An Anthropological Critique of Development

The Growth of Ignorance

Mark Hobart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134896318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Questioning the utopian image of western knowledge as a uniquely successful achievement in its application to economic and social development, this provocative volume, the latest in the EIDOS series, argues that it is unacceptable to dismiss problems encountered by development projects as the inadequate implementation of knowledge. Rather, it suggests that failures stem from the constitution of knowledge and its object.By focussing on the ways in which agency in development is attributed to experts, thereby turning previously active participants into passive subjects or ignorant objects, the contributors claim that the hidden agenda to the aims of educating and improving the lives of those in the undeveloped world falls little short of perpetuating ignorance.

1 Segmentary knowledge:a Whalsay sketch

Anthony P.Cohen

In the summer of 19861 I took with me to Whalsay, Shetland, the first draft of a book I was writing about the community, intending to show it to some of the people about whom I had written. One man who looms large in part of the book is a controversial figure locally, well known for the single-mindedness and vigour with which he pursues his campaigns. Notwithstanding the regard and affection I have for him, I had tried to write about him ‘warts and all’, reporting his somewhat ambivalent standing in the estimations of the islanders. I also made reference to several anecdotes which are frequently offered by Whalsay people as evidence of his idiosyncratic behaviour. He did not object to any of this, nor to my account of the extremely contentious manner in which he had campaigned thirty years ago for a harbour development, an argument which caused considerable strife within the community and which still evokes painful memories. He made only one objection: to my description of his brief fishing career as ‘inglorious’, the judgement of it which was certainly made by the many people who had commented about it to me. Far from being ‘inglorious’, he said, it had been ‘da maist glorious’ time of his life. He also explained away in rather prosaic terms the stories which I had proffered as indicating his absent-mindedness and iconoclasm.

The details need not concern us here. I report the incident because it struck me as a prime instance of the partiality of knowledge even in so small and intimate a community of some one thousand people. The stories were of things ‘known’ about Henry; ‘everybody’ ‘knew’ them, ‘Oh, aye, we aa’ ken wir Hendry’. Yet, what was known ‘about’ him was clearly not known by him, or was known in a quite different way. The knowledge which is assumed to embrace, unite and aggregate the members of a community turns out, like all symbolic forms, to be largely vacuous. It is constituted as meaningful in very diverse ways, yet within the framework of a formulation which is common to the members of the community. I do not suggest that such knowledge is individualized, although I am sure it may sometimes be so. But it certainly varies with the segmentary groups into which the community is divided and which provide the bases for social association within Whalsay (see Cohen 1985). Local knowledge masquerades as an orthodoxy, even as being so monolithic as to be contrastable to ‘extraneous’ or ‘expert’ knowledge, or theorized into ‘a folk model’. But, just as a multiplicity of meanings may lurk behind a common symbol, so a multiplicity of ‘knowledges’, which may not easily be reconcilable, informs common ‘knowledge’.

The importance of the masquerade is that it is one among many devices which mark the conceptual boundary by which Whalsay people separate themselves from the rest of the world. Such symbolic marking becomes increasingly imperative as geographical and infrastructural boundaries are breached and as local cultures have to respond to the spread of mass media, of national politics and of population mobility (Cohen 1982, 1986). It is not a matter of local people having to contrive difference, but, rather, of having to create means of reminding themselves that they do indeed differ from people elsewhere.

