Beyond the Sociology of Development

Economy and Society in Latin America and Africa

Ivar Oxaal, Tony Barnett, David Booth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136856921
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

Conceived as a response to the economic naïvety and implicit metropolitan bias of many 1950s and 60s studies of 'the sociology of development' , this volume, first published in 1975, provides actual field studies and theoretical reviews to indicate the directions which a conceptually more adequate study of developing societies should take.

Much of the book reflects strongly the influence of Andre Gunder Frank, but the contributors adopt a critical attitude to his ideas, applying them in empirical situations within such African and American countries as Kenya, Guyana, Tanzania and Peru. Others pursue the lines of enquiry opened up by Latin American theories of economic 'dependency' and by the new school of French economic anthropology.

1   Editors’ introduction: beyond the sociology of development

The implication of our rather provocative title for this collection of new research papers can be simply stated: we believe that as a consequence of their extreme economic naivete and implicit metropolitan bias many of the studies and theories presented under the rubric of ‘the sociology of development’ in the 1950s and 1960s were misconceived, intellectually abortive, and in some instances downright pernicious in their influence. We do not feel obliged to document this unavoidably harsh judgment here; it has been sufficiently demonstrated, in our view, by a number of vigorous critiques, the most important of which was supplied by Andre Gunder Frank in his Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology.¹ In no other field of sociological investigation have the disastrous consequences of the economic illiteracy of professional sociologists been so starkly revealed as in the ‘sociology of development’. In retrospect we can understand how this trained professional incapacity made sociologists into so many sitting ducks for the Cold War evolutionary paradigm of economic development epitomized by W. W. Rostow's classic The Stages of Economic Growth.² Those who suffered less from intellectual parochialism where economics was concerned made up for this, moreover, with a hearty disdain for history. Rostow's master metaphor which saw underdeveloped economies as so many aeroplanes waiting to ‘take off’ was seductive not least because it seemed to provide an alibi for the disconnected ahistoricism which typified studies of the social ‘factor’ in economic growth.

It is thus the contention of the editors—one with which we believe all of the contributors to this volume would agree—that the shallow and ultimately nonsensical character of much traditional ‘sociology of development’ resulted from the separation within academic disciplines of the ‘social’ and ‘psychological’ from the concrete historical and ‘economic’ aspects of change. Rather than issue yet another plea for ‘interdisciplinary’ and ideologically demystified research, however, the intention of this volume is to provide the reader with actual examples of field studies and theoretical reviews which indicate the directions which we feel a conceptually more adequate study of developing societies should take. The writings of Andre Gunder Frank have proved crucial to us for two major reasons: first, it was principally Frank who provided the definitive dissection of mainstream studies in the sociology of development. His critique was devastating not only because he wrote as a Marxist —but equally as much because he wrote as a trained economist who could pick apart the flimsy assumptions of the economically naive writers he attacked. Secondly, Frank was not only—or even primarily —a critic of academic sociology; he also provided the outlines of a macro-structural paradigm of the way in which economic underdevelopment in dependent economies is actively maintained in a vicious spiral by the very forces—foreign economic investment and aid—which conventional economic theory held to be necessary for the development of such societies. It is this combination of critique of sociology with an alternative and suggestive theoretical orientation which accounts for the centrality of Frank's contribution for the various studies in this volume.³ As will be seen, however, we have not adopted a reverential posture toward Frank's work—quite the opposite; the dominant spirit in these papers has been to try to test Frank's ideas scientifically by applying them to new empirical situations, and to pursue alternative or complementary lines of theoretical enquiry where these appear fruitful or challenging.

Three of the papers in this collection—Barnett's on the Sudan, Long's on rural Peru, and Wolpe's on South Africa—make links between the Frankian model and the approaches developed by a number of French-speaking economic anthropologists. Their incorporation of certain features from this tradition of economic anthropology—which Clammer reviews and criticizes in Chapter 10— reflects a concern with two areas insufficiently analysed in Frank's work. One is the problem of the structure and range of variation of the relationships ruling between metropolitan centres and satellites; the other is what Frank calls the problem of ‘continuity in change’. The Frankian model of a ‘whole chain of metropolises and satellites’ is considered to be inadequate by Long and Barnett. This is particularly significant in as much as both are attempting to analyse field-work data in terms of the model. It is apparent that both consider that the model as presented provides no clue to the interpretation of micro-level ethnographic data.

Long's paper grows out of a regional study in Peru, and Barnett's from the analysis of a very large-scale irrigation development in the Sudan. The task which they both faced was that of locating the local level social relations observed in the course of field-work within the regional, and, ultimately, national and international contexts. Here they encountered questions similar to those faced by Hanley in his work in Guyana. If the structure of local social and economic relations is in some way conditioned by the satellite status of the society, as the model predicts, how does this dependence manifest itself in empirical field data? For Long, the work of Meillassoux, Dupré and Rey, and Coquery-Vidrovitch on the articulation of different modes of social production provides the vital link between the local, regional, and national levels. The concepts of ‘mode of production’ and of ‘articulation’—concepts whose intricacies are explored by Clammer—are of central importance to this current. The notion of mode of production refers for them to the combination of material, human and cultural elements, in a systematic relation, through which the exploitation of the environment is possible for a group of human actors. The idea of articulation focuses attention on the social and economic relationships by means of which modes of production with different organizing principles—capitalism, feudalism, patrimonial-ism, and others which may not so far have been described—are empirically linked one with another. With the aid of these concepts, it becomes possible to describe the benefits which certain actors, or groups, operating in the context of different modes of production obtain from their activities as brokers (in Long's terminology) within and between modes.

