in PetrolinaJuazeiro. The few small-scale producers who were given five hectare plots on the irrigation schemes did not keep them for long as they lacked the capital, marketing networks, or expertise needed to produce high value export crops [Collins, 1995a]. While the laws requiring that a proportion of land be set aside for small-holdings on the irrigation schemes remained in place, the majority of these plots were quickly taken over by businessmen from the towns. The new (non-peasant) owners of the five-hectare plots were called colonos inteligentes (intelligent occupants), in derogation of their former owners. Even in the heat of the agro-export boom of 1993, remnants of the former fazenda (large estate) economy were still visible and were being actively woven into new economic practices. Several modern vineyards provided housing for workers on their property or built creches and schools. While the relationships involved approximated those of the ‘company town’, farmers and workers of the Valley tended to see them as continuous with the pre-existing pattern of the fazenda with its moradores, or live-in workers. On-site housing not only ensured a supply of relatively experienced workers, but made workers’ continued access to housing and social services contingent on compliance with the work regime. Even new entrants to the region, such as one Japanese vineyard owner, adopted such practices. This businessman referred to the agricultural workers on his farm as ‘meus filhos’ (my children), adopting the local fazenda-era vocabulary that meshed with his own understanding of work hierarchy [Kondo, 1990]. One Japanese immigrant who had used wage labour for several years was experimenting with the reintroduction of sharecropping on part of his property as a way of avoiding the high supervisory costs associated with wage labour. While remnants of the earlier regime of landed wealth and its work structure persisted, new forms of inequality were introduced to the Sao Francisco Valley along with irrigation and agro-export production regimes. Labour practices on fruit and vegetable farms created a work force segmented into local and migrant workers and men and women. As Stuart Hall has said ‘the more we understand about the development of capital itself, the more we understand that ... alongside the drive to commodify everything ... is another critical part of its logic which works in and through specificity’ [Hall 1991: 29]. As market relations expand in the Valley, new forms of inequality which draw on existing social characteristics of the population, are being created. Fruit and vegetable production is notoriously labour-intensive. For this reason, as well as climatic considerations, international banks and development agencies have suggested that their production is well-suited to developing

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nations. The labour intensive work of producing fruits and vegetables is also held to be particularly appropriate for women. Promotional brochures aiming to lure foreign investors to the Sao Francisco Valley juxtapose pictures of sophisticated irrigation technology with images of women working side-byside with their children in the fields. In certain labour-intensive crops in the Valley, particularly grapes, women workers are preferred to men and form up to 65 per cent of the labour force [Collins, 1995b]. Firms from outside the region were the first to hire women for a wage, but local firms quickly followed suit, breaking with local traditions and divisions of labour. Large landowners rely on these new forms of labour force segmentation to control and discipline the labour force and to keep wages low. As Fernandez-Kelly [1982] has noted, local and global forces intersect in local labour markets. It is in these labour markets that the needs of firms for a particular kind of labour at a particular price intersect with the needs of a local population for jobs. Just as the firms’ needs are conditioned by aspects of the competitive environment within the industry, the form and scale of capital investment, supply and demand fluctuations and available technology [Fernandez-Kelly, 1982: 3], the local population’s need for jobs is conditioned by unemployment rates for men and women, unwaged opportunities to contribute to family income and prevailing wages. In addition, local labour markets are the sites where a particular community’s understandings of gender, ethnicity and work interact with the understandings held by capitalist firms. The interplay between local and global forces in local labour markets can have a range of outcomes. As Hall [1993], Appadurai [1990] and others have noted, the impact of global investm ent patterns is not inevitably ‘homogenisation’ of local patterns to some dominant western norm. While a restructuring of local economies results from foreign investment and export production, local populations have often played an important role in shaping and/or resisting the new social forms that result. At times, Fernandez-Kelly [1982:101] notes, multinational corporations can ‘benefit from and accentuate preexisting imbalances in labour markets’. In these cases, they appropriate and deepen existing gender and ethnic divisions and enhance the illusion of their naturalness. In other cases, they may contradict prevailing notions of social order, ‘employing sectors of the population who were not previously part of the work force (such as most women) while excluding those who were (such as men)’ [ibid.: 101]. In the Sao Francisco Valley, insertion in export markets led in some instances to the reinforcement or reinvention of pre-existing forms of domination, such as live-in workers or sharecropping. But the large-scale employment of women destabilised and opened to contest many aspects of gender relations in ways that were analogous to what Stolcke [1984] has described for the coffee-producing zones of southern Brazil. She has shown how the employment of women under new wage labour regimes cracked the

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structure of the patriarchal families that had formerly sharecropped together in that region. Labour markets may be local, but they are not outside the world economy, and they are not grassroots organisations. The most important labour union in the region, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workers’ Union), provided another example of the complexity of power-charged social relations in the Sao Francisco Valley. Historically, labour issues in rural Brazil have been tied to the institution of sharecropping and other indirect, semi-servile forms of remuneration. Thus, the Rural Workers’ Union has primarily, throughout its history, represented smallholders, sharecroppers and renters and has been largely concerned with access to land [Nejfa, 1986: 55]. With the rapid growth of agro-industry in the Sao Francisco Valley, and the widespread adoption of production regimes served by wage labour, the Union now represents an unwieldy mixture of smallholders (who often employ wage labourers) and workers themselves. As one union representative explained in 1993, smallholders are often the worst employers because they are under-capitalised. They can rarely afford to pay benefits required by the State, so they rarely sign work cards, leaving the work context unregulated and workers without recourse in disputes. They can never afford to provide housing, child care or schools. Union representatives spoke frankly about the difficulties of organising workers and employers in the same union. In transition between fazenda economy and modern agro-export regime, the Sao Francisco Valley in 1993 was an amalgam of the hierarchical social relations pertaining to the pre- 1970s landlord/sharecropper era and the capitalist classes and labour force segmentation practices of the irrigation period. How does one speak straightforwardly about ‘the local’ in such a context? Who are the representatives of popular interests in the region? Even amongst institutions most likely to represent impoverished and disenfranchised groups - the unions - complex sets of power relations render attempts to locate a single ‘local voice’ ludicrous. In his evaluation of three other irrigation schemes established in the Brazilian north east (and drawing implications for the Sao Francisco Valley), Anthony Hall [1978] severely criticises irrigation as a development strategy. He argues that irrigation generates little employment (which is not true in the Sao Francisco Valley), and that smallholders are unable to participate competitively in the large schemes (which is probably true in most cases [Collins, 1995a]). His book, Drought and Irrigation in Northeast Brazil, concluded with a set of recommendations that are a classic example of a populist ‘gesture to the local’ as a way of solving development problems. He recommends targeting small-scale producers, instituting collective forms of production, devolving decision-making to tenant farmers, and providing these farmers with access to credit and other resources.

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Hall’s book has stimulated a tremendous amount of debate among Brazilian development scholars. For some, it was simply naive in its recommendations that the state preferentially channel benefits to smallholders and sharecroppers. Given that drought relief programmes had always benefitted the region’s elites, by allowing them, among other things, to use state money to employ drought victims, Brazilian scholars scoffed at the assertion that smallholders should be targeted, without specifying where the political will or enforcement would come from. In his response to the book, economist Jose Ferreira Irmao [1979: 365] writes that ‘the scant attention given by the irrigation program to the poorest sectors of the population should not be surprising, since the general policy of the state is not directed to these lower-income groups’ and ‘even if those mechanisms of policy are instituted, the benefits will accrue to the most privileged groups of rural society’. In a more scathing attack, Otamar de Carvalho [1988: 384] accused Hall of proposing a fundamentally conservative programme, since his recommendations to support smallholders would leave the region’s property structure unmodified, and would in no way challenge the power or economic base of the local elite. Carvalho and Ferreira advocate attention to the political mechanisms and power relations that have perpetuated elite domination as a prerequisite to opening up local economies. This debate is in many ways an argument over what constitutes the ‘local’. For Anthony Hall, the ‘local’ is a utopian construct. It is not about existing smallholder communities embedded in complex networks of relations with the wider society. Rather it is about communities to be created by the state, in which smallholders would be given what they need to produce, encouraged to co-operate, and somehow be unleashed from the power relations with elites and the state that have formerly oppressed them. For Ferreira, Carvalho and other critics of Hall, ‘local’ is the lens they use to examine the place where powerful elites make their power felt. They see the local environment as a complex place where various interests play themselves out. Figuring out how to move forward in a way that would increase the social welfare of the entire population requires analysis of how the local elites hold power, how they are supported by powerful interests outside the region, how less powerful groups are integrated into this system, and what their ‘bargaining power’ or strengths might be. It is the analysis of these ‘multiple, fluid structures of domination’ that Chandra Mohanty [1991: 13] calls for when she says we should study ‘relations of ruling’. It is what Adrienne Rich [1986: 219] refers to when she says that we need ‘to name the ground w e’re coming from, the conditions we have taken for granted’. A politics of the local is not simply an invocation then, of the infallibility of perspectives grounded in daily experience. It is a call to look closely at how power plays itself out in daily life.

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C O N C L U S IO N S

In many ways, the proposition behind this study is obvious. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a myriad case studies have detailed local inequalities and the multiple ways that power flows through local communities. Yet at the level of prevailing models of development, the weight of these studies has not necessarily been felt. They have not penetrated the cultural models held by those researchers and lay persons who find in the grassroots an appealing vision of hands-on democracy, face-to-face relationships, and direct experience with the day-to-day realities of development. That vision invites an invocation of the local as panacea. We heartily wish that we could devolve decision-making to communities where right-thinking men and women would exercise choice and forge compromises. That would make the job of policy, or of politics, so much easier. With the decline of monolithic models of development, the tendency to gesture to the local has become that much greater. As Probyn [1990: 186] has said ‘postmodernists of various inclinations have pointed out that the world is a confusing place to live right now ... Against the apparently unending range of complexities, it is tempting to go the route of Baudrillard and others and treat life as simulation and live out the local in abstraction’.5 Postmodern disillusionment with frameworks such as Marxism and political economy has led many researchers to grasp hold of the local as a site of agency and resistance to hegemony, the home of social movements, the hope for the future. This newer invocation echoes the earlier grassroots or populist usages of the term. Both uses define the local as a place of innocence and unproblematic sociality. What would it mean to increase local control and decision-making in Petrolina/Juazeiro? As the accounts by Carvalho and Ferreira argue, when the state has placed control of development funds in local hands, elites have increased their control. Such a move in the present would undermine the already paltry allocation of irrigation land to smallholders, and would undermine already poorly-enforced labour legislation. The Brazilian state, responding to social movements, has established at least minimal regulatory principles that protect rural workers (although it did not extend them to seasonal agricultural workers until 1969). In ‘colonising’ the local, it acts, however reluctantly, in support of principles of social justice. A politics of location, in contrast, would analyse local power relations, local practices and meanings and their relation to power. In doing so, it adheres to calls for a social theory that is issue-oriented, pragmatic and fallible; that is inflected by temporality and locality [Fraser and Nicholson, 1990: 34]. Such an approach does not supplant the need for models of global process that would allow us to understand how events in one site are related to those in

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another, or how a multitude of small events and decisions in one part of the world create forces felt in other locations. But, through its attention to the global in the local - that is, the action of markets and states, elites and multinational corporations (as well as institutions of family and community) in specific localities - it provides a description of the local that can be integrated into such models. Hall’s version of the Brazilian north east as a place in which smallholders could thrive under collective forms of production, provided with credit and other resources by the state contrasts sharply with a version that attends to the new forms of labour market segmentation, reinvigorated mechanisms of domination developed in the fazenda era, and complex struggles between landed peasants and wage workers in local unions. This is but one example of what is at stake in theorising the local in development process. It is an example that attests to the need to examine how our own utopian visions and political desires become embedded in our development theory, and to take responsibility for those visions and choices.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See Bernstein [1981] and Watts [7955] for critiques of this approach in African development theory. See Kaplan [1994] for a review. See Rosaldo [1989] for a critique. These formulations have been adeptly criticised by Rosaldo [1989], Fabian [1983\ 1988]. Probyn [1990: 187] rejects such a move, however, arguing that ‘the local exists nowhere in a pure state’ and calling for an analysis of local practices and meanings and their relation to power.

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun, 1990, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Public Culture, Vol.2, No.2, pp. 1-24. Bernstein, Henry, 1981, ‘Notes on State and Peasantry’, Review of African Political Economy, Vol.21, pp.44-62. Carvalho, Otamar de, 1988, A Economia Politica do Nordeste: Secas, Irrigagao e Desenvolvimento, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus. Chilcote, Ronald, 1990, Power and the Ruling Classes in Northeast Brazil: Petrolina and Juazeiro in Transition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Jane, 1995a, ‘Farm Size and Non-Traditional Exports: Determinants of Participation in World Markets’, World Development, Vol.23, No.7, pp. 1103-14. Collins, Jane, 1995b, ‘Gender and Cheap Labour in Agriculture’, in Philip McMichael (ed.), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy, Westport, CT: Praeger, pp.217-32. Duque, Ghislaine, 1984, ‘A experiengia de Sobradinho: Problemas fundiarios colocados pelas grandes barragens’, Cadernos de CEAS (Centro de Estudo e Accao Social), Vol.91, pp.30-38. Fabian, Johannes, 1983, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Fernandez-Kelly, Maria Patricia, 1982, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier, Albany: SUNY Press. Ferreira Irmao, Jose, 1979, Review of Drought and Irrigation in Northeast Brazil, by Anthony Hall,

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Journal o f Peasant Studies, Vol.6, No.3, pp.362-65. Fraser, Nancy, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson, 1990, ‘Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminist and Postmodernism’, in Nicholson [1990:19-38]. Fundagao Joaquim Nabuco, 1988, Hidrelectrica de Itaparica: Impactos e Mudanga no Meio Rural, Recife: Editora Joaquim Nabuco. Habermas, Jurgen, 1984, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.l (trans. Thomas McCarthy), Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hall, Anthony, 1978, Drought and Irrigation in Northeast Brazil, London: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Stuart, 1991, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in Anthony King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions fo r the Representation of Identity, London: Macmillan. Hall, Stuart, 1993, ‘Culture, Community and Nation’, Cultural Studies, Vol.7, No.3, pp.349-63. Holdcroft, Lane E., 1984, ‘The Rise and Fall of Community Development, 1950-65: A Critical Assessment’, in Carl K. Eicher and John M. Staatz (eds.), Agricultural Development in the Third World, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, pp.46-58. Illich, Ivan, 1981, Shadow Work, Boston, MA: Marion Boyars. Kaplan, Caren, 1994, ‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Practice’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Minnesota-, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kondo, Dorinne, 1990, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Long, Norman, 1977, An Introduction to a Sociology of Rural Development, London: Tavistock. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1991, ‘Cartographies of Struggle’, in Chandra Mohanty, Lourdes Torres and Ann Russo (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-50. Neffa, Julio Cesar, 1986, ‘El Trabajo Temporario en el Sector Agropecuario de America Latina’, Geneva: International Labour Office. Nicholson, Linda (ed.), 1990, Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Payer, Cheryl, 1982, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis, New York: Monthly Review Press. Probyn, Elspeth, 1990, ‘Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local’, in Nicholson [1990: 176-89]. Rich, Adrienne, 1986, ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’, in Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-85, New York: W. W. Norton, pp.210-32. Rosaldo, Renato, 1989, Culture and Truth, Boston, MA: Beacon. Sigaud, Lygia, 1988, ‘Efeitos Sogiais de Grandes Projetos Hidrelectricos: As Barragens de Sobradinho e Machadinho’, in L. Pinguelli Rosa, Lygia Sigaud and Otavio Mielnik (eds.), Impactos de Grandes Projetos Hidrelectricos e Nucleares: Aspectos Econdmicos e Tecnologicos, Sogiais e Ambientais, Sao Paulo: Editora Marco Zero. Smith, Dorothy, 1987, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Stolcke, Verena, 1984, ‘The Exploitation of Family Morality’, in Raymond T. Smith (ed.), Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Tendler, Judith, 1975, Inside Foreign Aid, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watts, Michael, 1983, “‘Good Try Mr, Paul”: Populism and the Politics of African Land Use’, African Studies Review, Vol.26, No.2, pp.73-83.

