Casebook of Social Change in Developing Areas

Arthur H. Niehoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138518117
• eBook ISBN: 9781351529952
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Most early approaches to encouraging social development focused on economic and technical issues. This volume begins from the premise that economic and technical patterns are embedded in cultural patterns. These patterns of custom and belief are sometimes elaborate, and they can act as barriers to technical or economic change. This volume presents case studies of social change, developing a model for analysis and action. An analytic guide is presented for each case history, and the editor points out factors that influenced the outcome of the project. The volume ais designed for people in the field, and is intended to be of practical usefulness.

From hundreds of case histories, Arthur H. Niehoff selected nineteen that most clearly exemplify the technique of the innovator, the motivations of potential recipients and the reactions of these recipients due to local cultural patterns and values. These case histories of efforts at innovation in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia illustrate the specific problems facing American change agents abroad and define the basic ingredients of socio-economic change. Covering the types of problems innovators most frequently encounter in developing nations, Niehoff's compendium of successful and unsuccessful attempts at change demonstrates concretely the theoretical principles set forth.

Prospective change agents gain fruitful insights into many problems by studying the practical examples of the programs of change agents in a wide variety of situations. Each of the case-histories is analyzed in the context of a socio-cultural concept of change, emphasizing the principles and factors of change. This book presents essential guidelines for perceiving and dealing with the cultural aspects of a change situation for all students of applied anthropology and social change.

1

Introduction

Man is a unique animal. Although he shares most of his physical characteristics with the other warm-blooded mammals, he has developed a different kind of ability to cope with his environment. He has developed a system of symbolic communication called language, a complicated thinking apparatus, an upright posture, and an ability to manipulate his forelimbs with great dexterity. There are some other minor differences separating man from other animals, but these are sufficient to provide an understanding of the basis for man’s very singular means of dealing with his universe. As a talking biped, man has developed the ability to learn through time. He inherits vast amounts of knowledge from his predecessors, adds to this storehouse a small amount of new knowledge, and passes it on to his descendants. Basically, this is what we call culture.

Man has progressed from being a primitive hunter and food gatherer in competition with the noncultural animals to a creature who is on the verge of leaving his home base, the planet Earth, in vehicles he has developed by means of his cultural heritage. And though the achievements of great men along the way were necessary for this progressive development, their contributions would have been nothing if the new knowledge they obtained had not been infused into the social groups of which they were a part. And once it was integrated into these groups, it was transferred in each generation by parents instructing their children and teachers instructing their students. Then it became a part of the culture of that group, the total body of knowledge and customs that is passed on from one generation to the next.

It is obvious to anyone who takes a long look at man’s cultural history that change is constant. If this were not so, we would not be able to transmit ideas today by means of a cultural complex called printing, nor would we be able to go aloft in aircraft weighing many tons, nor would the majority of the citizens of the more fortunate nations be able to forget about the possibility of not having enough to eat. Even the people of less fortunate nations change, though perhaps less rapidly. The Peruvian Indian herds sheep today whereas his ancient Inca ancestor had only the llama. The more fortunate East Indian villager has a bicycle or a treadle sewing machine today whereas his ancestor of only one or two generations ago went by oxcart or sewed by hand. Thus, we accept for the purpose of this book that one constant among men is that all cultures change, even though such change may take place at different rates.

What is perhaps most obvious to those interested in cultural change is this difference in rate. It can be so varying that some who have not been too familiar with the more exotic cultures of the world have been tempted to say that such people live just as their ancestors did. Such an opinion is not acceptable to a social scientist. Cultures that do not change die out. This has happened with some cultures such as many of the American Indians. However, most cultures of the non-Western world are changing today, even though at a slower rate than their leaders wish and, of course, much slower than the industrialized nations of the Western world. The basic problem is how to induce these cultures to change faster.

We believe that this process of change will become more rapid only when it is understood better than it has been in the past. There are various influences which cause cultures to change, both internal and external. A decrease or increase in population causes a repatterning of customs. Warfare brings new stresses to a culture, as well as new ideas and technical developments. Very significant new inventions, such as the motor vehicle, cause vast changes. And there is the give and take of ideas that takes place without deliberation of either donor or receiver which is called diffusion. Such change is caused by travelers whose devices or ways of doing things impress those who see them so much that they adopt them. One constant source of change is produced by the interaction of people from different cultures. The early Euro-Americans learned from the Indians just because they came in contact with them and saw the advantages of some of their practices, particularly in agriculture. Asians and Africans have been adopting new practices continuously from the Europeans they have been in contact with during the last four hundred years.