The development theorists who dominated the Anglo-American literature until some twenty years ago genuflected to the Weberian assumption that ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ knowledge were incompatible; and that the feasibility of development (or ‘modernization’) rested on the possibility of replacing the first by the second. The work of David McClelland on ‘achievement motivation’, though easily dismissed as simplistic, was a stark, but not extreme expression of this position (e.g. McClelland 1961). Social anthropologists who, by the very nature of their discipline, were more closely engaged with developing societies at the grass-roots level, were quick to disown such views. But, ironically, local communities whose members feel themselves to be beleaguered by the inexorable encroachment of ‘mainstream’ culture, may well feel that they are involved in the confrontation of such a dichotomy: that extraneous knowledge does indeed threaten their own knowledge. It depicts itself as ‘expert’ and is thereby felt to impugn local knowledge as ignorance. Moreover, it appears to be underpinned by power and, therefore, to be even more difficult to resist. Localities thus either capitulate, discard and even, perhaps, repugn their ‘traditional’ knowledge; or they may make a syncretic accommodation between local and extraneous knowledge; or they may subtly subvert the extraneous. To this observer, Whalsay strategies fall into the two latter categories, and particularly into the last (notwithstanding the judgement of older islanders that their successors have surrendered to ‘da sooth’). One of the ways in which the islanders express their distinctiveness from people elsewhere is by suggesting the ephemeral, superficial and usually bogus nature of Expert Knowledge. For reasons which I shall come to later, they do not claim expert knowledge for themselves. Rather, they disparage such claims. When these are made by outsiders about matters which affect the locality, they are discounted and ridiculed: they are ‘ignorant’. Such outsiders fall into a generic category labelled variously as ‘the authorities’, ‘the Experts’, and ‘the powers-that-be’. Outsiders are always wrong—indeed, they must be for, were they to be correct, then the conceptual boundary of ‘Whalsayness’, to which I referred above, would have been successfully breached.

There is ample evidence to justify the judgement made by Whalsay people that outsiders are usually wrong on Whalsay matters. But the problem is not peculiar to Whalsay. Expert outsiders are almost bound to be wrong, not because they are technically deficient, but because extraneous expertise is insensitive to the modalities of local knowledge. For the Expert Outsider, salient knowledge is substantive: problems may be resolved by having ‘knowledge’ applied to them. For locals, the disputation with experts may not call into question the substance of their knowledge, but its appropriateness. The sense of a discrete local knowledge does not deny that outsiders could know ‘what we know’ but, rather, that they could know ‘as we know’. In viewing the world across their conceptual boundaries, Whalsay people argue for a kind of relativity of knowledge, insisting that while facts may well be facts, their interpretations and their implications are culture bound. To be sure, there are certain expert statements which are invariably invalid: those which stipulate where a house should be built; the sea-routes along which submarine telephone or electricity cables should be laid; the capacity of a new reservoir; the appropriate depth of water for the harbour; the basis on which fishing boat subsidies should be calculated. These are regarded, quite simply, as statements of ignorance which are all the more inexcusable because, in formulating them, ‘da Experts’ have blithely ignored local knowledge, indeed, may even have neglected to seek local advice. Such confrontations are contests for the definition of expertise: ‘theirs’, or ‘ours’?

The more intriguing and complicated aspect of the relativity of knowledge does not lie in contesting the expertise but in questioning its appropriateness, less a matter of what is known than of how it is known. The indigenous modality of knowledge is inextricably tied to the segmentary quality of social relations in Whalsay.

A brief example must suffice. During the last thirty years, the one thousand islanders of Whalsay have acquired and capitalized the most modern fishing fleet in the UK. Now worth at least £30 million, the fleet is entirely locally owned. (These figures were correct at the time of field-work in 1986, but will obviously have changed since.) There are no multiple owners; the boats are owned by the crew members in equal share holdings. Whalsay fishermen have made particularly adventurous investments in purse-seiners, designed for fishing the pelagic species of herring and mackerel, although new boats have also been acquired for the lower risk (but lower earning) white fishery. Investment in the pelagic fleet, now in its third generation of boats, and nine vessels strong ranging in length from 90 feet to 190 feet, might well be regarded as economically irrational. Pelagic stocks have proved even more vulnerable to overfishing than white fish and ‘industrial’ species (caught for processing into fish meal), with the consequence that their abundance from year to year is uncertain and unpredictable. They are subject to continuously revised and politically influenced catch quotas. Some of these boats were ordered during the five-year period when the North Sea was completely closed to herring fishing. The British government ended all its financial support for the construction of pelagic boats; the Whalsay fishermen sought, and found, finance in Norway. The British government designated a very few Scottish ports, excluding Lerwick, Shetland's principal market, for herring landings. The Whalsay fishermen took their catches to Denmark or sold them, sometimes more cheaply, to East European ‘klondykers’ (factory ships) stationed in Lerwick harbour. The debts which the men incurred in acquiring their boats, and the financial risks of this fishery, gives their investment something of the appearance of a ‘deep play’ (Geertz 1975).