‘Cultures of Land’ in the Caribbean: A Contribution to the Debate on Development and Culture TRACEY SKELTON Part o f the contemporary debate on the crisis o f development interrogates the very notion o f what constitutes development. For many contributors to the critiques o f development discourse the role o f ‘culture9 in all its complexities o f definition has become a central focus. This article engages with the relationship between culture and development through a consideration o f ‘cultures o f land’ in the Caribbean. Using ethnographic research the complexities o f meanings o f land at local and global scales are examined and the importance o f understanding such cultural interpretations highlighted. The article articulates the meeting o f global processes and local cultures over the issue o f land and demonstrates that meaningful and sustainable development fo r the Caribbean can only be achieved through fu ll understanding o f cultures o f land. This means that development approaches have to become people-centred and sensitive to cultural issues rather than driven by motives o f profit and economic rationalities. IN T R O D U C T IO N

Development is at a crisis point, it appears not to be working for anyone in the way it was, and is, intended. In his introduction to Power o f Development, Jonathan Crush [1995: 3-4] argues for a critical engagement with the ‘discourse of development’, with ‘development’ as a discipline, in much the same way as other disciplinary fields have undergone interrogations. Such interrogations are structured around three central arenas: an investigation into the ways disciplines make sense of the world; critical analyses of the way Western knowledge constructs Western power; engagement with the rising Tracey Skelton, Lecturer in Geography, Department of International Studies, Nottingham Trent University. The author wishes to thank all the Montserratians who participated in the interviews and shared their ‘cultures of land’ with her. She is grateful for the support of the Geography Section Research Fund which funded the 1992 research visit to the Caribbean and the research sabbatical for one semester (1995-96) which provided the time to write this article. She also wishes to thank Sue Loveridge and Parvati Raghuram for their support whilst writing this article.

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alternative voices against the knowledge/power constructions of the West. However ‘development’ as a concept, an ideal, a political project, an income earner, a charitable appeal, a future hope is all pervasive and persistent. If it is not working as planned, why is it still seen as an achievable goal? Without the concept of ‘development’ what are we left with? Without the ‘power of development’ what does the West have? Such questions are largely beyond the scope of this article. However, both they, and the fundamental challenge to the concept of ‘development’, are an important backdrop to the consideration of the role of ‘culture’ in development. To admit ‘culture’ into the development equation is to contribute to the ongoing critiques of development from within the academy, from within the development industry itself and, most importantly, from those ‘being developed’ or, as I would prefer to name them, the people of the ‘Third World’.1 For some time now there has been a growing realisation that development discourse has to incorporate more than economic and political analyses; it also needs actively to acknowledge social and cultural constructions. After all: ‘Development discourse is constituted and reproduced within a set of material relationships, activities and powers - social, cultural and geo-political’ [Crush, 1995: 6].2Those calling for the inclusion of culture into development discourse do so from a range of backgrounds. For example, these include development practitioners, such as Thierry Verhelst [1987], a senior project officer with the Belgian development agency, and Kathy McAfee [1991] of Oxfam America; academics working on globalisation, global theories and development studies who are beginning to feel that concentration on the economic and political situations is inadequate [Crush, 1995; Featherstone, 1990; King, 1991; Robertson, 1992; Kofman and Youngs, 1996]; anthropologists who wish to integrate their conceptual understandings of culture with those of development studies [Allen, 1992; Geertz, 1984] ; and the many peoples of the ‘Third World’ who argue that economics and political science cannot adequately analyse their needs. People of the ‘Third W orld’ have been ‘resisting’ developm ent programmes, policies and practices for as long as the West has been implementing them. The process of development has always been dynamic. Development, for all its power to speak and to control the terms of speaking, has never been impervious to challenge and resistance, nor, in response, to reformulation and challenge ... Without the possibility of reaction and resistance, there is no place for the agents and victims of development to exert their explicit and implicit influence on the ways in which it is constructed, thought, planned and implemented [Crush, 1995:

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The call for the inclusion of culture within the multiple parts of development, which constitute the ‘development m achine’ [Ferguson, 1990], the ‘development industry’, is part of a reaction and resistance to the ways in which development is structured. In this article I will examine the notion of ‘culture’ and present a working definition of this highly complex term. I will consider the calls for the inclusion of ‘culture’ within development debates. The article will then give examples of a particular cultural pattern within the Caribbean, with specific case study material from the island of Montserrat. Through the use of Caribbean and Montserratian ‘cultures of land’ the article provides real life examples of the importance of cultural issues to the people who live in this part of the ‘Third World’. It will show how land has been, and continues to be, a site where global processes (including development) interconnect with local cultures and how such meetings affect the ordinary people caught up within them, even at the very small-scale, local level. TH E P L A C E FO R ‘C U L T U R E ’

‘Culture’ is a subject of multitudinal definitions and extensive debate. ‘Culture’ means many different things to different people and consequently is probably one of the hardest words to define [Williams, 1958]. What we can do however is identify key concepts as a way of grounding the term for our specific purposes. I present certain features of culture which are salient for this article; other authors my draw upon different features of culture for their definitional purposes. Culture is not fixed and static but rather dynamic, changing over time and space. However, there are elements of cultural practice and cultural meaning which may be maintained through generations. Culture is socially constructed and so an individual’s experience and creation of culture is determined by such social factors as gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, age, geography. Culture is also contingent upon history and contemporary social, economic and political factors [Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts, 1976; Hall, 1980]. Geography also has a role to play in the definition of culture; place and spaciality are both important in the construction of culture and the ways in which space is constructed by culture [Jackson, 1989; Shurmer-Smith and Hannam, 1994]. Hence in this discussion of the ‘cultures of land’ in the Caribbean these features of what culture is, may mean and can signify, are central. In a consideration of the ‘cultures of land’ in the Caribbean we have to bear in mind the dynamism of relationships involving the meaning and value of land. At the same time, connections with the land have been constructed through a particular history of slavery and the plantation economy and culture. Understanding contemporary relations around land have therefore to take into account both the history and the ‘here and now’. While central elements of

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Caribbean relations of land link back to history (as discussed in greater detail below), there is also a changing quality of contemporary relationships. However, in the face of external change or threat, traditional cultural relationships to land may re-emerge as a form of resistance against, and retreat from, the global and a move towards the local. As mentioned earlier, the call to include ‘culture’ in academic discourse on development, globalisation and global political economy is gaining strength [,Skelton, 1996]. Verhelst talks of culture as the forgotten dimension and he determinedly uses a broad definition of culture. By culture is meant, therefore, every aspect of life: know-how, technical knowledge, customs of food and dress, religion, mentality, values, language, symbols, socio-political and economic behaviour, indigenous methods of taking decisions and exercising power, methods of production and economic relations, and so forth [Verhelst, 1987: 17]. He forcibly argues that ‘Third World’ cultures have been neglected not only by the mass machine of development but also by smaller pieces within the machine working directly with the peoples of the ‘Third World’. Groups and individuals from amongst the common people, belonging to various cultural worlds, have been sounding the alarm with increasing frequency. Not only do they feel their cultural identity threatened by the ideology and the alienating mechanisms of international capitalism, but also by left-wing parties and movements and by progressive NGOs who often deny or neglect the people’s cultural and spiritual heritage [Verhelst, 1987: 20]. Roland Robertson is one example of academic discourse demanding that culture be written into analyses of globalisation and world politics. I believe that it is directly necessary to adopt a cultural focus to what is often called world politics ... We have come increasingly to recognise that while economic matters are of tremendous importance in relations between societies and various forms of transnational relations these matters are ... subject to cultural contingencies and cultural coding [Robertson, 1992: 4]. While the importance of culture to a fuller understanding of global politics is thereby acknowledged, there is also a growing awareness of the importance of culture at the local scale [Featherstone, 1990; 1993; Hall, 1991]. This local arena of culture will be investigated below after the wider context of ‘cultures of land’ in the Caribbean has been examined. Calling for development to take account of culture is not an easy critical strategy. Many working within development would argue that there has always

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been a place for culture. However, what traditional development has defined as ‘culture’ is at best elitist and at worst fixed in time. It is essential that when we call for development to take account of culture, culture should be defined as broadly as possible, to ensure that the dynamism and contemporary nature of people’s cultures are recognised, reflected and respected. ‘It is, therefore, not a question of culture in the narrow sense of the word, seen as prestige commodity often reserved for an elite, nor as a more or less folkloric epiphenomenon, but of culture in the wider sense of the word’ [Verhelst, 1987: 17]. When development descends its objects are stripped of their history and they are placed in typologies which define what they now are, what they once were and where development will take them [Crush, 1995]. Part of this process means that the culture of those peoples ‘to be developed’ is rendered frozen, traditional and fixed. Development ensured (and ensures) that: Collectivities (groups, societies, territories, tribes, classes, communities [and I would add cultures] ) were assigned a set of characteristics which suggested not only a low place in the hierarchy of achievement but a terminal condition of stasis, forever becalmed until the healing winds of modernity and development began to blow [Crush, 1995: 9]. For a representative and inclusive definition of culture to become part of development discourse, the established ways in which the ‘development machine’ views the world have to be fundamentally challenged and transformative change has to take place. The ‘Third World’ is not ‘becalmed’ nor are the ‘winds of development’ healing. The ‘development machine’ constructs the world in such a way that it frequently does profound, often irreversible, damage and violence to the people and lands it comes into contact with. The relationship between culture and development has to be much deeper and more nuanced than just a change in attitude to the cultures of the ‘Third World’. When one talks of the need for ‘culture within development’ it means in addition that the very ‘culture of development’ itself has to be transformed. The power of the cultural constructions of development has to be acknowledged and changed. While such a notion is implicit in this article it is not my specific focus. The focus here relates to the demand for development to recognise and respect the cultures of those it comes into contact with. The remainder of this article demonstrates the dynamic ‘cultures of land in the Caribbean’ and the ways in which land is a part and parcel of Caribbean, and in particular Montserratian, peoples’ lives. The article also interprets some key points found in writings on the global and the local by drawing on Caribbean examples. C U L T U R E S O F L A N D IN TH E C A R IB B E A N

In the Caribbean there are multiple meanings of the term cultures of land.

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Here, I focus on selected features of such cultures. If we consider the history of the region, it is clear that there are cultures of land which have been in direct conflict with each other - Amerindian versus Columbian/European; plantation-owner versus slave; post-emancipation estate owner versus free peasant; single-crop agricultural estate versus subsistence farming. This article is concerned with the contemporary cultures of land shared by the majority of small-scale farmers and gardeners3 throughout the African Anglophone Caribbean. However this has to placed in an historical context of land cultures throughout the Caribbean. When Columbus sighted land and ‘invaded’ the Caribbean islands, around the year 1492, the cultures of land for the native Amerindian groups, notably the Arawaks and the Caribs, were in direct contradiction with a European culture of land as testament and proof of conquest. The Amerindian peoples had travelled to the Caribbean region from the South American coast and pre-dated Columbus’s so-called ‘discovery’ by more than a thousand years [Fergus, 1994]. After brutal but valiant battles of resistance the Amerindian peoples were largely exterminated in just under 200 years. Apart from the physical contact of battles, the Amerindians died out from European diseases and from the destruction of their culture of land by the European culture. Shifting agriculture, which had allowed the land to return to its natural state after use, was ended as a means of livelihood in all but the most remote and mountainous parts of the region.4 By the mid-seventeenth century the Caribbean islands were established as sites of European colonialism: English, French, Spanish and Dutch with small pockets of Danish and Irish settlements [Fergus, 1994]. In the Caribbean, colonialism brought the plantation and slave economies and cultures [Beckles, 1990; Beckles and Shepherd, 1992; Bush, 1990; Hart, 1980; Williams, 1970]. Once their freedom from slavery had either been won, as in 1804 for Haiti, or granted, as in 1838 throughout the English Caribbean and finally in 1886 in Cuba [Beckles and Shepherd, 1993], the peoples of the Caribbean began to develop their own cultures of land. Such cultures of land were distinctive from those of slavery where Africans had been transported after capture across the Atlantic, the so-called ‘Middle Passage’, in which hundreds died before even reaching the Caribbean. The African peoples were sold as property to plantation owners; their sole function being to serve the plantation owner and the plantation itself. The culture of land on the plantations was one of forced labour to produce a single-crop, mostly sugar, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once the slaves were purchased, labour was effectively free. The slaves were given small plots of land on which to grow their own provisions and were provided with minimum rations of meat and fish. With emancipation came a new relationship with the land whereby the ex-slaves moved off the plantations onto the marginal, unused, unclaimed

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lands between the estates and up in the mountains. It was this physical movement of Caribbean peoples from one cultural meaning of land to another which established the cultural traditions and meanings which exist until the present day. In the 150 years since the Emancipation of the slaves, the peoples of the Caribbean have established several indigenous patterns of land occupancy, side by side with the archetypal export-oriented plantation. The plantation alternative takes many forms reflecting differences between islands in cultural traditions, ecological constraints and historical determinants [Besson and Momsen, 1987: 1]. In their edited volume Besson and Momsen [1987] present a strong case for the potential of the Caribbean peasantry to work towards rural development which is based upon indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Such a view is a direct challenge to what they term Eurocentric ‘outsider’ models of development (p.l). They argue that existing attitudes towards land among the contemporary farmers of the Caribbean are established in response to constraining agrarian relations. They explain patterns of land tenure, land use and attitudes to land throughout the Caribbean in order to provide a better understanding for more ‘productive’ development. While they do not use the term ‘cultures of land’, the various authors do consider attitudes towards land and place these in an historical context, showing the extent of both continuity and change. W hilst agreeing with Besson and Momsen that many ‘outsider’ development programmes for land and agricultural development in the Caribbean have been disastrous in their results [McAfee, 1991], I would go further in my critique. It is the culture of land under colonialism which has led to the present complexities, in which cultural meanings of land are both contradictory and paradoxical. Slavery and plantation agriculture established a love-hate relationship with the land for the African populations. On the one hand, they loathed the land into which their blood and sweat flowed. Yet, for many freedom was symbolised by their own piece of land. The continuance of this complex relationship is evident throughout the Caribbean. Many people hold the title deed to a small piece of land yet the idea of working in agriculture is so strongly linked to the forced labour of slavery that it cannot be contemplated. Consequently this ancestral legacy of slavery makes attempts to foster and co-ordinate small-scale agriculture throughout the region difficult. C O M P L E X IT IE S O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y C A R IB B E A N C U L T U R E S OF LAND

In this section I use Jean Besson’s [1987: 13-45] work on the pan-Caribbean

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paradox in attitudes to land in conjunction with my own ethnographic material from interviews carried out with people who farm or garden their own pieces of land in Montserrat.5 In her work on the village of Martha Brae, Jamaica, Besson points out that the movements of the emancipated slaves from the plantations to the ‘neglected’ and unused lands of the island were strongly resisted by the plantation owners. Planters refused to sell them any land and passed legislation to maintain the newly free people as landless labourers. For almost a century the ex-slaves were tenants with few more rights than they had had under slavery. However, the ex-slaves persisted in their desire for their own pieces of land and gradually free villages were established. Individuals used their land for subsistence agriculture and developed local market economies for their surplus production. Plantation owners, however, clung to their land and throughout much of the Caribbean large areas of the most fertile, flattest and most accessible land remain as agricultural estates, owned in many cases by absentee landlords or foreign companies [Besson: 1987; Bolland, 1993; Johnson, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Mintz, 1993]. With the memory of slavery and the subsequent struggle to leave the plantations and establish a living external to them, the Caribbean people established a culture of land which is imbued with meanings of freedom, defiance, independence and personhood. There has, therefore, been resistance to the dominant cultures of land among everyday Caribbean folk for some considerable time. The land which became the free peoples’ land was established and remains as ‘family land’, ‘children’s property’ or ‘generation property’ throughout the Caribbean, and Besson argues that it typifies Afro-Caribbean peasantries in general [Besson, 1984; Clarke, 1953; 1966; Greenfield, 1960; Horowitz, 1967; Philpott, 1973; Rodman, 1971, M.G. Smith, 1965; R.T. Smith, 1955]. Family land is an institution where small plots of land are seen as the permanent property of all those who descend from the person who first gained freehold to it [Besson, 1987]. The culture of family land shows a remarkable resistance to the idea of giving up something which was desired for so long and fought for so hard by those slaves who finally saw freedom. Caribbean peoples today still maintain that these small plots of land have the potential to be a place for their own families and future generations. This culture of seeing family land as a permanent resource is contrasted with the culture which also perceives land as a scarce resource given the spatial, financial and cultural dominance of the plantation. Below are some typical responses of farmers and gardeners to the question, ‘Would you sell your land?’. About three quarters of the land that I farm it was pass down from my mother ... I would never sell it because the same things as I say, it is not belonging to me personally, it will be for the five of us (her brothers and

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sisters), it is a family affair, and I don’t think that they would sell, no other members of the family would want to sell it - what usually happens, traditionally, and which people don’t break away from easily, is traditionally you say, ‘I don’t want it but my children might want it’, like for example my brother don’t want it but my nephews might want it, so you know you always leave that for the other members of the family who are interested because when you sell it, it is gone, you will not have it again, but if it is there then you know you can just go and see it (Mary, Family Planning Clinic worker and farmer, Montserrat). I want to buy this land that I rent and when I have it I wouldn’t sell it. It would add to the land that come to me from my aunt and I wouldn’t let anyone else have it because although my children might not want to live there, but just in case they want to ... my grandchildren would not want to live here but just in case they want to I must have something that they can fall back on - you know if you leave it and somebody else gets it then it is all confusion (Miss James, farmer). No, no, no! I wouldn’t sell it, if the boys don’t want it then ... I wouldn’t sell it I would keep it for them and if they don’t want it then they have to pass it on to their own children. They wouldn’t sell it, it’s always a part ... it’s a family tradition, a family tradition, they wouldn’t sell it (Lucille, teacher and gardener). I want to have my land for my children coming, when they come they will have something to look forward to although some of them according to the jobs that they acquire the money can give them their own, but in the case that they need the land it is there for them, it is there if they need it (Celeste, nursery school worker and gardener). For all these women their future view of the land is that it should be there for any of the ‘coming’ generations who may need it. There is absolutely no doubt in their minds about keeping the land. Whether the land is actively used or not, now or in the future, the land must remain as part of the legacy of their own generation and the generations that have gone before. In practical terms these women know that these small areas of land could not possibly sustain the whole family network descended from the first freeholder. However the land is bound up with cultural meanings which far surpass its physical presence; indeed it has been said to have a ‘mystic significance’ [Clarke, 1966: 65].6 The land symbolises freedom, the value of which lives on several generations down from slavery, although often only one generation down from the lease-hold systems on the estates. Freehold land was not only of obvious economic importance to those