What is relatively new is that during the last two decades a new kind of stimulus to cultural change has been set in motion. The advanced industrial nations have become involved in vast efforts to assist the less fortunate nations to speed up the process of change in their own countries. Basically, they have tried to do this in two ways: economically and technically. The economic approach has been to analyze the means of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth in the receiving nations and attempt to improve these systems by transferring considerable amounts of money or goods to develop those sectors that are deemed essential for sparking economic growth. This technique worked very well in Europe under the Marshall Plan, but it has worked considerably less efficiently in the now developing nations. The other approach has been to try to transfer technical know-how, on the reasonable assumption that technical knowledge has made the industrial nations rich and that other nations are not rich because they lack such expertise. Although this approach has undoubtedly helped the developing nations, it too has fallen short of expectations.

It is our belief that there is a third component which has too often been neglected, but which is equally necessary to induce change in the nonindustrial nations. This is the socio-cultural component, which means simply that technical knowhow and economic patterns are imbedded in cultural systems, elaborate patterns of customs and beliefs, which can either act as sanctions or barriers to technical or economic change. The simplest example we can give is that of cultural beliefs concerning food. From either an economic or a technical point of view, a system of pork production would be advantageous to most farming people of the earth. However, it is next to useless to consider such a possibility for people of the Islamic faith. They have a cultural belief that pork is not a proper food for man, and neither economic nor technical considerations will change this attitude. The same kind of belief affects Hindus in India in regard to beef. These examples may seem very obvious, and the reader may justifiably say that anyone with just a little familiarity with these cultures would know these facts. However, there are multitudes of beliefs of the same nature that are not so obvious.

To remain in the category of beliefs concerning food, we can mention the difficulties that have arisen because the United States has exported much surplus food familiar to North Americans but often quite strange to Latin Americans, Africans, or Asians. It has been reported that butter has frequently been used as soap. Wheat is frequently rejected by rice eaters, since they are unfamiliar with it and cannot visualize it as proper food. In one rice-eating area of South Asia, village people who were given American wheat as partial payment for working on canal construction projects sold it in order to buy rice. It is very difficult for people who have never used powdered milk to consider it as a food. It has been reported that in one Latin American country mothers gave such donated milk to their children in its powdered form and the children developed stomach-aches as a result. Also, in one Southeast Asian country, villagers who had never used milk before reportedly used donated powdered milk to make lines on their soccer fields. Since they were unfamiliar with white powder as a food, they used it for a purpose which had meaning to them. The meaning of these examples is simply that cultural differences can stand in the way of the best-intentioned efforts where only economic or technical considerations are observed. The socio-cultural approach can help to correct this kind of difficulty.

Although Westerners in action capacities who are trying to assist in bringing economic improvements to the developing nations are usually aware of differences between their way of life and that of the people they are trying to help, this awareness is often of a very general nature. They are usually told that they must respect the customs of the local country and that, moreover, they need not Westernize the people in order to bring about useful economic changes. Since most such advisers lack any thorough grounding in social science, they are frequently unable to recognize the depth and intensity of local beliefs or customs; they tend to classify them as merely quaint or unusual differences that can be overlooked as far as technical or economic change is concerned. It is our belief that such cultural differences cannot be relegated to weekend photography and ignored during the workday week if economic change in the developing nations is to attain efficiency.

The foreign assistance adviser can be viewed as an engineer, but not just in regard to some new Western technique or economic practice. Whenever he is dealing with the economy or the technical practices of another people, he is really tampering with an entire social system. We believe it is more useful to regard him as a sociocultural engineer rather than merely a technical expert. He can be compared to an engineer concerned with building bridges, who certainly must know the problems of stress and the nature of steel. But an engineer must also be aware of the environment in which he constructs his bridges. He must know something about the flow of water in the river he is attempting to cross, the nature of the rocks where he is anchoring his abutments, as well as the weather conditions of the area. Intense cold will contract his steel and intense heat will expand it. In a comparable sense, though the technician or economist must know the techniques of his trade, he also must know something about the environment in which he is working. And primarily this is the cultural system of the people among whom he is working. This cannot safely be assumed to be the same as the cultural system of the adviser, any more than the physical conditions for building a bridge in a temperate climate can be assumed to be the same as in the arctic or in the tropics.