For Barnett, the problem is the related one of explaining the continuity of a structure of dependence and underdevelopment. He sees Frank's use of the term ‘continuity’ as essentially an obfuscation which loses sight of the need to explain continuity in terms of social and economic processes. In the field-work situation it was this processual aspect of socio-economic structures which became crucial. Barnett feels that the Frank model does not really help here, whereas the work of the economic anthropologists does, by redefining the question in terms of the concept of reproduction. A mode of production requires for its continuity the provision of the means of subsistence for the human actors within its boundaries. This ensures the supply of personnel and material for the continuation of the social unit through time. Thus the contradictions between actors and groups of actors within one mode of production, and between different modes, may be explained through an examination of the common and conflicting interests which they have in common in the production of basic subsistence needs within the context of the wider system of relations (the total social formation). For, as Long says in his paper, ‘the reproduction of the social relations of production for one mode is dependent on the continuity of other social relations of production found in other modes’.

Consideration of the question of the reproduction of the social relations of production is what directs Wolpe to this literature. For him the singular nature of South African society and politics can only be explained by recourse to an analysis of the articulation of capitalism with non-capitalist modes of production. South African capitalism may be said to be dependent on the reproduction of its relations with other modes of production. By using these terms, Wolpe is able to go beyond the unsatisfactory model of South Africa, derived from the notion of internal colonialism, to a discussion which directs our attention to very specific features of the social and economic structure. Thus he says: ‘in order to avoid the abstraction involved in treating racial or ethnic groups as undifferentiated and homogeneous, we must think of each such group as having … a specific structure’.

It is clear, then, that for Barnett, Long, and Wolpe the marriage of economic anthropology to the Frank model supplies a theoretical vocabulary which effectively elucidates research problems, and makes possible an understanding of social processes common to three very different underdeveloped societies.

The absence of this theoretical marriage in Hanley's analysis serves as a partial demonstration of some of the inadequacies of the crude Frank model when applied to research data. Nevertheless, Hanley's study provides a wealth of specificity regarding a particular mode of agricultural development in which an embattled Marxist colonial politician attempted to partially outflank the iron grip of metropolitan domination. Moving from the Americas back to Africa, the Feldman paper documents in appropriate detail the gradual, but apparently relentless, emergence of rural capitalism in Tanzania and the conflict between this and the socialist goals of the central government. Hutton and Cohen focus on a continuing orthodoxy in the sociology of development, though they deal with an area largely missed by previous critiques. Despite the time-honoured sociological practice of blaming poverty on its principal victims, they argue, the meaning of peasant resistance to change is far from self-evident. Indeed, in the absence of an exhaustive analysis of the total context—history and contemporary economic structure—to characterize such resistance as ‘irrational’ is to beg some very big questions indeed. This paper—which was first given at a conference in Addis Ababa—is in fact a critical manifesto directed at the superficial ahistoricism of some contemporary studies of development in Africa.

The major thrust of this book is to suggest that a point has now been reached where theoretical convergences from within economic anthropology, sociology, and economics are making possible an integration of work on development at an advanced level of multi-disciplinary sophistication. We are mindful that many readers of the book—especially sociologists and anthropologists—may be alarmed by this prospect in view of the reputed technicalities of economics. We feel none the less that with a little persistence such readers will be adequately rewarded by our first four papers. Two of the contributors to this section of the book—Weeks and O'Brien—are professional economists. Weeks has provided what is probably the most technical —yet, we would urge, lucid and indispensable—example of how a radical economist approaches the problem of underdevelopment. For the non-economist we particularly recommend this paper as an entree to the level of economic analysis which we think indispensable to serious future students of the sociology of development. O'Brien's paper on the other hand provides a clear, concise, and perceptive introduction to the recent Latin American literature on economic ‘dependence’, much of which remains otherwise inaccessible to English readers.

Enough has been said to account for the inclusion in this collection of a paper devoted especially to the work of Andre Gunder Frank. Booth's essay takes the form of a retrospective introduction to Frank's work which highlights the contribution to the Frankian ‘synthesis’ of some of the Latin American intellectual and political currents also discussed by O'Brien. The lacunae in Frank's theory, it is suggested, have to be understood in the context of the specific polemical function which the theory performed in the Latin America of the 1960s.