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ex-slaves who managed to obtain it, giving some independence from the plantations and a bargaining position for higher wages when working on them, but it also had considerable symbolic significance to a people who had not only once been landless, but property themselves. For such land symbolized their freedom, and provided property rights, prestige, and personhood. Family land was also the basis for the creation of family lines and the maximization of kinship ties, in contrast to the kinlessness o f the enslaved [Besson, 1987: 18] (my emphasis). When asked specifically about the practicalities of such small pieces of land being useful to more than one or two people Montserratian farmers and gardeners presented the following strategies which would ‘by chance’ solve the problems: Well some of them would move out, maybe they have the little that is theirs and they sell it or rent it to the other members and then maybe they go out - when they know they are going then they may pass it to the others that want it, maybe they have money and they buy their own place somewhere else, or they would leave the island (Miss Mattie, farmer). Well maybe the whole family gone away and no one stay to care the land. In that case they will rent out the land for someone to use it for pasture, but that person who use the land they know for sure that it is family land for the people that gone and that if anyone of them come back then the land is theirs (Joseph, carpenter and farmer). Well some of my land is my own, but some of it I rent. You see that land over there, they sort of family to me, so that is why they wanted me to rent it to keep the land in order until they are ready to build. They wouldn’t sell it because it is their family land and I have to respect that (Mr. Taylor, sexton and gardener). All the respondents had a strong sense that the land would not be a cause of trouble among the family. It seemed to be part of the tradition that the person most committed to working the land should be the one to benefit from it; in return the person who worked on the land always acknowledged that the land was not theirs alone but family land. As all the Caribbean islands experience large migratory outflows of population, either temporarily or permanently, the idea that people will ‘go from the land’ is not improbable and hence the pressures on family land are relieved. Besson quotes Mintz [1974: 755] for her discussion of the significance of land ownership throughout the Caribbean: ‘ ... the significance of land ownership for Caribbean peasantries “far exceeds any obvious economic considerations”: symbolizing freedom and “identity as persons”, and being

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“perceived as the key to independence and dignity”’ [Besson, 1987: 26]. In my ethnographic work there were several aspects of the ownership of land which were identified as relating to dignity, independence and identity. One was being able to share the produce of the land with other people who needed it, being proud to be able to give someone something from one’s own land. Another was the dignity land gave a person who needed to borrow money from the bank, that is the land was perceived as an asset which conferred status and prestige. A third source of independence and sense of identity came from the freedom to make your own decisions about your own land. With our produce we take it to the market and sell it of a Saturday, the rest we keep for ourselves, and you give friends, any friends that come you give, you give, you give (Ruth, laundress and farmer). I feel good of giving, you just feel good, yes, maybe you have a friend and the friend don’t have this thing that you have, you give to your friend, that’s how Montserrat people do, we love giving (Miss James, farmer). To own your own land is important ... It could be beneficial in a future situation, this way for example, if you want a loan from the bank and you have this land, and the land is registered and is the right proportion, and you have the title deed for it you have no problem - you goes to the bank ... and you just let them know what you would need the money for and they would deliver it ... they would hold the land until I pay back the loan but at least I will not need a second man in my business, I wouldn’t have to ask a second man to go to the bank and get the loan for me - I could go there myself and do my business for myself (Saul, construction worker). Another thing too what make it so important (owning your own land) I could remember as a young girl growing up my mother used to have to plant what the landowners want, you couldn’t plant what you want, you were renting the land from them but you had no authority to plant corn for instance if they didn’t want corn to be planted at that time - you had to plant something they want, and you had to give them some too - you have to plant three rows and you could use two and you had to leave the third for them - you always had to leave one for them out of the crops ... you rent the land and you have to work and do everything on the land and still have to give them the crops. So is a different feeling to then, to know, now, that you could own the land, nobody could come and tell you what to plant, nobody could come and tell you! You know it is so different to own the land ... My mother rented some of this land for a long time but after we were on the land for some time and the Government

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bought the land from the estate owner who went back to England, the land was then bought by my mother. She was happy to have the land, because she have this feeling from before that she didn’t own anything, all that she had belonged to the landowner, so it was a good thing for her because she had her own land and she could plant what she like and she didn’t have to give it to no-one [Mary, Family Planning Clinic worker and farmer], Besson noted a distinct paradox in attitudes to land among the Afro-Caribbean peasant farmers, both in Jamaica and throughout the wider region. They perceive land as scarce in relation to the wider agrarian structure of the Caribbean societies in which they are located, and have responded throughout the region by creating and perpetuating the institution of family land. Within the kinship corporations associated with such land, however, land is regarded as unlimited in its primary long-term symbolic role. Coexisting with this perception of family, and thus elaborating their paradoxical view of land, is the awareness that family land is scarce as a short-term economic asset among living kin [Besson, 1987: 35]. In Montserrat too there existed a contradiction in cultures of land specifically related to the sale of land. As seen above, those who have family land are adamant that they will never sell it, that it must remain for the generations to come. To this end the land is cared for either by a family member, who maintains the soil’s fertility and the health of the trees, or by a trusted friend or distant relative. However, this conservation of land does not extend to land throughout the island. There was common agreement that the selling of former estate land for real estate development was a very positive thing for the whole island. Since the 1960s land plots on the west and south-west coasts, and also on a smaller scale on the east coast down near the airport have been sold almost exclusively to expatriates from the United States of America and Canada. Many purchasers are retired business people or lecturers from the American University of the Caribbean, an offshore private medical school. The majority of the land sold was formerly owned by the Montserrat Company, an English company, established by Joseph Sturge in 1869. Sturge was a Quaker and his philanthropic motives were demonstrated through the adoption of progressive farming methods, the renting of land by the peasantry and the establishment of the first estate school in 1870. The Company soon owned about half of the island’s arable land [Fergus, 1994]. During the 1860s male members of the Sturge family were heavily involved in the politics of the island and the family moved from ‘philanthropy through property to power politics’ [Fergus, 1994: 144]. When I asked respondents what they felt about the selling of this land to

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people from overseas their response was overwhelmingly in favour. However, none of them lived near the former Montserrat Company estates and it is likely that people from the neighbouring villages would not have been so positive. That was very good of it because people get a place to build their houses, you want people to come in and invest something else like that (Ruth, laundress and farmer). Is a good thing, a good thing, because for one it help develop the country - because we had, in the early 1960s, we had people who are now the white collar workers in Montserrat, the people who are the middle income people, who were out there on the construction of those places, who started from the construction field and come up, and if those ex-patriots didn’t come in here then we would still be struggling but they came and they open up construction, they open up jobs for maids, people work as maids, and they open up other things like real estate and things like that, they help build up the country. They came in and they wanted certain things like water and so forth, roads, electricity, and they help build them up for the whole country (Mary* Family Planning Clinic worker and farmer). There is a clear sense that the selling of land to expatriates ‘developed’ the island. Indeed the type of properties that were built indicate that those moving into the island were extremely wealthy. The new residents also provide a considerable amount of employment - maids, laundresses, gardeners, swimming pool maintenance, lamentably service jobs in which black Montserratians are paid to take care of white ‘First World’ residents. The expatriates also brought a demand for their own types of food and so imports from North America now dominate the island’s trade. Among younger Montserratians there is the sense that consuming home-grown food indicates poverty and there is considerable pressure for Montserratians to buy imported food stuffs, reinforced by the cable television advertising beamed in from the United States. The expatriates also wanted cars, car franchises were established and the culture of the car as a status symbol entered the island. In all fairness to those who bought land from the Montserrat Real Estate Company the land was never made available to Montserratians and was priced well beyond the reach of all but the elite Montserratians, a handful of whom bought land. At the time of my third research visit to Montserrat in 1992 an estate called Blakes was in the very early stages of being put up for sale. Preliminary land surveys were being carried out and the Montserrat Water Authority were carrying out water research. Blakes Estate comprised most of the mountainous east side of the island, an area of wild, wooded, green land seen from the plane on the approach from Antigua. The eastern side is the least inhabited part of

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the island partly because of the strength of the Atlantic winds and partly because no free villages were established on that part of the island. There are a few collections of homes of people who either worked on the estate when it was used for agriculture or who are the descendants of those workers. The present owner, Mr Gage, is a Montserratian but has lived all his adult life in New York. His family purchased the land at a very low rate when the English Blake family went bankrupt. He had recently become the sole owner of this huge estate and had been given permission to sell the land to Montserratians only. He expected purchasers to be expatriate Montserratians who wish to return to the island for holidays and to retire. I asked interviewees how they felt about the sale of Blakes Estate. Well I think is a good thing, I think its a good thing because there is a lot of land over there, a lot of good land ... If they get over there develop it be a very nice place, very, very nice, because the doors overlooking the sea, these people could be very healthy by living there, all they got to do when they go to build is they got to know what they are building because of the sea blast (Thomas, quarryman and gardener). Well that is private land and so if the people feel that they have to sell the land, I suppose it’s all right, then that could be an area that is developed as well, it might be another area. It will change the wild green area of the East, I think it might change it in a positive way, it’s true though that it is nice and green and the scenery over there, but the change might be a positive, it might be a plus (Sarah, farmer). In contrast to attitudes to selling their own land most people felt that the selling of Blakes Estate had the potential to be a positive thing. However one respondent knew people who were related to someone who lived on the Estate. She had quite a different response and reacted in a way which was premised upon her understanding of the meaning of ‘family land’. The man (Mr Gage), is stupid, he should have been selling long time ago because some people there born on the land, grew up on the land, their children come and born on the land, grow up on the land, well if they asking to sell them I think it should be reasonable that you sell them a bit because they was born there, renting it, and they was born there and their children come and their grandchildren come, everybody seems to think it was a reasonable thing that you should sell them that bit because it come to them that their bit is theirs. He waited late and he get on so stupidly when he come from America first, he get gun man and they just go and shotting (sic) animal and get them off the land, he make a big heap of confusion. I don’t know why he must behave like that! (Bertha, farmer).

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What had happened was that the families on the estate were given the option to buy the land that they had been renting for years but the sale price of the land was far beyond their means. They could not afford the land and they were no longer to be allowed to rent it. The experience of many of the respondents I interviewed was that they, or the generations before them, had been able to buy the marginal lands of the estates once the Montserratian Government had purchased them. Government sales of the land had been at very low prices which could be afforded by the previous tenant farmers. Bertha’s indignation about the situation on the Blake Estate arose because the people who not only rented the land but were born on the land, had their children on the land and had seen their grandchildren born on the land, were given no genuine rights to that land. In fact while I was on the island one of the women farmers from Blakes, Mrs Grady, and one of her sons had verbally challenged and abused Mr Gage in public in one of the villages in the North. In response he purchased a gun but did not register it with the police. When challenged in a bar by some of the villagers about what he was doing to the families on Blakes Estate, he had drawn the gun and fired shots into the air. He was arrested and forced to hand his gun in. After this incident Mr Gage employed someone to supervise the surveying of the land and left the island. What this story shows is that the emotional attachment to the land and awareness of land rights run very deep in Montserratian culture. There is a strong sense of outrage when traditional understandings of rights to land are transgressed. Mr Gage was seen to have broken the traditions of family land as well as all sorts of social and cultural laws. The idea that someone should purchase a gun after being ‘cussed out’ by the aggrieved people was seen as ridiculous, alien to Montserrat and a symbol of his inability to understand how Montserrat worked. What these contradictory attitudes towards the selling of Blakes Estate demonstrate is that the selling of land and the meaning of land are bound up in a tight web of tradition, which links land, history and cultural meaning. The persistence of these cultures of land indicate that such cultural meanings and attitudes are a fundamental part of Caribbean social structures. Any development project which involves land and agriculture has to be fully cognisant of the strength and tenacity of these complex and often contradictory cultures of land. W H E R E G L O B A L P R O C E S S E S M EET L O C A L C U L T U R E S

In the final section of the article I want to consider the complex inter­ connections between global/external processes or events, which include development, and the local/internal sentiments of peoples of the Caribbean. The examples below illustrate how cultural attitudes towards the land held by

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those in the West clash fundamentally with those held in the Caribbean. This section also shows how the cultures of land discussed above play a central role in Caribbean peoples’ need to find a ‘retreat to the local’, a place of security in the face of ‘fractured modernity’. Look at an island, like, Montserrat, or the others. If their governments could be persuaded to sell land for retirement homes for wealthy Americans the place could be another Monte Carlo! The ones (Montserratians) who stay would have higher incomes. But they don’t want to do it. They regard the land as some sort of birthright (A World Bank former senior economist for Jamaica, quoted in McAfee [1991: 4]). This approach to Caribbean land by those from the West, in particular the United States was echoed by George Shultz, US Secretary for State in the Reagan cabinet. Following the invasion of Grenada by the US in October 1983 Shultz was taken to the capital of St George. On seeing the town with its backdrop of green mountains and the calm harbour, he commented, ‘It’s a lovely piece of real estate’ [McAfee, 1991: 97]. Both quotations raise serious questions relating to cultures of land. We have already seen that a private company sold Montserratian land to expatriates. It was not the Government who sold the land nor did the sale make Montserratians rich. Why would Montserrat want to be another Monte Carlo? Why should Montserratians not have a sense of birthright to their land? Why is there such a prevalent assumption that Caribbean land is ‘For Sale’ in the West? What the above quotes demonstrate in simplistic terms are the different cultural relationships and attitudes to land between the West and the Caribbean. A central aim of the article is to integrate the Caribbean cultures of land within academic debates on ‘culture and development’. If the Caribbean experience is to have any extrapolative meaning for development discourse, it has to be linked to a social theory which interrogates development and globalisation. To this end I draw on the work of Mike Featherstone [1990; 1993] and Stuart Hall [7997] and illustrative Caribbean examples. Featherstone [7993: 169] argues that globalisation not only produces homogeneity but also familiarisation with greater diversity, the knowledge that there is an extensive range of cultures. However major players in the global economy, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank fail to appreciate the complexities of cultural relations between Caribbean peoples and the land. This is perhaps because both institutions are locked into the Western conceptualisation of itself as ‘the guardian of universal values on behalf of a world formed in its own self image’ [Featherstone, 1993: 172]. As products of Western cultural hegemony, as well as economic predominance, the two institutions are determined that Caribbean governments and Caribbean people, if considered at all, should perceive land in the same way they do. The

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land is there to be sold, the land is ‘a lovely piece of real estate’. Land is seen in monetary terms, with investment in mind, to be possessed and owned, compartmentalised into lots and sold off piece-meal. An example of this cultural clash is given below. In Grenada the US Agency for International Development (USAID) upheld the principle of ‘privatisation’; Kathy McAfee [1991] researched what happened in the name of ‘development’ after the US invasion of Grenada. USAID was determined to return the land to private ownership but what they failed to realise was that the land had been government prior to the New Jewel revolution of March 1979. Their anti-revolutionary zeal blinded them to the fact that the basis of Grenada’s economy is the 8,000 independent, mostly small-scale farmers. By the end of their effective involvement in Grenada in 1988, USAID had spent US$1.7 million but left behind more rural workers without jobs and more small-scale farmers with no future prospects for development and improvement of their land than before their involvement. Farmers, who used to be part of the Farms Corporation, were left uncertain as to whether they would get the right to buy their land, or whether they would in fact lose it altogether IMcAfee, 1991: 97-102]. USAID failed to understand both the political and social cultures relating to land and farming in Grenada. The words of a Grenadian woman farmer sum up the chaos created by USAID. Right now we have so much wasting. Tomatoes, cabbage, dasheen are rotting because we can’t get transport or sales for them. I’d like to put in more tree crops, but I don’t know if I might lose the land. It seems like the government wants to give the estates to rich Americans, or they’ll sell the plots for people living overseas to build houses, but there’s no way for farmers like us to get land [McAfee, 1991: 100]. Featherstone presents a definition of local culture which would certainly describe many small islands of the Caribbean region. Local culture he suggests is: a culture of a relatively small bounded space in which individuals who live there engage in daily face-to-face relationships ... the emphasis is upon the taken-for-granted, habitual and repetitive nature of the everyday culture ... [T]he common stock of knowledge ... has persisted over time and may incorporate rituals, symbols and ceremonies that link people to a place and a common sense of the past [Featherstone, 1993: 176]. In the case of Montserrat the island is small enough to have a local culture. For many Montserratians rituals and ceremonies are linked with the land and the villages connected to a particular area. For example, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated to remind the islanders of their link with Eire (Irish Catholics