We believe the adviser must be introduced to the study of change from a sociocultural point of view. He is already committed to the necessity for change and knows how it takes place within his own culture. But he needs to understand how it can take place within other sociocultural systems. In other words, he needs to know something about the principles of cross-cultural change.

One way the techniques of change have been successfully taught within other professions in the United States has been by the case history method. In medicine, law, and business, to mention only some of the more successful fields of endeavor, the technique of studying and analyzing past efforts in order to improve current practice has been utilized thoroughly. Thus, no medical doctor believes himself qualified to undertake a serious operation until he knows well what happened during similar operations in the past. In the same sense, a practicing lawyer must depend to a very large extent on the knowledge embodied in the casebooks for each new case. Business also uses this technique in putting trainees to the task of studying and analyzing business ventures of the past in order to learn what are the factors for success. The common element in all these fields is to build knowledge progressively, to learn from the past in order to avoid the same errors in the future, and to learn what techniques bring the desired results.

We believe that if the field of international development is to become a mature, productive profession, it, too, will have to construct a body of knowledge which will be cumulative. Moreover, the individuals involved will have to assume the same role as the doctor and the lawyer, a large part of which will be to study and analyze past efforts. Further, we believe that the case history method is highly suitable to this field also. This is the only way it will be possible to avert the common difficulty of one specialist after another repeating mistakes that have occurred many times before in other countries but in similar circumstances.

Despite the fact that each situation encountered by an adviser in the field of international development will be unique, there are many common principles that govern the change process. Thus, though the type of leadership one can effectively work through on a local village level will vary from country to country, there are recurrent types of leadership which are found world-wide, and from which one can expect similar reactions.

A case in point is that of traditional religious leaders. There are four major religions in the developing countries—Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam—as well as tribal religions in a small percentage of the world’s population. Although the leaders of these faiths have different theological beliefs, they have a similar relationship to the rural people among whom they work. They provide supernatural assistance to their devotees, and because of the usually high regard with which this is received, the devotees also usually seek from them advice of a more mundane nature. The religious leaders may also get economic advantages from their positions, and at the very least they are concerned to safeguard such positions. Thus, when outside forces, such as foreign assistance agencies, appear and fail to include the religious leaders in their development plans, these leaders are likely to talk down the new developments and advise their devotees not to participate. It does not matter that the innovations being brought to the villagers would really help them; unless the advantages are very obvious, the recipients are likely to follow the advice of their religious leaders and fail to co-operate. One general principle for including change is, therefore: “Involve the local religious leaders in the new developments simply because they are a powerful leadership force.”

Obviously, the characteristics of such leadership will vary from country to country and from religion to religion, but the variations can be analyzed on the spot by the change agent involved. At least he will have a starting point if he has some basic principles to follow. Variations also occur for the bridge builder. There are a number of principles that govern all bridge construction problems. However, no two bridge problems are exactly alike. If the bridge is to be 2,500 feet long, the problem of stress will not be the same as if it were to be 500 feet. If it is built where there are high winds, the problem will be different than for a sheltered location. The bridge builder studies these problems on the spot and adjusts his plans accordingly. Similarly, this procedure is also necessary for the agent of social change. He can learn general principles, but he will have to learn the exact circumstances at the location of his proposed development efforts. In this book we will be concerned with the general principles.

We shall do this by combining two methods. In the next chapter we shall provide an outline for change and for the analysis of change projects. We believe that by knowing the importance of the various influences that affect such efforts, the change agent or student of change will be able to analyze his own problems and case histories in a methodical manner. This model can be considered as a guide for either analysis or action. Although it will be as comprehensive as the data studied up to this point permit, it cannot be considered final. No scientific scheme is ever final. Each is only the best that is available at the time, to be replaced or altered as more data are analyzed.

The second method is to provide actual case histories of change efforts as they have occurred and as they were described by the original analysts. We will attempt to provide an analytic guide for each case history and to point out how one or several of the influences affected the outcome.