Why did they proceed in this way, against the advice of marine biologists, of processors and of government? Why did they choose to ignore ‘expert knowledge’? Adequate answers require a more comprehensive examination of Whalsay society than can be given here (see Cohen 1987). But one element of them may be stated categorically: they have little to do with fishing, and much to do with Whalsay culture, both as it relates to local perceptions of the outside world, and to social relations within the community. First, Whalsay people filter the ‘objective’ ecological and economic considerations through a local interpretive prism which fractures them into a plethora of culturally reflexive questions: what is our experience of these considerations? What do they mean to us in the light of our historical experience and of our present circumstances? Can we overcome the negative indications of the strategy? What might be the implications for the community of our success or failure? Such questions are clearly predicated on Whalsay islanders’ perceptions of themselves as different from people elsewhere. The ‘knowledge’ which they apply in taking their investment decisions is ‘local’ in the possessive sense illustrated by Vitebski (this volume). If it is not ‘theirs’, then they would have ceased to be culturally distinguishable from people elsewhere and would thereby have become socially unrecognizable to themselves. Whalsay islanders do not suffer from such an identity crisis; their ‘local’ knowledge is inalienable (Strathern 1984).

There is nothing contrived or eccentric about this localization of knowledge. It is not a self-conscious attempt to put some cognitive distance between Whalsay and elsewhere. Rather, it is a refraction on a slightly higher societal scale of the disparity of knowledges within the community among its segmentary groups. Segmentation in Whalsay should be understood in cultural terms: people think of themselves as belonging to the community through the mediation of their more immediate associations, and think about each other in these terms. ‘Formal’ associations are based on kinship and affinity; they are expressed in the aggregation of households in crofting townships, in membership of fishing crews, and in the treasury of public knowledge about local people. The community does not have the classic structural properties of segmentation noted elsewhere because, both in principle and practice, descent is cognatic and kinship is reckoned bilaterally. Nevertheless, a person is known as belonging for specific purposes to one group; while, for other purposes, he or she may be identified with other groups. These are essentially ascriptive structural associations which people must publicly acknowledge, timeless groups in which the individual's character is held to be rooted even though they may have ceased to provide the nexus of everyday interaction and economic life.

However, the individual's self-identification recognizes another, more fundamental notion: ‘wir (our) folk…yon folk’, an opposition sometimes also expressed as between people who are ken't (known) and unken (see Cohen 1987:70 ff.). These categories are cognitive and ideal: they are means of discriminating, and of locating, one's chosen associates within a field of potential associates limited only by the geographical bounds of the community. Because this notion conflicts with the dominant rhetoric of local commonality, egalitarianism and homogeneity (‘we’re all the same here’) it has to be expressed in ways which avoid the explicit suggestion of permanent, faction-like sub-community groupings. It is a more subtle form of association than those of kinship, neighbourhood and crew membership, all of which imply inescapable obligations and which compromise individuality. These associations are indeed credited within Whalsay as having idiosyncratic knowledge, but are insensitive to differences among their own members. ‘Wir folk’, by contrast, implies a greater degree of pliability and voluntarism. Its relationships are reproduced as expressions of choice rather than of ascription. It is not entirely separable from kinship but is a dimension of it, as it is of the other structural forms of close association. It really describes close relationships in practice rather than principle. Identity within Whalsay is thus a process of serial segmentation: the community ‘as a whole’ vis-à-vis ‘elsewhere’; its component structural groups (kin, neighbourhood, crews) in relation to each other; ‘wir folk’ (which may overlap with, and may exclude parts of the former) as social refractions of the self. To each there is a modality of knowledge which, to comply with the imperatives of egalitarianism and communal solidarity, must be expressed through common forms giving the appearance (at least so far as outsiders are concerned) of a shared substantive knowledge, of an orthodoxy. This is to say that within the framework of a common (but possibly spurious) local knowledge, there are many real local knowledges, as in Geertz's use of the term, suggesting differing hermeneutics, ways of imagining and interpreting ‘reality’ (Geertz 1983:215).

Relations among the segments are competitive. An opinion venerated within the group, because it was expressed by one of the group's members, may be denigrated by the members of another group. Such opinions are rarely debated across group boundaries for the very reason that they are contentious. People try to avoid behaviour which might result in overt conflict. What is actually thought by the members of a group is somewhat irrelevant. They have opinions imputed to them (just as they have identities allocated to them) by the members of other groups on the bases of lore and tradition. Their opinions and claims to knowledge are frequently portrayed by others as expressions of their sectional interests or as products of their idiosyncratic circumstances or histories.