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expelled from Virginia were the first European settlers of Montserrat). At the same time it serves as a memorial to the attempted slave uprising on the island which took place on St Patrick’s Day 1770 [Fergus, 1994]. Such a dual meaning demonstrates the complexities of cultural histories and the way they are mapped out in space. The space of St. Patrick’s parish has different historical meanings - the name of the space acknowledges the colonial settlers, and the actual day of St. Patrick reminds the present-day islanders of both their colonial and their slave pasts. Layers of historical and cultural meaning are sedimented down upon the land. The day is also an opportunity for the Southern part of the island to host people from all over the island. People of the parish prepare food for sale from their own land - all kinds of vegetables, cassava bread traditionally baked in stone ovens, goat water (stew), and juices made from tree and fruit production of the area. The cultural connection of the place, the land and people’s relationship with that land is very clear. When we consider the encounter between globalisation forces and local culture, we find that localities are integrated: ‘into more impersonal structures in which the dictates of market or administrative rationalities maintained by national elites or transcultural professionals and experts have the capacity to override local decision-making processes and decide the fate of the locality’ [Featherstone, 1993: 177]. As already discussed there has been a process of selling land to those from the United States and Canada for retirement or second home building in Montserrat. This process has given rise to contradictions in understandings about and perceptions of the land specifically access to and ownership of the land for those living in the locality of the Montserrat Company estates. Part of the land culture of Montserrat involved estate land which was not built upon or used for any agricultural production being perceived as common land and thereby used as grazing land by individuals with a few cattle and goats. When the Company estates were sold, the fate of the surrounding Montserratian villagers was decided by M ontserratian elites and professional real estate developers. These Montserratians lost access to land they had always had since the decline of the estates. Where there were unfenced lots, Montserratians continued to graze their animals but the expatriates in their newly built houses complained about animals breaking their tethers and feeding on their well-watered lawns. Legislation was consequently passed which allowed for the impounding of animals found on sold lots; the payment of fines often meant selling other animals. With fewer and fewer places to tether their animals individuals had to sell off their stock and so lost an important, traditional source of livelihood. Hence the global processes of ‘land for sale’ - as long as you are buying in US dollars it appears - had a dramatic knock-on effect on local lifestyles, the local economy and cultural attitudes of access to land. Stuart Hall [1991], in his essay on global and local issues, talks of the

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return to the local as a response to globalisation. He suggests that faced with a particular form of modernity, people ‘opt out’. Featherstone [1993: 177] reiterates this argument when he talks of a ‘deglobalizing reaction to global compression and the intensity of global flows’. Hall stresses that it is at the ‘retreated to’ local place that struggles for cultural representation take place. It is respect for local roots which is drawn on and used against the anonymous impersonal forces of development and globalisation. The neighbourhood, the community, is what people know, understand and can talk about. Stuart Corbridge [1993: 200] talks of the Third World experiencing ‘a fractured modernity in western term s’ - the modernisation of the economy is incomplete, political systems are usually linked to private gain and yet the penetration of Western ideas and modes of thought is much more complete. A response to this ‘fractured modernity’ and such insecurity may be the retreat to historical meaning, a retreat to something which modernity has yet to taint and destroy. I argue that a ‘retreat to the local’, a ‘deglobalizing reaction’, a response to ‘fractured modernity’ for many who live in the Caribbean involves a cultural relationship with the land. Caribbean cultures of land are not based solely on economics but rather connected to history, ancestry, independence and freedom. The land has a spiritual meaning as well as being of practical importance. Hence the cultures of land are important factors in people’s resistance to global processes, including development, and provide a sense of security at a time of ‘fractured modernity’. A F U T U R E FO R C A R IB B E A N C U L T U R E S O F L A N D ?

The Caribbean currently faces spiralling national debts of more than US$21 billion, owed predominantly to the World Bank, the IMF, USAID and the Interamerican Development Bank. Faced with programmes of structural adjustment policies the rural poor in the region have become increasingly dependent upon their small plots of land to provide basic food sources for themselves. At the same time the land is under increasing pressure. External ‘development’ advice on agriculture is to move towards or continue with export crops. More and more land is cultivated with a single export crop, for example, bananas in Dominica [McAfee, 1991]. Land is also under pressure from external buyers. A more recent threat to Caribbean land comes from transnational companies offering large sums of money to those governments in severe external debt for the right to dump toxic waste from the West. When Montserratians heard in 1994 that their government was negotiating with one such company, there was a unanimous outcry across the island against the proposal [Swift, 1994]. Such global processes will throw Caribbean islanders trying to maintain their cultures of land into constant conflict with the West.

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However, such is their position within the global political economy that it will become increasingly difficult to resist. Future development has to include an integrated understanding of the cultures of land in the Caribbean, a recognition of the social, historical, spiritual and emotional importance of land. Discourse of development for the region has to take account of Caribbean cultures in their broadest sense and give space to indigenous strategies for self-reliance and empowerment. This article has demonstrated the complexities of ‘culture’ as a subject and maintained that such complexities have to be acknowledged, represented and respected. Cultures of land in the Caribbean have been discussed in their historical contexts and the contradictions and nuances of such cultures have been represented. I have drawn examples from the Caribbean to illustrate the importance of cultures of land in allowing a local response to global processes. I have argued for recognising the importance of culture, both generally and specifically as in Caribbean cultures of land, to development.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

I have chosen to use the terms the ‘Third World’ and the West throughout this article, despite the fact that there are problems with both terms. By placing the ‘Third World’ between inverted commas, I want to indicate that it is open to debate. I reject the terms North and South for implying a neutrality that clearly does not exist. While this article is part of the development debate which acknowledges the importance of cultures within the ‘Third World’, there is also the need for development to consider the cultures of the nations of the West, the so-called ‘donor’ nations. There is relatively little research on this to date, although this subject forms part of the aims of Jonathan Crush’s [1995] edited collection. I use the term ‘gardeners’ to refer to people who use land close to their home or further away to grow produce and tether livestock. They are actively engaged in small-scale agricultural production but would not describe themselves as farmers and do not usually sell any of their produce. Amerindian Carib people still reside in the mountain reserve areas on the island of Dominica. Montserrat is a British Dependent Territory with an elected parliament and a Governor appointed by the British government. Montserrat receives financial support from the British government but Montserratians do not enjoy the same rights of citizenship and membership of the European Union as residents of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the French Departements Outre Mer. The island lies in the Eastern Caribbean between Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Guadeloupe. It is a small island of 32 square miles and home to about 12,000 people, the vast majority of African descent. Montserrat was initially colonised in the early seventeenth century by Irish Catholics fleeing Protestant persecution in Virginia and other Caribbean islands but was firmly under English rule by the end of the century. The island has a mixed liberal economy which has recently suffered greatly from the near year long volcanic eruptions from Chances Peak. Large areas of the island were evacuated at different times and many islanders took refuge with relatives overseas. Geologists finally declared the island to be safe in early January 1996. The Caribbean is home to many beliefs and customs associated with the mystical; the most famous example being voodoo culture and religion in Haiti. In Montserrat there are beliefs in ‘jumbies’ who are the spirits of dead ancestors: whenever a bottle of alcoholic spirit is opened a capful is thrown into the comer for the ‘jumbies’, and a portion of food at a celebration is set aside for them. There are stories throughout the Caribbean of places in the mountains from where slaves flew back to Africa. The mystical sense of meaning given to the land is thereby entirely in keeping with other traditions and beliefs.

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REFERENCES Allen, T., 1992, ‘Taking Culture Seriously’, in T. Allen and A. Thomas (eds.), Poverty and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press with the Open University, pp.331-46. Beckles, H., 1990, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckles, H. and V. Shepherd (eds.), 1992, Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Beckles, H. and V. Shepherd (eds.), 1993, Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Besson, J., 1984, ‘Family Land and Caribbean Society: Toward Ethnography of Afro-Caribbean Peasantries’, in E. Thomas-Hope (ed.), Perspectives on Caribbean Regional Identity, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp.57-83. Besson, J., 1987, ‘A Paradox in Caribbean Attitudes to Land’, in Besson and Momsen [1987:13-45]. Besson, J. and J. Momsen (eds.), 1987, Land and Development in the Caribbean, London: Macmillan. Bolland, N., 1993, ‘Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labour in the British West Indies after 1838’, in Beckles and Shepherd [1993:107-3]. Bush, B., 1990, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-838, London: James Currey. Clarke, E., 1953, ‘Land Tenure and the Family in Four Communities in Jamaica’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 1, No.4, pp.81-118. Clarke, E., 1966, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica, (2nd ed.), London: Allen and Unwin. Clarke, J., Hall, S., Jefferson, T. and B. Roberts, 1976, ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview’, in S. Hall and J. Henderson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals, London: Hutchinson/Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, pp.9-74. Corbridge, S., 1993, ‘Colonialism, Post-colonialism and the Political Geography of the Third World’, in P.J. Taylor, Political Geography o f the Twentieth Century, London: Bellhaven Press, pp. 171-205. Crush, J. (ed.), 1995, Power of Development, London: Routledge. Featherstone, M., 1993, ‘Global and Local Cultures’, in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson, and L. Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London: Routledge, pp. 169-87. Featherstone, M. (ed.), 1990, Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage. Fergus, H., 1994, Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony, London: Macmillan. Ferguson, J., 1990, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development\ Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, C., 1984, ‘Culture and Social Change: The Indonesian Case’, Man, Vol. 19, pp.511-32. Greenfield, S., 1960, ‘Land Tenure and Transmission in Rural Barbados’, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol.33, No.4, pp. 165-76. Hall, S., 1980, ‘Cultural studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems’, in S. Hall et a i, Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson/Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, pp. 15-47. Hall, S., 1991, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization of Ethnicity’, in A. King, op.cit., pp.19-39. Hart, Richard, 1980, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. Horowitz, M., 1967, Morne-Paysan: Peasant Village in Martinique, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Jackson, P., 1989, Maps o f Meaning London: Routledge. Johnson, H., 1993, ‘The Share System in the Bahamas in the 19th and Early 20th Century’, in Beckles and Shepherd (eds.) [1993:124-30]. King, A. (ed.), 1991, Culture, Globalization and the World-System, London: Macmillan. Kofman, E. and G. Youngs (eds.), 1996, Globalization: Theory and Practice, London: Pinter. McAfee, K., 1991, Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean, London: Zed Press.

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Marshall, W., 1993, ‘Notes on Peasant Development in the West Indies since 1838’, in Beckles and Shepherd [1993: 99-106]. Mintz, S., 1974, Caribbean Transformations, Chicago, IL: Aldine. Mintz, S., 1993, ‘The Origins of Reconstituted Peasantries’, in Beckles and Shepherd [1993: 94-8]. Philpott, S., 1973, West Indian Migration: The Montserrat Case, London: Athlone Press. Robertson, R., 1992, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Rodman, H., 1971, Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad, London: Oxford University Press. Shurmer-Smith, P. and K. Hannam, 1994, Worlds of Desire, Realms of Power: A Cultural Geography, London: Edward Arnold. Skelton, T., 1996, ‘Globalization, Culture and Land: The Case of the Caribbean’, in Kofman and Youngs [1996: 318-28]. Smith, M.G., 1965, The Plural Society in the British West Indies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smith, R.T., 1955, ‘Land Tenure in Three Negro Villages in British Guiana’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol.4, N o.l, pp.64-82. Swift, R., 1994, ‘Squeezing the South: 50 years is Enough’, New Internationalist, July, pp.4. Verhelst, T., 1987, No Life Without Roots: Culture and Development, London: Zed Press. Williams, E., 1970, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969, London: Andre Deutsch. Williams, R., 1958, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, London: Chatto & Windus.

Gender, Culture and Development: A South African Experience G. HONOR FAGAN, RONALDO MUNCK and KATHY N A D A S E N The context o f this study is set by the process o f political democratisation and social transformation now under way in South Africa. It focuses on the lives o f a group o f African women in Clermont township outside Durban. Its methodology seeks to break the artificial divide between political economy and cultural studies approaches to development. Its findings contradict a simplistic hierarchical distinction between practical and strategic needs. Attention is also paid to the particular dowry form o f lobolo and its ostensibly traditional role in African society. IN T R O D U C T IO N

South Africa is now embarking on a process of political democratisation and social transformation. For critical observers, at home and abroad, a crucial litmus test for the ANC-dominated (African National Congress) Government of National Unity which came to power in 1994 is the position of African women. Government policies in this area will be closely scrutinised. It is this political context which frames our exploration of the lives of a group of African women in Clermont township outside Durban. The theoretical context we operate within is the interrelation between gender and culture [Gender and Development, 1995] and the interaction between culture and development (see Tucker in this volume). Our purpose is to trace the discursive construction of reality by women in Clermont, emphasising the specific cultural processes shaping their daily lives. It is this process of agency which allows these women to engage with the structural constraints associated with their location and their subject positions as ‘Third World’ women living in conditions of under-development. This approach seeks to go beyond the artificial divide we see between ‘political economy’

The authors were with the Department of Sociology, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa at the time research for this study was conducted. They would like to thank all the women involved in the research project and the two organisations which facilitated their work, the Clermont Child and Family Welfare Society and Crisis Care in Chatsworth, Durban.

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and ‘cultural studies’ approaches to women in/and development. Whereas political economy directs us to the study of the structural conditions of women, cultural studies points us towards a politics of change and transformation. Following Tony Bennett, we adopt cultural studies as a label of convenience ‘for a whole range of approaches which, however divergent they might be in other respects, share a commitment to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within relations of power’ [Bennett, 1992: 33]. This cultural approach is a necessary complement to a critical political economy as we see it, in so far as it leads to a practical engagement with, and within, the relations between culture and power. The voices of African township women have been systematically silenced and devalued. As we explored the everyday lives of these women through their testimony we came to understand something of their subject positions and the construction of their identities. Our methodological commitment was to maintain a balance between our sociological understanding of their structural position ( ‘political economy’ for short) and a cultural understanding of the creative mechanisms of social agency as advocated by the cultural studies approach. We were acutely aware of our own role in the ethnographic study we engaged in. One of us did liaison work with the communities but did not participate in the interviewing process on the basis of his gender. Of the remaining two authors, one of us is Irish, the other South African Indian. The cultural, racial, social and economic differences between ourselves and our respondents were tremendous. This can lead to the production of the other as object of research, and the unjustified seizing of the authority of authenticity, and the appropriation of the voice of the ‘other’. We were also aware that the differences were so great that we could fall into a position that uncritically celebrated that difference, resulting in a focus on the homogeneity of the respondents. We were advised by the community workers to interview the women at centres rather than in their own homes so as not to put undue pressure on individuals, given the perceived power imbalance arising from our different subject positions. At all times we had a female interpreter from the community (likely to be trusted by the women) with us. Many of the women who talked to us chose to come in couples which perhaps reflected their insecurity with the process. Our approach stressed reflexivity about the research process and sought out further involvement and further intersubjective knowledge rather than closure. In a practical vein, we saw ourselves as ‘paying something back’ in the research bargain by producing research reports to assist those community groups, who had helped us to gain access, in their bids for funds for basic needs projects. The women interviewed, and the non-governmental

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organisations we worked with, believed that the process of recording their stories, writing this up in report form, and submitting this to funding agencies would help them in their struggle for survival. Our starting point was to trace the move from survival strategies towards empowerment by Clermont women. We developed our own open-ended questionnaires on the assumption that women organise around practical and strategic gender needs, with the latter being a qualitatively higher phase. Caroline Moser [1989], adapting categories developed by Maxine Molyneux [1981], distinguishes practical gender needs (such as sanitation, health care, higher income) from strategic gender needs which directly challenge women’s subordination and existing gender relations (such as affirmative action programmes and equal gender rights legislation). The basic conclusion we drew from this ethnographic study is that this distinction is problematic, especially if translated into political strategy. We simply could not draw a clear line between a coping or survival strategy and an enabling or empowerment strategy. Survival for the women of Clermont is, itself, a demonstration of considerable power. It was interesting to note, after our research was completed, that a group of Mexican researchers and activists [Alberti et al., 1995] had trouble ‘translating’ the word empowerment, linguistically and politically, from the NGO lexicon to practical conditions. W O M E N IN S O U T H A F R IC A T O D A Y

Black working-class women in South Africa have lived under what has been termed the triple oppression of race, gender and class. This burden affects women in the workplace, in the community and in the home, all sites of patriarchal domination. As the South African report to the 1994 women’s conference in Beijing put it: Women continue to be discriminated against in the workplace. The labour law framework tends not to recognise the position of women workers, and in particular the double burden of work in the workplace and in the home. Women experience an enormous amount of direct and indirect discrimination in the workplace, including unequal pay and benefits, discrimination in tax, no guaranteed maternity benefits or job security and disparities in medical, pension and housing benefits, among other things. Women are also subject to a high degree of racial and sexual harassment [Beijing Conference Report, 1994: 18]. The same report records that women also suffer disproportionately from unemployment, which in 1993 affected 44 per cent of African women compared to 33 per cent of African men, not to mention the comparison with 5 per cent of white women and 30 per cent of white men.