We have selected the case histories with several criteria in mind. There are many others that are quite good but that do not fit one or more of these conditions. One such requirement was to cover the range of types of projects that have taken place within the field of international development during the last two decades. Thus, we have tried to find representative samples in the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry, co-operatives, education, health, home economics, transportation, and general community development. We have also tried to get as wide a representative sample as possible from the world areas where development efforts are taking place. We also selected the case histories according to quality, interest and length. As far as quality is concerned, we have used only those that were analyzed in a professional and complete manner, so that the reader can get a clear picture of what happened. We were concerned also that a case history be interestingly presented, on the assumption that many action people, who are normally very heavily burdened with written reports, will not take the time to read material that is dull. The length of each was significant to the extent that we selected those which contained the most information presented in the most succinct manner.

The final criterion we used for selection was success and failure of outcome. We have tried to balance the cases half and half, not because we believe that this is the normal percentage of successes and failures, but because we believe that it is equally important to know what to do and what not to do to implement the introduction of new ideas or techniques.

Two final points should be noted in regard to the selections. One is that they are on the project level, that is, the level where change agents are in interaction with the recipients. We believe that it is on this level that the final success or failure of most projects takes place, regardless of what planning has been done on a higher government level. In other words, although a country might decide in its five-year plan to increase the agricultural sector of the economy and budget a certain amount of money for this purpose, unless some effective means of transferring the knowledge of better agricultural implements or fertilizer to the rural peasants is worked out, the plans will come to naught. The same would be true of health measures. It is one thing to decide that better health would make village farmers more productive, but it is quite another to convince them to build and use latrines. It is this second part of the problem that we are concerned with here. However, we believe that this second part has strong implications for those on the planning level. There are some new ideas or techniques that can be transferred more easily than others. For instance, the idea of using fertilizer is in general easier to transfer to peasants than the idea of using latrines. If program planners were aware of this and had limited budgets, which is almost always the case, they might choose to concentrate on disseminating first the idea of fertilizer use, knowing that more food would also make villagers healthier. There would be less resistance, and thus more value gained for expenditure.

The second point is that most case histories concern the peasant farmer. This was not our choosing, but a fact that is forced on us by the nature of the developing world. Seventy to eighty per cent of the population in the developing nations lives in rural villages and consists primarily of farmers. Ultimately, these people will spell the difference between success and failure in the developing nations. Although most such nations are very interested in industrializing themselves, their basic problems stem from the fact that two-thirds of their populations are poorly fed, conservative, basically illiterate, and relatively unproductive—the village peasants. When these men become well-fed, interested in change, literate and productive, most of the overpowering problems of the developing nations will be in the past.

2

The Process of Innovation

Sociocultural change takes place through time. There is a beginning and an end of the change process. The beginning is the first presentation of any new idea to the potential recipients and the end, if the effort is successful, is the point when it is integrated into the culture of that group. From the point of view of the innovator there is a goal, some new idea or technique or more efficient means of accomplishing a traditional task that will assist in the economic improvement of the recipient group. As will be seen in the figure below, this is what we call “the plan.” The line from the inception of “the plan” to the point of “integration” is broken, which signifies the possibility that the new ideas or techniques may never be integrated. Because of a variety of influences, the recipients may reject the innovation at any time after it begins. If this happens, the project ends in failure.

Throughout the change process, there are basically two forces acting on the plan-integration line: the techniques used by the innovator in his efforts to convince the local group to accept the new idea, and the behavior of the recipients toward the proposed innovation. These two forces can be characterized as the action and the reaction.

Any projected innovation will be subject to influences stemming from these two forces. Any influence or multiple of such influences, as will be described b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Process of Innovation
• 3. Land Reform and Community Development in Bolivia
• 4. Community Development in Highland Peru
• 5. Community Development in Brazil
• 6. Rural Self-Help in Costa Rica
• 7. The Prevention of Sleeping Sickness in Nigeria
• 8. Resettlement to New Lands in Nigeria
• 9. Venereal Disease Eradication in Northern Rhodesia
• 10. Urban Community Development in South Africa
• 11. Range Management in the Somali Republic
• 12. Developing a Village Co-operative in Israel
• 13. Rural Development in East Pakistan
• 14. Community Development in India
• 15. Health Education in Village India
• 16. Factionalism in Village India
• 17. Buddhism and Development in Laos
• 18. Community Development in Hong Kong
• 19. Family Planning in Taiwan
• 20. Village Improvement in the Philippines
• 21. A Literacy Campaign in Sarawak
• Index