I emphasize that segmentary knowledge should not be regarded as contrived or tactical, even though it has this competitive character. Differences of opinion and of information are not motivated by the mere fact of segmentary confrontation but are, rather, authentic expressions of cognitive diversity within the community. They thereby call into question the existence of a putative indigenous knowledge which contrasts with ‘expert’ and extraneous knowledge. This has distinct implications for the consideration of knowledge as an issue in ‘development’. First (and most obvious) the once popular proposition that successful innovation requires the ‘translation’ of an alien idea into an indigenous idiom (e.g. Kavadias 1966) is revealed as hopelessly simplistic as well as being insidious. Second, the technical or ‘objective’ aspects of knowledge are of less significance than outsiders are usually prepared to acknowledge. Third, the integrity of local knowledge and expertise has to be seen as inhering in the segmentary ideology which renders indigenous knowledge into a number of plausible versions, rather than in its apparent contrast to extraneous (in)expert systems. Knowledge does not commend itself locally by its intrinsic merit, nor by the subtlety and ingenuity with which it is disseminated (e.g. Paine 1970), nor even by its congruence with what else may be known locally, but rather, by its appropriateness to the ways in which things are known locally. This difference is vividly illustrated in Feit's account of the contrast between the ecological monitoring of Cree hunting lands undertaken by Canadian government scientists and other white wildlife experts, and as practised by the Cree themselves. Feit shows that Cree knowledge of flora and fauna is infinitely more detailed and sophisticated than those of the Expert Outsiders; but, also, that its association with the customary Cree institution of ‘stewardship’ makes it acceptable knowledge, knowable knowledge, in a way which excludes extraneous expertise as crass (Feit 1982, also 1984).

Outsiders’ knowledge of a locality is generalized and imputes to the members of the locality largely undifferentiated views. But by contrast, members’ knowledge of their locality is highly particularized, and has a variety of competences. In its formal expression as shared knowledge—that is, as a form of knowledge common to members—it has, what Schwartz calls, an ‘ethnognomomic’ character (1975). It marks symbolically the community's boundary with the outside world, and serves as a ‘cultural totem’: ‘this is how we[Whalsay Islanders] know’. But, in internal discourse, this putative collective knowledge, an illusion of shared form, is fractured into knowledges as it is filtered through the community's segmentary boundaries. I think this plurality of knowledges is what Apthorpe has in mind when he urges us, in contradistinction to the conventional wisdom among developmentalists, to assume that there is a ‘lack of integration in local knowledges, dissent in local knowledges about meaning, rival tendencies in local knowledges about truth, knowledge and ignorance’ (1986:6).

I stress again that I am not attributing to Whalsay society a segmentary structure. Therefore, I do not suggest that these internal boundaries determine the modalities of knowledge which they enclose. My argument is, rather, that people make knowledge accommodate their general social circumstances and not just those to which items of knowledge refer specifically. ‘Knowing’ what qualities constitute the good skipper or the skilful shepherd, the accomplished joiner or the lightsome fiddler depends partly on who is making the judgement, to ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF DEVELOPMENT
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• THE SCHOOLMASTER OF THE FUTURE
• INTRODUCTION: THE GROWTH OF IGNORANCE?
• 1: SEGMENTARY KNOWLEDGE: A WHALSAY SKETCH
• 2: PROCESSES AND LIMITATIONS OF DOGON AGRICULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
• 3: CULTIVATION: KNOWLEDGE OR PERFORMANCE?
• 4: HIS LORDSHIP AT THE COBBLERS’ WELL
• 5: IS DEATH THE SAME EVERYWHERE? CONTEXTS OF KNOWING AND DOUBTING
• 6: SCAPEGOAT AND MAGIC CHARM: LAW IN DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND PRACTICE
• 7: KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN THE PRACTICES OF DEVELOPMENT POLICY
• 8: THE NEGOTIATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN CHINA'S DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
• 9: BRIDGING TWO WORLDS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF BUREAUCRAT-PEASANT RELATIONS IN WESTERN MEXICO
• 10: POTATOES AND KNOWLEDGE