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As in other ‘Third World’ countries it is notoriously difficult to estimate the number of African women engaged in formal employment. Women employed in subsistence agriculture, for example, are not regarded as ‘economically active’, not to mention those engaged in unpaid domestic labour. However, it has been estimated that women account for over half of the extended labour force if the gender blindness of official statistics is corrected. Women still find it particularly difficult to obtain regular jobs in the formal economy, particularly in the rural areas where four-fifths of African women were found to have no income at all. We can see in Table 1 below the skewed distribution of income by gender in South Africa, bearing in mind that it deals with women of all races, therefore masking racial inequities. TABLE 1 SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN AS PER CENTAGE OF INCOME BRACKETS (1991)

ANNUAL INCOME Rands 300,000 plus R100,000- 299,999 R70,000 - 99,999 R50,000 - 69,999 R30,000 - 49,999 R10,0 0 0 - 29,999 R7,000 - 9,999 R 5 ,0 0 0 -6,999 R3,000 - 4,999 R2,000 - 2,999 R l-9 9 9 No Income

PERCENTAGE WOMEN 9.3 6.4 8.7 12.8 26.0 35.2 24.4 31.7 39.7 50.2 59.0 53.6

Source : Beijing Conference Report, 1994, Country Report on the Status of South African Women, p.36.

The oppression of South African black women goes much further than these bare statistics suggest. A systematic and multi-faceted system of subjugation places African women outside the decision-making process, both in the public and private domain [World University Service Women’s Development Programme, 1992]. Women are confined to the domestic arena and men are left in control of political power and social authority. It is only recently that women ceased being considered as minors under the law and thus subject to the guardianship of their husbands. The 1993 amendment to the marriage laws removed the marital power from all marriages but excluded those women married under customary law and those living in KwaZulu Natal (subject to the Natal Code) who remarried subject to marital power. It is not surprising that in this patriarchal society domestic violence is widespread and the incidence of rape in many townships is alarmingly high. With respect to reproductive rights, many rural women are simply sterilised or given Depo-

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Provera as a matter of routine, and in urban areas a partner’s permission is often required before contraceptive measures are prescribed. After the ANC’s historic victory in the April 1994 elections, there were great expectations that the triple burden of women would be lifted [Work in Progress, 1994]. In the first post-apartheid parliament one hundred of the four hundred deputies were women. However, there were only two women amongst the 27 ministers. There is, undoubtedly, a window of opportunity to advance gender issues. Yet, as the Beijing Conference report argues: Whether the wonderful visions are translated into reality will depend on the strategies and machinery put into place, the resources allocated and the commitment to evaluating and measuring, within time frames, what real changes are being made to the most oppressed and exploited South African: black, working class women [Beijing Conference Report, 1994: 51]. While undoubtedly true, the emphasis on the state and state measures as the road to reform looks somewhat hollow at a grassroots level. The active civil society which might have forced these measures through is not much in evidence. The demobilisation of the once vibrant national civics movement is a token of this problem. The community organisations known as ‘civics’ were once the mainspring of resistance against the apartheid system at the community level. Today they are a pale reflection of their former selves and many of their one time enthusiastic proponents now advocate primacy of the parliamentary arena. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which was intended to launch the democratic development project to uplift black working class women, was bound to disappoint. Even those involved in its inception find the final policy document to be incoherent, lacking in vision and pandering too much to dominant free market ideologies [Abelzadeh and Padayachee, 1994]. The commitment to race and gender equality, and to a ‘people driven’ process now appear to be pious aspirations. From a gender perspective there are many problems with the RDP, not least in the way women are ‘tacked on in the various sections’ [Agenda Collective, 1995]. A recent survey on women and the economy shows that ‘[d]espite continual references to the RDP, the reallocation of government spending and the creation of employment remained unsystematic at best’ [Makgetla, 1995:14]. Put bluntly, for most black women democracy brought no immediate discernible economic changes to their daily lives. Whatever the merits of the RDP as a general development programme, it seems that the specific needs of women, and particularly rural women, will not be highlighted. In South Africa the so-called ‘traditional’ aspects of women’s oppression weigh heavily. This customary dimension being deep-rooted in African

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society, multi-faceted and contradictory, will hardly be swept away by one election. Many women argue that customary law is oppressive and deprives them of basic rights. As Peliwe Lolwana [1993: 50] puts it ‘[t]he traditional values held by black society about women hurt black women in many ways’. Yet, given the heterogeneity amongst women, for some tradition, (sometimes translated simply into ‘our culture’) is cherished as a link between the past and the future and as a guarantee of particular ‘traditional’ rights they wish to hold on to. There is, indeed, considerable debate in ANC circles on the African form of dowry known as lobolo. On the question of polygamy, a major issue in rural society, the ANC argues that this is a complex issue not easily resolved by legislative measures. Others on the left are more categorical in their view that no traditional or customary practices should steal away the equality that the new constitution confers on women. We should be aware, finally, that there is a long history of ‘tradition’ being used by men to oppress women. As Terence Ranger [1983: 258] notes, men’s dominance in African society was often expressed in colonial invented tradition. Customary practice usually means a male and colonial practice which silences women’s indigenous beliefs. W O M E N IN C L E R M O N T T O W N S H IP

Our concerns with women in the ‘new’ South Africa were focused on a small corner of KwaZulu Natal, namely, the township of Clermont on the outskirts of Durban [Todes and Posel, 1994]. Dating back to the 1930s, Clermont is unique in that it was constituted as an African freehold township. By the mid1970s there were some 50,000 people living in Clermont, including 10,000 in a large hostel complex. There is a wide range of housing from formal housing to shack settlements. There is also a large tenant population attracted by the reasonable proximity to the Durban industrial suburb of Pinetown. Today, Clermont comprises a population of nearly 100,000 people of whom approximately one fifth are shack dwellers [Hindson and Byerley, 1993]. Until 1980, Inkatha was the dominant political presence in Clermont. This was not necessarily an anti-ANC stance as at that time many perceived Inkatha as a legal substitute for the banned ANC. However, in the early 1980s the conflict between Inkatha and the ANC-aligned UDF (United Democratic Front) rocked Clermont, as it did other areas in the KwaZulu Natal region. Militant youth spearheaded a campaign of resistance against the apartheid state and its local collaborators. The bus boycotts of the early 1980s, helped bring together communities and workplace resistance structures. The bus boycott was resisted by the mainly Inkatha-supporting hostel dwellers. Open clashes subsided in the late 1980s, although there was clandestine, more targeted, activity pitting Inkatha against the ANC. On the whole, Clermont today is an

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ANC-supporting area. There is a ‘civic’ or community organisation, but it is not particularly strong. A survey conducted in 1993 provides some general data on social needs in Clermont [Hindson and Byerley, 1993: 22]. About half of those surveyed had been bom in rural areas which gives a strong indication of the extent of urban migration. In the more established part of Clermont (Old Clermont) Hindson and Byerley’s survey found that the most important facilities people found lacking were, in order of importance, formal housing, toilets, better roads, transport, electricity and water taps. By contrast, in the shack settlement nearly half of the population surveyed placed water taps as their first priority, reflecting the order of developmental needs in these areas. One third of the population surveyed had seriously thought of leaving Clermont, citing poor accommodation and poor services as the main reasons. An impressionistic view of Clermont would start with the overwhelming feeling of over-crowdedness. The area teems with people and there seems to be a plethora of small-scale economic activities. The ubiquitous mini-buses transport workers into Durban or the nearer industrial areas of Pinetown and New Germany. There is also a distinct air of official neglect, especially from the political establishment, including the ANC. Community workers (some with individual case loads of more than a thousand) exude an air of helplessness, even despair, given the magnitude of the social needs of Clermont and the patent lack of remedies after one year of the ‘people’s government’. M A K IN G E N D S M EET

In an era of global restructuring, we are seeing many changes in the position of working women [Aslanbeigui, Pressman and Summerfield, 1994]. Women already bear the double burden of household responsibilities and other forms of work. In paid employment women are more vulnerable than men, being concentrated in low wage sectors and forming a disproportionate part of the informal sector. Even the World Bank acknowledges that ‘their relative position has often deteriorated during structural readjustm ent’ [World Development Report, 1995: 107]. Structural adjustment policies are usually generated in a way which is gender blind and ignores the specific position of women. In terms of its effects, more women are exposed to the market be it as wage-workers, petty-commodity producers or consumers. This process known as the ‘feminisation of work’ - has affected South Africa as elsewhere. In 1991, 40 per cent of African women worked in community, social and personal services. Of these, 24 per cent were in domestic work, ten per cent were employed in agriculture, ten per cent in the retail trade, and 35 per cent worked in ‘unspecified’ occupations, covering a range of informal trades [Makgetla, 1995: 11].

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The women of Clermont whom we interviewed worked in a range of occupations. A few had been involved in factory work but the m ost common areas of work by far were sewing, washing and ironing, and market or door to door selling. This spread of occupations seems to make our sample ‘representative’ in terms of the national statistics quoted above* as well as the available ethnographic information. Around a third of the women had partners living in and most of these worked in the light engineering plants of the nearby industrial estates. The issue of finding a job or moving to a better job was ever­ present in our interviews. When asked what they wanted for their sons and daughters practically all the women stated simply ‘a job’. The key to a stable occupation- something eminently lacking in their own lives - was seen to lie in higher education. For the women of Clermont, the world of work is one of long hours, poor pay and insecure conditions. It is now accepted that conventional economics has failed to investigate or measure the unpaid work of women in the household [Bakker, 1994]. Doris, a mother of two, who has lived in Clermont since 1985, says that: ‘The men tell themselves that they are high and yet everything in the house is done by the women from the darning of the socks to the cooking.... everything is done by the women. The woman is the manager, managing everything, and the man doesn’t like that.’ For Doris, men think they are ‘higher’ than the women, even when the latter are better educated or earn more, and women tend to accept this for the sake of ‘peace’ in the household. A study of women living in Alexandra township outside Johannesburg found that nearly half the men did help with household chores, but these women belonged to a different social strata being mainly teachers and nurses [White: 1991]. None the less, while women in White’s study were engaged in the ‘double shift’ in the home, the men were either down at the shebeen or sipping a beer in front of the television. Control over time is as important as control over income or food in terms of intrahousehold gender relations. Although, the democratic South African government had promised major improvements in social wage and household infrastructure for the poor majority, the 1994-95 budget was not restructured to improve household infrastructure in poor communities. The women in Clermont did not feel, nearly a year after the elections, that much change had come to their lives. For Thokozane, the new government ‘promised us they were going to change ... last year ... but still no jobs ... no change ... nothing’. For Antonia, ‘they made all these promises ... to build the schools we’ve got nothing happened’. The Clermont women have their own analysis of the new government and job creation as shown in the following composite quote. My worry is that President Mandela is not here with us, we got the problem of jobs and he’s promised to make us jobs this year ... But the

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thing is M andela’s got no jobs ... the jobs are those from the white people . . . we know that white people they don’t like u s.....Still whites they own tfce factories ... we blacks we don’t have work, so it is still hard for us t© get work. Caroline W hite’s [1991: 85] finding in which women in Alexandra township ‘painted a rather harmonious picture of their financial arrangements with their husbands’ is certainly not replicated in Clermont. Thembi’s account is typical: When he comes home, like today its Friday, he has to come with the money to me but he never do it ... he go to town and buy something maybe we don’t need ... without sitting down and discussing what we need ... that is my worry. We fight about it. We have to sit down and say this week we are going to pay this shop, and this one, like electricity, telephone, like that ... he never do that. Consequently women spend long hours looking for work, doing washing for other people or selling wares door to door, on the street or at the market as well as carrying almost total responsibility for household management. They feel the oppression of race and class but this is always subsumed by the ever present, all embracing condition of gender. Kate Young [1993: 59] has written in this regard about ‘the erroneous but widespread view..... that households are unproblematic units of pooling and sharing’. In fact, the intra-household distribution and control over resources is very uneven in terms of gender, and is a critical arena for the cultural production of social relations of gender. T R A D I T I O N , L O B O L O A N D T H E C O N S T R U C T I O N OF G E N D E R RELATIONS

Only one-third of the women we interviewed were ‘married’, either legally or living with a ‘boyfriend’. Of the rest around half lived with other relatives (usually parents) and the other half lived on their own with children. The institution of marriage was integrally related to the custom or tradition of lobolo. This particular form of dowry traditionally consisted of cattle which passed from the groom to the bride’s parents. Currently it is more common for lobolo to take a cash form, especially in urban areas. Some anthropologists have argued that lobolo is rooted in a web of kin relations which in the pre­ colonial era offered some protection for women. Against this can be cited early reports of violence against women in rural areas. There was still an economic rationale to lobolo even amongst urban workers who pay bridewealth in order to stake a claim in the rural area. Today many women object precisely to the notion that they can be ‘bought’ with the equivalent of a few head of cattle. However, opinion on this matter is very divided as will be seen.

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Two-thirds of our respondents spoke up in favour of lobolo. Agnes, who has lived in Clermont since 1948, has seven children, and four grandchildren, and worked in a supermarket for 18 years, thinks that lobolo: is our custom, its not easy to change a custom. Because it is from the forefathers many people will still like to follow it. Maybe a few will say ‘No, we don’t like it now’. Lobolo they make it so that a person can learn to love his wife ... so that they can look after them nicely ... you can’t expect somebody come and do anything to your wife because you know, its yours, you paid for her. This sentiment was common if expressed in different ways. Most women simply said that lobolo was ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’. A more prosaic view came from Tryphina. In her thirties, married, with no children, she thought lobolo: ‘is good because with this money he pays ... My parents can take it and help me to buy some wedding gown and furniture ... .’ Here lobolo appears just like an African version of a typical Western suburban marriage custom. The minority of women who oppose lobolo hold strong views. Thandi’s husband paid lobolo for her some years ago and they have three children. She believes whilst lobolo is part of ‘our African culture ... it’s not right because if somebody has paid for you he makes you a slave because he knows he has given your parents money, so you become a slave’. Patricia is 57 years old, has nine children and lives in a shack. For her lobolo is: something that I hate in my life but it is a custom. I hate it because it is the main cause of this pregnancy of children. This lobolo is not very good because you have to pay a lot buying something ... I don’t think a person should be sold. The man knows he is the boss of the house ... He bought her just like the furniture. And your furniture when you don’t want it you shift it away, you give it out. That is what is happening to the women. There are both young and old women who accept lobolo and young and old women who strenuously oppose lobolo. A small-scale survey of students in Durban found similar attitudes [Walker, 1992]. One rural male interviewed was quite specific. ‘A woman cannot dictate because she is in a very fragile position. I buy her and she has to obey because she is my property’ [Walker, 1992: 5]. However, most rural women said they did not feel oppressed by the institution. Most objections to lobolo were pragmatic, namely that it had become too expensive. It was also felt that the move from cattle to cash had commercialised what was an otherwise valuable traditional custom. Cheryl Walker [1992: 58] concludes from this survey that ‘the institution of lobolo is significant, valued by both men and women but probably for different reasons and not unanimously so, and the

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attitudes towards it are complex, nuanced and not beyond self-scrutiny’. Commodification certainly means that lobolo has lost its ritual character, and there is little evidence that it plays a protective role vis-a-vis women. It cannot be assumed that appeal to ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’ implies acceptance of lobolo as such. As one reviewer of our paper stated ‘it could be a reiteration of what is expected, which does not necessarily express agreement, or indicate what they do, how they act with their own children’. A study of urban lobolo practice by Mary de Haas likewise found that when women said that it was ‘a custom’, this was an explanation ‘given by those who did not know any other reason why it passed’ [De Haas, 1987: 45]. In a sense this is the path of least resistance, maintaining conformity with the mores of the elders by not breaking with the continuity of any tradition. Yet, the cultural significance of lobolo for our respondents seems open-ended, and dependent to some extent on the bargaining powers of the personalities involved. D O M E S T IC R E L A T IO N S

We need to go beyond lobolo to understand quite how basic life is for many of the women we interviewed. Protest came from the Transkei to live as a tenant in a small shack. She has three children and ekes out a living by selling mangoes and doing washing. She tells how: After I completed school I didn’t get any job ... so the time went on. I was looking for a job and this guy came to me ... No, I can help you, I can get a job for you ... but first be my girlfriend. So because I was helpless, I was desperate for a job I accept this guy but after that [she points to her stomach to indicate she became pregnant] he has vanished from thin air ... The next thing is coming another guy. If help doesn’t come I’m not going to have the rent and the owner is going to throw me away ... The guy says ‘Come and live with me. I’m going to feed those mouths and you’ and then it’s the same story going to continue. Women like Protest demonstrate the crude nexus between food, survival and gender oppression. Given the material reality of patriarchal relations the only thing worse than a man seems to be the lack o f a man. This is a point which is troubling to most orthodoxies and is reminiscent of Joan Robinson’s remark that the one thing worse than capitalism was no capitalism. Neither remark is amenable to easy theorising or the drawing up of neat political conclusions. Victoria has three children (the oldest daughter is 17) and has lived in Clermont since 1989. Her husband has a badly paid job in a local factory and he paid lobolo to Victoria’s parents when they got married. She tells how: I went to town for dress making lessons. I got a certificate when I