Since it is really the socio-cultural praxis of economics which forms one of the central problematics of this book, the chapter by Oxaal, a ‘layman's introduction’ to the language and contexts of the debate over dependency theory and practice in a former British colony, provides an appropriate sequel to O'Brien's. Trinidad does not loom large on the world stage, yet with its growing susceptibility to Latin American influences combined with the juxtaposition of its Afro-West Indian population alongside its Indian, Chinese, and other minorities—’the Third World's Third World’ as the novelist Vidia Naipaul has dubbed it—it makes a not inappropriate setting for a close-up look at the universe of discourse concerning economic dependency and its relationship to social change.

But we need not dwell at length on the manifold dimensions of social science thought revealed by the writers of these pages; these largely speak for themselves. This is a work of partial—not final— synthesis. In any event, partial synthesis is all that is practical: the writers represented here form no ‘school’ but reflect, rather, the crystallizing theoretical understandings of some, mainly young, sociologists, anthropologists and economists working out of Britain in the mid-1970s. We have no combined research programme, or prospects of founding some grandiose global research scheme. Nor do we expect or wish events in the less developed countries of the world to wait upon the creation of a finished Grand Theory of Development. As a modest, but we hope suggestive, introduction to the world of enquiry which lies beyond the ‘sociology of development’, we commend this book to the reader.

Notes

1   Pluto Press, London, 1971; first published in Catalyst (Buffalo, New York) in 1967. Other wide-ranging critical essays include especially Jamil Hilal, ‘Sociology and underdevelopment’, Sociology Department, Durham University, mimeo, February 1970, and Henry Bernstein, ‘Modernization theory and the sociological study of development’, Journal of Development Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1971.

2   Cambridge University Press, 1960.

3   Cf. in this respect the papers presented to the 1972 conference of the British Sociological Association: Emanuel de Kadt and Gavin Williams, eds, Sociology and Development, Tavistock Publications, London, 1974.

2 A critique of Latin American theories of dependency

Philip J. O'Brien

Dependency is very much in vogue in Latin America. Much writing on cultural, political, social, and economic matters adopts as a framework for analysis the concept of dependency. Faced with such an overwhelming mass of writing, it is pertinent to raise a number of questions—what is the background of the dependency school, and why did it emerge when it did? What sort of theory is it? How successful is it in establishing a framework for analysing the dynamics of Latin American society? What are the mechanisms involved? Does available empirical evidence seem to support the theory? What policy implications (if any) can be drawn from the theory? And how new, useful, and important really is the concept of dependency ?

A. O. Hirschman, in a perceptive essay, ‘Ideologies of economic development in Latin America’, has traced the main views advanced by Latin Americans to explain the causes of Latin America's underdevelopment and what could be done about it.¹ The theory of dependency is a response to the failure of these explanations and those offered by the advanced countries to give either a convincing explanation of the backwardness of Latin America or a way out of that backwardness. Specifically the theory of dependency is a response to the perceived failure of the previous dominant ideology of development in Latin America, that of ‘import substitution’ industrialization.

A. Gerschenkron noted in his essay, ‘Economic backwardness in historical perspective’, that in backward countries certain institutional innovations and the acceptance of specific ideologies in favour of industrialization were necessary to break down the gap between obstacles to industrialization and the promises inherent in such a development.² Backward countries had to substitute for some of the factors which were prerequisites for industrialization elsewhere. This substitution process and the drive for industrialization was usually accompanied by an ideology explaining the cause of, and suggesting a cure for, the relative backwardness of the country concerned. Nineteenth-century Latin America, however, evolved few ideas concerning its underdevelopment and it was not until the twentieth century that Latin American writers concentrated on attempting to explain Latin American underdevelopment.

Two themes dominated these early explanations of relative backwardness: philosophical and psychological explanations, and imperialist exploitation. The first was, and still is, very common; Latin Americans, it is argued, have certain character traits or philosophies of life which prevent the determined pursuit of rapid development. These philosophies of life or character traits, the latter often accompanied by racial interpretations, were variously identified as laziness, sadness and arrogance (e.g. C. O. Bunge, Nuestra America³), or anti-materialist, spiritual qualities as in Jose Rodo's Ariel,⁴ or inequality being the result of a collective sense of inferiority as in Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico by Samuel Ramos.⁵

The second theme, popularized by the Peruvian leader and founder of APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana), Haya de la Torre, puts the blame for Latin America's underdevelopment squarely on imperialist exploitation. But interestingly and importantly the blame is not put on capitalism. Haya de la Torre explicitly argued that the Latin American proletariat was to...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Editors’ introduction: beyond the sociology of development
• 2 A critique of Latin American theories of dependency
• 3 The dependency economist as grassroots politician in the Caribbean
• 4 Andre Gunder Frank: an introduction and appreciation David Booth
• 5 Imbalance between the centre and periphery and the ‘employment crisis’ in Kenya
• 6 African peasants and resistance to change: a reconsideration of sociological approaches
• 7 Rice, politics and development in Guyana
• 8 Rural social differentiation and political goals in Tanzania
• 9 The Gezira Scheme: production of cotton and the reproduction of underdevelopment
• 10 Economic anthropology and the sociology of development: ‘liberal’ anthropology and its French critics
• 11 The theory of internal colonialism: the South African case
• 12 Structural dependency, modes of production and economic brokerage in rural Peru
• Index