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finished and he bought me a sewing machine. He said ‘you must stay at home now’... So I was staying at home ... sewing by myself ... so when I hear that the other women are here [at the Child Welfare Community Centre] I came and talked to them. I learned so many things here ... it is very nice. But this one doesn’t like that I came here by myself. We were fighting and fighting about it. I made my own decision. Even now he doesn’t want me to go. He wants me to go out with the hat. They say if you are a woman, if you are a married woman, you must put a hat on, but I don’t do that every time. Sometimes I comb my hair and go. He used to get cross but I said ‘N o’. A small ‘domestic’ incident, maybe, but indicative of the tension in gender relations in Clermont. Rape is a regular feature in the lives of the women we interviewed. Almost all the women mentioned rape when we explored the different facets of daily living in Clermont. Gang rape was reported as a regular occurrence and many had heard of young children being raped in their vicinity. When we asked Doris (34) if Clermont was a safe place to walk around, she replied ‘No, it’s not safe ... a man rapes, kills her’. When asked if women could do anything about the frequency of rape, she said ‘Yes, women can get together and complain and no one listens’. Surprisingly, Adelaide maintained that Clermont was a safe place to walk out in but we then discovered that, like many other women, she did not leave the house after 8 p.m.: ‘You know, we as Africans, it is not our custom to ... a lady to go out at night. It’s something our parents taught us. You can’t go out after eight o’ clock. It’s not done ... we black people ... it’s dangerous. Sometimes somebody who’s walking can get hurt’. This might explain why Adelaide thought Clermont was ‘quiet’. In terms of reproductive rights almost all women interviewed used some form of contraception. Invariably the decision to take contraceptives was their own, although the type of contraceptive (most commonly Depo Provera) was outside their control. Often they did not tell their husbands of their decision, leading to serious disputes. Some feminist approaches to ‘Third World’ women have tended to focus on contraception (especially sterilisation) as something which is done to women through powerful development agencies, and there is an emerging understanding that the methods through which contraception is doled out have not always been woman friendly. Leaving this debate aside, contraception for the Clermont women was a means to gaining some control over their lives by limiting the number of children they would have. The women nearly always said that they advise their daughters to use contraception at an early age. Irene sums up the attitude of most women towards contraception: ‘It’s good ... because the cost of living is too high. Everything is so expensive. You won’t be able to school them [children] ...

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You won’t be able to dress them, you won’t be able to look after them. So now it is much better for a young woman to take a pill.’ In relation to gender conflict at the interpersonal level, most women we interviewed simply felt that men could not be trusted. Pinky is a self-employed dressmaker who lives with her two teenage boys. In her view, women’s lives are difficult ‘because the men cannot be trusted ... You never trust a man. Sometimes a man doesn’t stay at home, sometimes he doesn’t work’. Conversely, men could be relied upon to act oppressively towards women. Constance had direct experience of violence in the home and when asked if women in her position would go back to their homes, said: ‘Some they go back ... some they run away ... but some of them they go back and stand that hard life because even if they can leave this one they’ll go to the other one who will do the same’. As researchers linked to the university, women often asked us for information or assistance regarding their children’s education. But Pinky went one step further and asked us: to go back to your university and tell them that we need our men to be educated ... (laughs heartily) ... We need our men to be taught how to treat women ... They’re wild you see, wild ... even those who are educated. He goes to a shebeen where he drinks beer and all until he comes home. That’s not good ... I think men need to be educated more than women. This view highlights the shortcomings of the Women in Development approach, which focuses exclusively on women, as though they are mistresses of their own future. The Gender and Development approach, by contrast, focuses on the relationship between the two sexes, on the ways in which women’s lives are shaped by men and on the changes which are required in men’s attitudes and behaviour [Young, 1993: 129-35]. TOW ARDS EM PO W ER M EN T

Following Molyneux [1981] and Moser [1989], it has become commonplace to distinguish between practical and strategic gender needs. Indeed, we began our research with this distinction in mind. Practical gender interests relate to women’s position in the sexual division of labour and involve such interests as childcare facilities, better wages, sanitation, and healthcare. Strategic gender interests, by contrast, are defined as those which challenge women’s subordination, such as changes in legislation to achieve gender equality. As will be seen below, we found it difficult to draw a hard and fast line between coping strategies and empowerment strategies in our research [cf. Elson, 1992]. We could, however, distinguish between gender-related issues (jobs,

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health, transport, etc.) and gender-specific issues (contraception, rape, lobolo). Janet has been a market trader in Clermont since 1966. She has six children and lives with relatives. When asked whether women or men were the leaders of the community she replied: Women are very strong and powerful and willing if they want something to be done they try by all means ... I’ve noticed here at Sub 5 (shack area) women who have tried to get a place to stay and how they succeed! (laughs) They lift up dresses to the police men and everyone and said they are staying here. Women are strong because they toyi-toyi (protest dancing march). Other forms of women’s resistance include a ‘togetherness’, a topic which recurred frequently. For example, Lillian who has lived in Clermont for 25 years, has five children, and sells vegetables door to door, spoke of how: ‘We do help each other, for example, if I sew something and I got money ... I buy milk for my children. If my neighbour comes and asks for the milk, I give her and she can cook for her children. And even if I haven’t got something ... I can go to my neighbour and ask for this and she can give me.’ Pinky, who said she did not understand what ‘empowerment’ meant, nonetheless told us of her wish ‘to make some clubs ... like we stay together ... be a help to one another’. Writing about Latin America, Gina Vargas argues that women are now speaking out: In different forms, with different voices, shouting and whispering, in what already amounts to a historically significant rebellion, and after having felt confined for too long to private invisible spaces, women . . . . are now invading streets, town squares and other public spaces, demanding to be heard [Vargas, 1991: 1], Vargas acknowledges that the ‘private’ voice whispering in defiance can also be considered a form of rebellion. Empowerment should not be exclusively confined to the public arena of the plaza or political party but include the ways in which women empower themselves in the daily acts of gaining control over their lives as shown above. Certainly, there is also empowerment through the macro- acts on the national scenes, such as the historic elections in South Africa in April 1994. Survival itself, in Clermont, depends on diverse forms of individual initiative and group solidarity through enabling processes. As Hazel Johnson [1992: 172] puts it: ‘Women’s empowerment involves self-discovery and enablement as well as challenging structures of economic and political power.’ That is the point we found as we disabused ourselves of the notion of a hierarchy of struggle, from the ‘low-level’ coping strategy to the ‘higher level’ empowerment, or that meeting strategic gender needs was more ‘feminist’ than

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meeting practical gender needs. If we look at women working world-wide, we find fluidity and diversity in women’s resistance to global rationalization and gender oppression [Rowbotham and Mitter, 1994]. At the forefront of women’s solidarity in the township we studied is the Clermont Women’s Organisation (CWO) launched in 1993 and with a current membership of one hundred and fifty. The poor schooling facilities and the use of Clermont as a dumping ground for local industry seemed to be the main motivating factors. For CWO Chairperson Hlengiwe M gabadela, the objectives include ‘reconstructing the disoriented vision of a Black person ... of a Black woman ... instilling the sense of Pride, Confidence and Responsibility ... ’ [Clermont Women's Organisation, 1994: 2]. In practice, the CWO has campaigned energetically and successfully to reduce (if not prevent) the dumping of hazardous waste. Health education is also an area where the CWO, in alliance with other agencies, has made considerable progress. More frustrating were the candle-making and sewing projects launched in 1992 which had to be abandoned after equipment was burgled. What we were not able to establish was the scope of the CWO organising work and to what extent it reached the poorer women of Clermont. There are few comparative studies of women and township politics which we could use as a benchmark for the Clermont case. In one survey Jeremy Seekings [1991: 87] points to an apparent ‘demobilisation’ of women in (the mid-1980s), and a remobilisation of some along different, more genderstructured lines. An example of the latter was the involvement of women in committees responding to the crisis in township education. Our own study hopefully fills a gap in exploring the diverse ways in which women’s interests are articulated and the range of social and political activity. We would argue that perhaps one of the problems creating the gap in the literature has been an exclusive focus on traditional ‘male’ forms of political organisation. A study of two domestic servants in Tanzania bids us ‘respect the ways in which, despite their poverty and limited scope for manoeuvre (they) have challenged their oppression, and recognise that their accounts of their lives give a personal meaning to these real, material, everyday struggles which could be built upon’ [Bujra, 1993: 77]. We can only endorse this sentiment and hope that future studies of empowerment will understand this. This, again, is based on a research strategy which does not separate or counterpose the political economy/structural dimension and the culture/agency aspect by which people, even if constrained by structures, make and shape their own lives. In terms of a broader analysis of gender, culture and development we would argue that the life stories we have approximated in our interviews provide a more nuanced and potentially progressive approach. A focus on empowerment allows us to rearticulate the relationship between structure and agency, between actors and their knowledge repertoires. As Norman Long and

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Magdalena Villareal [1993: 161] put it in an important epistemological intervention, we need to highlight ‘the central importance of strategic agency in the ways in which people ... deal with and manipulate certain constraining and enabling elements in their endeavours to enrol each other in their individual or group “projects’” . Clearly the women we spoke to were able to articulate their voice and make their agency felt. They dealt with constraining factors with fortitude and considerable ingenuity. They also understood enabling factors, such as the democratic developmentalism of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and have moved, albeit sporadically and unevenly, towards new forms of organisation. The final word should go to one of our respondents, Constance, who has been married since 1958 and recently moved into the township, encapsulates many of the problems and prospects of the women we interviewed: When I look back ... ja ... its d ifficult... a woman has to look after their house ... not working as well ... when the man comes with nothing in the house the woman has to suffer ... The woman has to think what the children have to get to eat ... for food ... And it’s not easy to be a woman. You try your best to keep these children living ... And these days we are not ploughing, not planting anything here, we have no place to plant. Before it was even better, because there were fields. You had to plant mealies, beans, potatoes, spinach and so forth. Now you have got to get it through strength, through money and money is a problem. We haven’t got nice jobs to do to get the money, we haven’t got education. These days I think it is much better to have higher education than getting more children, when we have got education we have got a job, no education no job.

REFERENCES Agenda Collective, 1995, ‘Gender Flaws in the RD P\ Agenda, No.24, pp.40-44. Adelzadeh, A. and Padayachee, 1994, ‘The RDP White Paper: Reconstruction and Development Vision’, Transformation, No.25, pp. 1-18. Alberti, P. et al. (eds.), 1995, Empoderamientos y la Mujer Rural en Mexico, Mexico: Colegio de Postgraduados en Ciencias Agricolas, Montecillo. Aslanbeigui, N., Pressman, S. and G. Summerfield (eds.), 1994, Women in the Age of Economic Transformation, London: Routledge. Bakker, I. (ed.), 1994, The Strategic Silence, Gender and Economic Policy, London: Zed Press. Bennett, T., 1992, ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and and P. Treichler, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Beijing Conference Report, 1994, Country Report on the Status of South African Women, Cape Town: CTP Book Printers. Bujra, J., 1993, ‘Gender, Class and Empowerment: A Tale of Two Tanzanian Servants’, Review of African Political Economy, No.56, pp.68-73. Clermont Women’s Organisation, 2nd Annual Report, 1994.

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De Haas, M., 1987, ‘Is There Anything More to Say about Lobolo?’, African Studies, No.46.1, pp.33-54. Elson, D., 1992, ‘From Survival Strategies to Transformation Strategies: Women’s Needs and Structural Adjustment’, in L. Beneria and S. Feldman (eds.), Unequal Burden: Economic Crises. Persistent Poverty and Women’s Work, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gender and Development, 1995, Special Issue on ‘Women and Culture’, Gender and Development, Vol.3, No. 1, Feb. Hindson, D. and M. Byerley, 1993, Class and Residential Movement - Report on a Survey of Clermont and Kwadabeka Residents, Dublin: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Johnson, H., 1992, ‘Women’s Empowerment and Public Action: Experiences from Latin America’, in M. Wuyts, M. Mackintosh and T. Hewitt (eds.), Development Policy and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 147-72. Lolwana, P., 1993, ‘Women, Work and Economic Development’, Agenda, No. 18, pp.48-52. Long, N. and M. Villareal, 1993, ‘Exploring Development Interfaces: From the Transfer of Knowledge and the Transformation of Meaning’, in F. Shuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, London: Zed Books. Makgetla, M.S., 1995, ‘Women and Economy: Slow Pace of Change’, Agenda, No.24, pp.7-20. Molyneux, M., 1981, ‘Women’s Emancipation Under Socialism: A Model for the Third World’, World Development, Vol.9, pp. 1019—38. Moser, C., 1989, ‘Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Gender Needs’, World Development, Vol.17, N o .ll, pp.1799-825. Ranger, T., 1983, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowbotham, S. and S. Mitter, 1994, Dignity and Daily Bread, New Forms of Economic Organising Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First, London: Routledge. Seekings, J., 1991, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda, No. 10, pp.77-88. Todes, A and D. Posel, 1994, ‘What Has Happened to Gender in Regional Development Analysis? Examples from Kwazulu-Natal’, Transformation, No.25. Vargas, G„ 1991, The Women’s Movement in Peru: Streams, Spaces and Knots’, European Review of Latin American and Carribean Studies, No.50, pp.7-58. Walker, C., 1992, ‘Attitudes to Lobolo: Findings from some Student Research Projects’, Agenda, No. 13, pp.57-8. White, C., 1991, “‘Close to Home” in Johannesburg: Oppression in Township Households’, Agenda, N o .ll, pp.78-89. Work in Progress, 1994, ‘Great Expectations - Women’s Rights and the 1994 Election’, WID Supplement, April-May. World Development Report, 1995, Workers in an Integrating World, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank. World University Service Women’s Development Programme, 1992, ‘Women and Power, Implications for Development’, Johannesburg: World University Service. Young, K., 1993, Planning Development With Women, Making a World of Difference, London: Macmillan Press.

Health, Medicine and Development: A Field of Cultural Struggle VINCENT TUCKER This contribution is a case study o f the Transnational Pharmaceutical Industry and its impact on development thinking and practice. The discourse o f development is composed o f a range o f knowledge systems and practices. By focusing on one set o f these, health and medicine, this article takes a step towards critically unpacking the discourse o f development. It argues that there is an intimate relationship between medicine and development and that medicine like development has global aspirations. During the colonial period this took the form o f public health campaigns designed to increase production. In the post-colonial period this aspiration has taken on new global form s in the shape o f the Transnational Pharmaceutical Industry (TPI). This industry has achieved considerable global hegemony shaping development policies and health thinking and practice worldwide. But its cultural and economic power has been challenged by new transnational actors such as NGOs, global information networks and solidarity movements using strategies which are primarily cultural and organisational. In order to understand how global hegemony is constructed and challenged I argue that new approaches which transcend local-global binaries and which combine perspectives from political economy and cultural analysis are necessary. In the latter part o f the study I address some o f the methodological issues posed by this challenge. IN T R O D U C T IO N

In this article I will use the field of health and medicine as a site for exploring some of the theoretical and methodological issues which I raised in the introduction to this collection. Health and medicine also offer us a particularly Vincent Tucker, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland and a Coordinator of the Postgraduate Programme in Irish and World Development; e-mail: [email protected]. The author wishes to thank Jane Collins, Abdullahi El Tom, Kathy Glavanis, Cristobal Kay, Kieran Keohane, Denis O’Hearn, Jamie Saris, Jan Nederveen Pieterse and John Tomlinson for their helpful comments and encouragement. The author is grateful to the Arts Faculty, UCC for a travel grant which enabled him to carry out research for this project.

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fruitful field of study for demonstrating how perspectives from cultural analysis and political economy can complement each other. This study of the Transnational Pharmaceutical Industry provides us with a particular case study of cultural and economic globalisation and provides some insights into debates about the relationship between global and local, and between cultural imperialism and cultural resistance. In exploring the intimate relationship between health, medicine and development this article also provides a critique of development. Medicine has played a much more significant role in the construction of development than has been generally recognised. Western medicine has preferred to portray itself as a body of scientific knowledge and practices somehow apart from political and economic processes with the result that this link has been obscured. Since the colonial era medicine has constituted an integral component of the knowledge system and technology of development. Medical ideas and practices were part of the regulatory mechanisms of colonialism [Arnold, 1993] and continue to play a central role in development thinking and practice. Franz Fanon [1967] was one of the first to analyse the relationship between medicine and colonialism and recent work by Ehrenreich [1978], Vaughan [1991] and Arnold [1988; 1993] have also shown the centrality of medicine to colonialism. However, there has been relatively little critical analysis of the role of medicine in contemporary development discourses.1 Like colonialism, imperialism and modernisation, modem medicine has always had monopolistic aspirations. In the post colonial era this aspiration has taken on new globalised forms. The ‘health care’ industry, in the form of transnational pharmaceutical companies, has become one of the largest and most powerful industries in the world and its return on investment exceeds that of most other industries [Comanor, 1986; Chetley, 1990]. Through a combination of coercive and persuasive strategies the TPI has established itself as a major global actor capable of shaping development priorities, health thinking and practices, diagnostic procedures, doctor-patient relationships, household budgets, government health spending and, in some instances, industrial development policy. Its global influence is such that in the mid1970s Dr Halfdan Mahler, Director General of the WHO, aptly described the situation as one of ‘drug colonialism’.2 The influence of the industry far exceeds its economic power. Pharmaceutical drugs have come to be perceived as the most typical representation of medicine - indeed they have become the most central part of, and have given their name to, the entire enterprise: medicine [Van der Geest, 1988: 3]. Pharmaceutical drugs are now a universal phenomenon and are distributed and consumed in every corner of the globe. But pharmaceutical companies do not simply sell pills they also promote ways of thinking about

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health, illness and development. They have shaped, in varying degrees, the belief systems of virtually every society on the globe. Under their influence ‘health for all’ has virtually come to mean drugs for all. They are major cultural players shaping the social imaginaries of societies. They mobilise powerful emotional reactions and moral sentiments. They are portrayed as saving and prolonging lives and as weapons in the war against illness and disease. They inspire hope and promise salvation, although in recent decades they are also seen as a major cause of concern and a cause of ‘iatrogenic illness’ [Illich, 1976]. The TPI emerged and expanded in its present form mainly in the period after the Second World War. Technological innovations in automation, in chemistry, and in civil and biological engineering produced a huge accumulation and mobilisation of capital and remarkable improvements in communication and transportation. New organisational and political imperatives combined with these to give rise to an increasingly tightly integrated network of multinational investments and of production and trade links. Through this process multinational corporations gradually evolved into transnational corporations [Miyoshi, 1993: 736]. These organisations were truly global in that they were not beholden to any nation state and their organisational strategies were shaped by the imperative of profit maximisation.3Post-Fordist production methods allowed them to disperse sectors of their research, development, production, marketing, advertising, financing and distribution processes to different parts of the globe, according to a logic of costs and profits, while retaining a large degree of centralised control over the entire enterprise. In this way the ‘global’ was ‘localised’ but according to a particular economic rationality. The TPI since its rapid expansion in the post-Second World War period has amassed vast financial and organisational resources. Where its interests have been challenged it has been able to mobilise the strategic support of national governments such as the US, Japan and Germany [Lall and Bibile, 1977; Rolt, 1985]. Yet as a powerful global actor it is beholden to no government and it has consistently resisted all attempts by governments and international organisations to control its operations. Carl A. Gerstaker, a chairman of the Dow Chemical Company, aptly expressed this sentiment: I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no country and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society. If we were located on such truly neutral ground we could then really operate in the United States as U.S. citizens, in Japan as Japanese citizens and in Brazil as Brazilians rather than being governed in prime by the laws of the United States ... We could even pay any natives handsomely to move elsewhere [Barnett and Mueller, 1974: 16].

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The aspiration here is one of global reach unimpeded by national or international regulations, a goal for which the industry has continually battled. However, its enormous resources and global reach notwithstanding, we must not resort to seeing the rise of the global pharmaceutical industry as simply another tale of economic and cultural imperialism. The industry has also encountered widespread opposition and has had its hegemony challenged by other global actors in the form of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), solidarity groups and information networks. These actors, despite their very limited financial resources, have been able to mobilise considerable moral capital to challenge the practices of the industry, and to influence the policies of national governments and the WHO [Hardon, Kanji et al., 7992]. They have also successfully challenged the knowledge claims of the industry and contested the scientific rigour of its assertions.4 These challenges have been so effective that by the mid-1970s the vice-chairman of a major pharmaceutical company was led to claim that the industry was in a state of siege.5Other actors in the health field, the baby food companies, were the subject of an international boycott, Senate Hearings in the US, and the object of a WHO Code of ethical conduct [Chetley, 1986]. As a result of these and other challenges over the past two decades, medicine has moved from being regarded as one of the brightest moral and technical achievements in the field of development to being increasingly viewed as a serious cause of ill health and underdevelopment. Health and medicine have become a field of cultural struggle and, to use Norman Long’s [1992] term, a battlefield of knowledge. TH E R O L E O F M E D IC IN E IN D E V E L O P M E N T

Disease has long been a potent factor shaping European conceptions of the societies which it colonised, and medicine has been used as an important tool of empire, facilitating the penetration and domination of non-European societies. Medicine was not only a means of protecting the health of the colonial officers and armies, it also offered a means of winning over indigenous populations and gaining influence over them. Even before the scientific breakthroughs of the late nineteenth century, imperial powers were beginning to use medicine as a demonstration of their benevolent and paternalistic intention, as a way of winning support from a newly subject population, of balancing out the coercive features of colonial rule, and of establishing a wider imperial hegemony than could be derived from conquest alone [Arnold, 1988: 16]. The discoveries of microbiology and the germ theory of disease further enhanced the prestige of medicine and provided new ways of understanding disease without reference to the social, economic and political ills of

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colonialism. Robert Koch, founding father of microbiology, travelled to the colonial territories in Africa and New Guinea to bring the new medical expertise to the aid of embattled colonial regimes. Medicine was also directly linked to the economic imperatives of colonialism and imperialism. Medicine and public health became a central concern of both colonial regimes and commercial enterprises, since disease and illness interfered with efficiency and reduced productivity on plantations, and in mines and factories. Enveloped as it is in the language of science it is easy to underestimate the degree to which medical thinking and practice have been shaped by economic and political imperatives and the degree to which health is conceptualised in terms of productivity at both the personal and collective levels. To be healthy is to be able to work, to be able to produce, and to contribute to economic development. This is the thinking which motivated public health campaigns and extended medicine beyond administrative and military enclaves to the indigenous populations. The Rockerfeller Foundation’s investment in campaigns to reduce the incidence of hookworm (whose discovery was hailed in the media as the detection of the ‘germ of laziness’) in the Southern states of the US was defended on the basis of its payoff in terms of increased worker productivity [Ehrenreich, 1978]. This thinking was later extended to the British colonies and motivated the establishment of Schools of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Disease was seen as an obstacle to ‘development’ and today also health status and health spending are viewed primarily in terms of increased productive capacity with less attention devoted to the subjective experience of disease. Development came to be defined in terms of a healthy population capable of sustained production while health came to be defined in terms of the ability to work. However, the increasingly central role which medicine came to play in development cannot be explained in material terms alone. Medicine is central, both technically and morally, to the modern imaginary. It is part of the ideology as well as the accountancy of development [Arnold, 1988]. It is seen as the embodiment of rationality and empirical science in face of superstition and ignorance which were believed to characterise the indigenous societies. Medicine also demonstrates Western superior technical and military power and the promise of triumph over the vagaries of nature. Health was conceived of as the ‘conquest of disease’ and promised longevity and even triumph over death [Illich, 1976]. As such it is one of the most convincing symbols of modernisation and is seen as providing one of the most tangible benefits of development. Medicine as a moral discourse not only justifies intervention but makes intervention, whether in the form of colonialism, imperialism or development, a moral imperative. Until recently medicine was one of the greatest and least disputed assets of modernisation and development. The underdeveloped world

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by contrast was portrayed in terms of ‘diseased continents’ or ‘the white man’s grave’ where the ‘war against disease’ had to be waged. The frontiers of civilisation and modernisation coincided with the frontiers of medicine. Medical discourses and development discourses borrowed freely from each other [Comaroffand Comaroff, 1992]. Developers speak of ‘ailing economies’ needing ‘injections of capital’ to help them ‘develop’ or ‘recover’. The language of the body politic has constituted the main discourse of development [Nandy and Visvanathan, 1990: 146]. It was in this context that modern pharmaceutical medicine, sugar-coated and in glossy packaging, came to represent a cure, not only for individual ailments but also for social ailments. An advertisement promoting Librium, a tranquiliser, went so far as to suggest that this medicine would solve the major political problems of the 1960s. It is ten years since Librium became available. Ten anxious years of aggravation and demonstration. Cuba and Vietnam, assassination and a devaluation, Biafra and Czechoslovakia. Ten turbulent years in which the world-wide climate of anxiety and aggression have given Librium with its specific calming action and its remarkable safety margin - a unique and still growing role in helping mankind to meet the challenge of a changing world. Pharmaceutical drugs became a potent symbol of modernisation and development and were promoted as offering yet another technical fix for the social, economic and political problems which were ‘endemic’ to the ‘Third World’. C O N S T R U C T IN G G L O B A L H E G E M O N Y

In the 1930s Bayer took advantage of the upsurge of Egyptian nationalism by producing advertisements for Aspro which not only promised instant pain relief, the reduction of fever in ten minutes, a cure for women’s sweat, and a better personality, but also declared, ‘Here is the National Medicine, you will not be in pain anymore’. The advertisement was illustrated with the icons of Egyptian and Arab nationalism and accompanied by a banner headline declaring ‘The Awakening of Egypt’. In this way Bayer and its product Aspro fostered the impression that they were on the side of the rising masses and that the hallmark of a truly modern citizen was the consumption of medical miracles such as Aspro. By such means, global capital aligned itself with nationalist development ideology and appropriated aspects of its symbolic universe in order to sell more pills. Medicine, with an eye to new markets, now distanced itself from a discredited colonialism and aligned itself with the promise of modernisation and development.

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When Duisberg, a director of Bayer, unveiled the 236-foot-wide Bayer cross, the largest advertisement in the world, he expressed the wish that just ‘as the Southern Cross gives direction and hope to the mariner may this Western cross in the heart of German industry shine o u t ... as a symbol of our courage and confidence’. Soon the Bayer cross and the little white pills which promised, and indeed provided, relief from a variety of ailments were profoundly to shape the imaginaries of people throughout Africa and in virtually every corner of Latin America. A squadron of some 80 Bayer agents, each driving a truck equipped with loudspeakers blaring out the wonders of aspirin, fanned out throughout the continent. Similarly equipped trucks and vans toured Africa and Asia. Later these were replaced by ‘Junior Sound Cars’ equipped with 16mm projectors. The sides of these unfolded forming a stage on to which the pharmaceutical salesman climbed. The Bayer banner was unfolded, and a gramophone played tunes until a big enough crowd gathered and then the movie show began. Everything and anything from Disney cartoons to old newsreels were shown to people who had not previously encountered cinema. This concluded with industrial films made by Bayer, a central feature of which was the Bayer cross. Other agents rode horses and mules into highland areas dispensing free samples and introducing thousands of highland Indians to the new miracle pills. In Brazil alone Bayer had a sales team of 600 agents. One company memo stated that: ‘Even illiterates who formerly never would have thought of using a pharmaceutical product became customers of drugstores’ [Mann and Plumber, 1991: 79]. By 1929 Latin American consumers were swallowing 330 million tablets - one hundred tons - a year. A marketing supervisor reported: ‘The Latin Americans are great consumers of prepared medicines and for many of them the drugstore represents what the grocery stands for in other countries. It is claimed that in many parts of Latin America 20 or 25 per cent of the average family budget goes for the purchase of medicines’ [Mann and Plumber, 1991: 86\. The discovery that a small white tablet could eliminate headache, reduce fever and cure aches and pains must have had an incredible impact on belief systems, health practices, consumption patterns and household budgets. Later the ‘pharmaceutical invasion’ would have an even greater impact on the social imaginary and on government spending. The medical revolution described above was just the beginning. By the 1950s there were almost 4,000 new products on the market and the dream of finding remedies for every ailment as well as securing bonanza profits led to the production of more and more formulations. Today there are an estimated 100,000 drugs on the market but a large number of these are ‘me too’ drugs6 which offer little therapeutic improvement over existing drugs but whose development and promotion are central to the economic strategies of the TPI. Numerous studies have shown that only four to ten per cent of new

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formulations coming on the market can claim modest or important therapeutic gain [Hartog and Schulte-Sasse, 1990; Melrose, 1983]. A WHO expert committee, after careful study, produced a list of 200 essential drugs regarded as sufficient to meet most of a country’s pharmaceutical needs. The proliferation of drugs has to do with profit maximisation strategies rather than health care. In the words of one company director: T h e incidence of disease cannot be manipulated and so increased sales volume must depend at least in part on the use of drugs unrelated to their real utility or need’ [Chetley, 1983: 7]. In order to understand the present global structure of the industry and the vast proliferation of drugs we must examine the economic strategies of the industry because it is the drive for profit maximisation, and not primarily a concern with health, which dictates what the industry produces and how they promote their products. The aggressive promotional strategies of the TPI are a central part of its economic strategies. Companies spend between 20 and 30 per cent of sales on promotion and advertising in developing countries [Chetley, 1990: 54]. This promotion takes a variety of forms from use of radio and TV to the activities of sales representatives who target the medical profession. Whereas Britain has one representative for every 20 doctors, Tanzania has one for every four, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil one for every three and the Philippines one for every two doctors [Melrose, 1982]. In the Philippines doctors are visited by an average of 15 to 20 sales representatives each day [Tan and Tanchoco, 1988]. Inducements such as free samples, bonus travel schemes, and even air conditioners and TV sets are used. In this way the transnational pharmaceutical industry is a powerful global cultural agent shaping and often distorting health thinking, health care practice and health economics [Tucker, 1990]. It maintains its hegemonic role in health thinking and practice by its virtual monopoly of the production of medical knowledge. The pharmaceutical industry is also a powerful political actor and it uses its considerable political and financial resources to shape health policy and spending and to suppress challenges to its hegemony. When the governments of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh attempted to control the proliferation of drugs, tackle overpricing and set up a national drugs industry, British, German and American companies went on the offensive. They mobilised the political support of their governments, threatening to suppress aid and to stop all further investment in the countries [Chetley, 1990; Lall and Bibile, 1977; Rolt, 1985]. They also used their sales representatives, the media and Medical Associations to discredit the new policies [Chowdhury, 1995]. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations also brought their influence to bear on the WHO when it attempted, with the support of all but three countries, to pass an ethical marketing code. They mounted a similar campaign to challenge its ‘Essential Drugs Policy’.7The priority of commercial imperatives

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over health concerns was reflected in a statement by the US delegate to the WHO in 1986: I think that most delegations know that the United States was the only country to vote against the adoption of the breast milk substitutes marketing code in 1981. Before then and ever since, it has been our strong position that the World Health Organisation should not be involved in efforts to regulate or control the commercial practices of private industry, even when the products may relate to concerns about health [Hardon et al., 1992: 59]. Together with Japan the US added teeth to its support for the industry by withholding payments to the WHO. Health and health care are contested areas where powerful vested interests exercise both coercive and persuasive power. The mechanisms of coercion are primarily economic and political while persuasion involves the production of a body of medical knowledge and ethics which is decisively shaped by the transnational pharmaceutical industry. The processes through which the transnational pharmaceutical industry constructs and maintains global hegemony cannot be understood solely through the lenses of political economy. Economic and political considerations play a central role in this but these perspectives must be complemented by analyses of culture, the power­ laden processes through which knowledge is produced and ideas and meanings constructed and contested. It becomes imperative therefore to study cultural processes in tandem with economic, political and military processes. It is this task of meshing interpretive approaches with political-economy perspectives which is particularly challenging. Culture is not just an abstraction. Beliefs, knowledge and meanings are embodied in material structures and processes. Cultural processes manifest themselves through corporate strategies, social movements, consumerism, riots, rituals, rumors, economic policies, political strategies and so forth. It is important, therefore, that we combine structural analyses with analyses of social processes. Human agency is central to cultural processes. However, because of the dominance of economistic thinking and structural analysis, development studies has paid insufficient attention to cultural processes and has had a limited notion of human agency [Long and Long, 7992]. To correct this structuralist tendency we must devote greater attention to the role of counter-systemic forces and to new global actors. C O U N T E R H E G E M O N IC M O V E M E N T S IN TH E G L O B A L S P H E R E

Since the mid-1970s new global actors such as NGOs, solidarity groups, knowledge networks, consumer and other social movements have mounted a significant challenge to the practices and knowledge systems of the TPI. For

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the most part these organisations and networks have minimal financial resources when compared with the economic might of the TPI. Despite this they have been able to mobilise significant moral capital and have swayed public opinion, and influenced government agencies and transnational organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). They have also been able to mobilise expertise and disseminate reliable information challenging the knowledge claims of the industry. They have among their ranks eminent scientists, pharmacologists and concerned medical professionals. In a number of instances they have out-marketed the TPI. For the industry they have come to be regarded as a force to be reckoned with and a voice to be listened to. Global pressure groups such as the International Babyfood Action Network (IBFAN), the International Organisation of Consumer Movements (ICOU), Health Action International (HAI), and Greenpeace all emerged as influential global actors in the 1960s and 70s. Each of these organisations was in turn composed of a variety of NGOs and solidarity groups. Part of their strategic mode of operation involved building links between local organisations situated in various parts of the globe. They also built coalitions with other similar global organisations. Global networking became a significant organisational strategy and local groups in virtually any part of the world could, through these organisations, readily tap into a vast network of knowledge when they needed to. Health action networks mounted campaigns, mobilised technical and financial support, and achieved considerable moral authority and legitimacy. Movement intellectuals [Eyerman and Jamison, 1991] had sufficient scientific expertise to produce a credible critique of both the products and marketing practices of the companies. Through the creative use of lobbying skills, briefings, video productions, publications, and the skilful use of the media, they disseminated knowledge awakening public opinion and in several instances decisively influencing policy outcomes. They wielded considerable influence on governments and industry and were allowed to have an input into WHO policy making. They gained confidence from their successes and accumulated a considerable body of organisational skills. Despite their lack of financial resources, knowledge networks, social movements and NGOs are capable of mobilising powerful emotional forces and considerable moral power. When one considers the role of Amnesty International in shaping human rights agendas, or the role which the AntiApartheid Movement played in helping de-legitimise the apartheid regime in South Africa, and of Greenpeace in raising environmental awareness, one can begin to realise the importance of cultural processes. Despite their relatively small numbers and limited resources these cultural actors can be important sources of information, analysis, and strategies for action in challenging hegemonic beliefs and world views. The study of these actors requires new theoretical concepts and methods of

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study for which conventional notions of global and local are inadequate. We must identify the sites at which these submerged networks become visible and the ways in which they mobilise organisational resources and moral capital. This task requires new methodologies of cultural analysis. The notion of a social situation can be useful here.8 A social situation is a site where various forces meet and persuasively enact their world views in a struggle for hegemony. At global level forums such as the World Health Assembly (WHA) can be taken to constitute a site. The 1981 WHA at which a code of marketing ethics for the baby food industry was established is an example of ofte such social situation. At this meeting, Nestles, a powerful economic enterprise, the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), and the health ministers representing the interests of diverse governments, struggled to shape the outcome. These are sites of cultural struggle where knowledge is produced, ideas and meanings constructed and contested, and policy decisions made. The study of these processes whether through network analysis or the study of social situations will require new research methodologies. L O C A L A C T IO N

Counter-hegemonic struggles do not only take place in the global forums of transnational organisations, they also take place in the everyday lives of people in a variety of localities throughout the globe. In these situations also the ingenuity of human actors in resisting, manipulating or accommodating the forces which impinge on their daily lives can be observed. Local communities can also be sites where primary health care initiatives and health education programmes, often funded and aided by foreign NGOs, can compete with the promotional strategies of the transnational pharmaceutical industry in shaping the social imaginary. Through a variety of techniques and often using media such as drama and song they promote alternative visions of health and development.9 I would like to illustrate this with an example from Nigeria where I participated in a health education programme which attempted to counteract the ‘pill for every ill’ attitude which is widely prevalent in that country and is a source of innumerable health problems. In this programme we used a particular approach to cultural analysis in order to investigate the encounter between modern pharmaceuticals and local perceptions among a group of villagers. Informal dramatisation was used as a way of enacting an encounter between the different belief systems and practices. Health care workers and villagers were asked to act out particular encounters which illustrated healthseeking behaviours and the responses of various actors including doctors, medicine sellers, and traditional healers. Different participants acted out their beliefs in a dramatic encounter in the presence of the assembled group in a way

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that included not only verbal exchanges but also the use of their bodies. This dramatic enactment was followed by a discussion and analysis of what transpired in the drama. This approach was used to make the different beliefs and practices of the various participants transparent, together with all their contradictions and conflicts. It was thus possible to bring the various ‘rationalities’ to bear on the issue at hand. It also explored issues such as antibiotic use, the treatment of diarrhoea, and the transmission of AIDs in a way which challenged both conventional medical presuppositions and the beliefs and behaviour of the villagers. In this instance drama and improvisation were used as a means through which health professionals and villagers reflected on their behaviour, attitudes and beliefs, and on the impact of these on their health and on the health of the community. Drama is an effective way of making beliefs and attitudes accessible to analysis, something which is often not possible in traditional ethnographic approaches which rely on interviews. In cultures where the use of gesture, folk tale, proverb, song and mime are an integral part of group and interpersonal relationships, drama provides a valuable alternative forum for observation and understanding. Drama can provide insights into cultural processes for all involved. As such drama can be both an educational tool and a method of doing qualitative research into processes such as drug use. The use of this way of working does not overlook the needs and agendas of the different parties but creates a setting in which their interaction can be examined, reflected on critically and changed. TH E L O C A L IN TH E G L O B A L : S O M E M E T H O D O L O G IC A L C O N S ID E R A T IO N S

Forces operating globally like the TPI are important factors in shaping the ways of thinking and practices at local level. However, global forces do not simply sweep through localities erasing all before them. The multiplicity of encounters between global forces and local societies is much more complex than the imagery of global imperialism would suggest (Tomlinson, this volume). In their encounter with the local extensions of the transnational ‘Health Industry’, the unorganised majority of the population, ‘the consumers’, bring their own needs and belief systems with them. They do not simply take over another set of practices or a different rationality as an integral whole. They choose what appeals to them combining it in new ways with other practices available to them. They adapt, modify, reject, manipulate or, in varying degrees, comply with the forces which impinge on them. The resulting health care practices and beliefs are an eclectic fusion of foreign and indigenous elements. Medicines often become separated from the knowledge and practice systems in which they have been developed and are diffused and

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used independently [Van Der Geest, 1988: 9]. Drugs are frequently used for reasons that go beyond the intentions and instructions of their manufacturers, and which may be classified as psychological, social or religious. They become items of currency, barter and even take on ritual functions. They are used in conjunction with other cures by indigenous healers; they take on new meaning according to local notions of the efficacy of colour, shape or taste. Medicines are always used according to local understandings and perceptions. As Whyte has argued We must also examine the terrain from an anthropological point of view. We must examine the terrain being conquered, and the cultural and historical processes which form the local context of the intrusion. In Africa the power of foreign medicines was already established long before Western pharmaceuticals began to circulate on a large scale. The increased use of medicinal substances in general seems to have been partly a result of inter-regional communication facilitated by colonialism [Whyte, 1988: 227]. While medicines are part of a process of global cultural transformation they can only be adequately understood when their local context is also taken into consideration. The emergence of a new field of pharmaceutical anthropology has made an important conceptual and methodological contribution to the study of these processes and interactions. Van der Geest [1987], one of the founders of this field, has argued for an ethnography of pharmaceutical use to complement studies of the global TPI. Without ethnography one can only guess at or make assumptions as to how drugs are perceived and used by real social actors in their everyday lives. Ethnography brings techniques of fine grained analyses, Geertz’s ‘thick description’, to the study of pharmaceutical use and helps capture the perspectives of the various cultural actors. Consideration of the micro level, the day to day practice of drug use and the concomitant belief systems in specific localities, is an essential dimension in understanding these processes of culture change. But, it is im portant that the study of the cultural dimension of pharmaceutical use is not equated with or restricted to local studies. There are some dangers in the traditional anthropological approaches. Much anthropological work is overly micro in its approach. Many studies are impressive in their descriptive detail but lack a perspective which enables us to situate them in the context of global forces which impinge on the study site. Global forces are always an integral part of the construction of the local down to the most intimate levels of the cultural imagination. In the study of pharmaceutical use it becomes essential to devise perspectives and methodologies which take into account both localised belief systems and

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meanings and also the social construction of larger systems at national and international level. We must not fall into the trap of equating the cultural with the local. We also need to do ‘thick description’ of the culture of pharmaceutical companies, of managers, detail men, pharmacists and medical researchers. We need ethnographic studies of the pharmaceutical industry in order to provide us with insights into their marketing techniques, their research choices, their promotional strategies, and their decision-making processes, using the type of fine grained analysis which anthropologists have traditionally reserved for the study of communities or tribal societies. As well as studies of doctor-client interactions we also need studies of the interaction between doctors and pharmaceutical salesmen. The methodological implications of doing such studies poses major difficulties and deserves attention. Anthropologists may find studies in remote villages somewhat easier and less risky than the jungle of big business given the ways in which companies protect their secrecy.10 Two complementary perspectives must be considered in studies of pharmaceutical use - the macro and the micro. Special attention must be paid to the junctures where these encounters take place. This may entail new approaches to fieldwork. Traditionally the ethnographic has been equated with the local. Allied to this was a holistic concept of culture as a discrete set of beliefs and practices upon which ‘outside’ forces acted. A more interactive concept of culture as a process calls for a more dynamic approach to fieldwork. Instead of being situated in one locality for the duration of a study, field workers might investigate an entire network of relationships which encompass a process of cultural change but with particular attention to sites or social situations in which important encounters take place. In order to understand patterns of drug use in a village in Nigeria it is necessary to take into consideration the marketing strategies of the TPI, federal drug policy, the marketing and distribution of drugs, the practices of sales representatives and health personnel, national drug production and distribution and local belief systems. For example, the functioning of the Bridgehead market in Onicha, from where supplies to patent medicine sellers throughout Nigeria originate, provides important insights into the availability and distribution of drugs and their patterns of use in villages. Needless to say each researcher is not obliged to study everything but it is important to keep in mind that all of the above factors are part of the cultural process. In carrying out local studies we cannot assume a priori that any one set of considerations is of more importance than another. Similarly ethnographic studies of other global organisations such as the WHO and UNICEF are important as these also exert a powerful influence on pharmaceutical use. Other significant actors such as NGOs and churches exert influence at multiple sites in the process of culture change. They link different

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sites and are conduits of knowledge and influence. Overly concrete notions of ‘local’ and ‘global’ can mask the multiplicity of overlapping networks through which knowledge and goods pass and the variety of encounters which shape and channel these influences. Drugs are a form of travelling culture and a more comprehensive analysis requires the study not only of their use but also of the distribution systems through which they travel and the various social, economic and cultural processes which shape this. In this way we can also examine how the relationship between the material substances (the drugs) and the knowledge and practices can change. The transnational and the local merge in a variety of other ways. Workers can be recruited according to a combination of local custom and corporate policies. New class identities are constructed among a new nationless class of professionals living and travelling globally [Becker, Sklair et al., 1987]. New loyalties and communities were constructed with the notion of community taking on new meaning within a corporate context. For example transnational corporations support and even purchase football teams as a means of mobilising local sentiments and loyalties and in some situations creating new loyalties. Companies donate to local charities, and local cultural and artistic organisations. They are often paragons of multiculturalism. Notions of multiculturalism and hybridisation are now widely used as ways of conceptualising these encounters. Many of these accounts tend to be celebratory [Appadurai, 1993]. A word of caution is in order here. Hybridisation often takes the form of cannibalisation as when Transnational Pharmaceutical companies investigate indigenous medicines, study their properties, patent their genetic and chemical properties, and market them as formulated drugs. For example, a range of contraceptives are made from diosgenin, an active ingredient of a plant which grows wild in India. Two large American corporations, Searle and Wyet, set up factories in India to produce chemical ingredients from the plant. These ingredients are then exported to the US and Europe where they are used in contraceptive pills and later exported to India. More than 50 per cent of modem pharmaceuticals are derived from indigenous medicines [Melrose, 1982: 122]. Yet this process of appropriation can proceed in tandem with attempts to denigrate and outlaw the practice of indigenous medicine. Hybridisation is always uneven, unequal and asymmetrical. It is necessarily shaped and channelled by military, economic and political imperatives. Multiculturalism can often become suspiciously like a TNC marketing strategy. Brand names struggle for a place in the public culture or social imaginary. Commodities are invented, promoted, dreamed over, sold, purchased, consumed or discarded. Indigenous variants or competitors are appropriated, often aggressively on behalf of global capital. Yet here also local actors, often with the support of global information networks, NGOs, solidarity movements, or trade unions also work to appropriate transnational

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processes and products and adapt them for their own ends or struggle to promote alternatives. C O N C L U S IO N

Medicine like development may sometimes be difficult to take and may encounter resistance but the practitioners insist it is always for the patients’ own good. Cosmopolitan medicine like development has hegemonic aspirations but it also encounters processes of resistance and is forced to make accommodations and adaptations. It is an ideal site for the analysis of encounters between modernising forces and movements of resistance, betweeen global processes and indigenous systems. It allows us to address the methodological implications of key theoretical themes in development discourses, such as modernisation, dependency, self-reliance, world systems, globalisation, hybrididsation, alternative development, ecology, gender, human needs and culture. The position of medicine today ‘is akin to that of state religions yesterday’ (Friedson quoted in Arnold [1993: 9]). Like modernisation and development it carries notions of manifest destiny which no indigenous system can claim. These aspirations are backed by vast financial and technological resources and sophisticated persuasive strategies. Yet modem medicine has never succeeded in eradicating indigenous systems; indeed it can be argued that other forms of medical knowledge and practice such as Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and Tibetan medicine are now challenging and transforming bio­ medicine in the heartlands from which it emerged. This, however, is another story which cannot be explored here. Medicine has also spawned its internal critics and their voices have grown louder in recent decades. These processes of cultural resistance and cultural transformation do not lend themselves to simple analysis either in terms of global imperialism or global capital. Neither can cultural transformation be adequately understood from the traditional anthropological approaches to the local as these do not give adequate consideration to external forces. To analyse these dynamic processes we need greater theoretical and methodological eclectism. We need to combine perspectives from political economy with perspectives from cultural analysis, structural perspectives with actor-oriented perspectives. From this point of view neo-Marxist dependency and world systems approaches and theories of globalisation have an important contribution to make in helping us to understand global structures, but they do not tell the full story and must be supplemented with other perspectives. The work of Marxist critics such Navarro [7977], Doyal and Pennell [7979] was an important step in developing an analysis of the global political economy of health. The work of Gereffi [1983] on the Mexican pharmaceutical

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industry was particularly innovative theoretically and methodologically. Gereffi proposed the notion of situations of dependency as a methodological tool. Used in this way dependency was a strategic rather than a holistic notion. It could be used for studying the relations between a group of countries, a group of industries, a particular industry, or the relations between an industry and a country. This provided a way of unpacking ‘global capital’ and addressing some of the limitations of conventional dependency and world systems theory. This methodological shift was important as much of what is referred to as ‘global capitalism’ is heavily concentrated in corporations and banks. Gereffi also introduced the notion of dependency reversal which provided an antidote to the overly deterministic perspectives of much radical theorising. His work provides a model which is particularly useful for the study of the transnational pharmaceutical industry. My own work has been strongly influenced by these analyses. However, the work of Gereffi focuses almost exclusively on economic processes and does not address the cultural or persuasive role of transnational corporations in shaping patterns of consumption, meanings, fears and desires. In this article I have attempted to take this analysis further by emphasising the cultural processes which are part of this global strategy and also the cultural strategies of those who resist them. The theoretical and methodological implications of this approach have relevance for a critical analysis of other areas of development such as, for example, food and agriculture which are also dominated by global corporations.

NOTES 1. Important contributions include a collection of essays edited by John Milton and Taghi Farvar [7972], Nandy and Visvanathan [7990] and Dianna Melrose [1983]. 2. In a speech delivered to a meeting of US voluntary organisations in Vermont on 18 February 1988. 3. Long before the current popularity of the notion of globalisation, Richard Barnett and Ronald Muller [1974] provided a powerful seminal analysis of the role of multinational corporations in globalisation. They also examined the counter hegemonic forces emerging from the ‘Third World’ and used the term ‘postcoloniaF long before its current rise to popularity (albeit with a different emphasis). 4. There is now a considerable body of critical literature much of it from pharmacologists and doctors. Among the better known publications are Silverman and Lee [1974], Dianna Melrose [1983], John Braithwaite [1984], Charles Medawar [1984], Andrew Chetley [1990], Joel Lexchin, [7992], and two issues of Development Dialogue, the Journal of International Cooperation of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation (No.2, 1985 and N o.l, 1995). 5. Quoted in Who Needs Drug Companies?, Haslemere Group/War on Want/Third World First, London and Oxford 1976, p.l. 6. ‘Me too’ drugs is the name given to drugs which are reformulated simply for marketing purposes. When a drug patent expires, a variety of companies produce versions of the same drug each claiming to be an ‘improvement’ over its predecessors but in most cases having no therapeutic advantage over existing formulations. 7. This policy advocated the reduction of the number of drugs used in national health programmes

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to between 200 and 250 drugs so as to cut costs and ensure that only essential drugs were prescribed. After much resistance this policy was eventually accepted by the pharmaceutical industry but they insist that it is not relevant to the developed countries! 8. This notion of ‘situational analysis’ and the accompanying research methodology was first developed by British anthropologists Max Gluckman, Van Velsen and Clyde Mitchell to overcome the limitations of community type studies and to come to terms with the array of forces which confronted each other during the colonial period in Southern Africa. See Van Velsen [1967]. 9. See the special issue of Research in African Literature, Vol.22, No.3, 1991 on ‘Theater for Development in Africa’. 10. Braithwaite [1984] provides some useful advice for such studies.

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