Culture and Development in a Globalizing World

Geographies, Actors and Paradigms

Sarah Radcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134274574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Using recent research on development projects around the world, this book argues that culture has become an explicit tool and framework for development discourse and practice. Providing a theoretical and empirically informed critique, this informative book includes conceptual overviews and case studies on topics such as:

• development for indigenous people
• natural resource management
• social capital and global markets for Third World music
• post-apartheid South Africa
• cultural difference in the USA's late capitalism.

The editor concludes by evaluating the outcomes of development's 'cultural turn', proposing a framework for future work in this field. By combining case studies from both 'Third World' and 'First World' countries, the book, ideal for those in the fields of geography, culture and development studies, raises innovative questions about the 'transferability' of notions of culture across the world, and the types of actors involved.

Culture in development thinking: geographies, actors, and paradigms

Sarah A. Radcliffe

Why culture and development? The context

---

As I was researching Ecuadorian development projects and debates recently, references to culture kept coming up – in my conversations with Quechua indigenous representatives, in roundtable discussions about national policy, and in the corridors of Washington DC based multilateral development agencies. Not only were differently positioned actors and institutions talking about culture; people and policy were additionally drawing on specific examples of culture in action to illustrate their points. Indigenous leaders and international donors pointed out how in Bolivia’s Andean highlands, “traditional” forms of decision-making and administration were giving unionist structures a run for their money. In the midst of Ecuador’s economic and political crisis, Indian traders from the Otavalo area continued to export their distinctive textiles worldwide, giving anti-poverty policy-makers food for thought.

Culture has always been in development thinking and practice, but how it is conceptualized and when and where put in to operation reflect complex historical and geographical patterns of institutional, social, and political action. As the chapters here show, culture has recently acquired a new visibility and salience in development thinking and practice. Whereas in the past cultural norms and assumptions might have informed powerful development actors in their interaction with beneficiaries, culture is now being discovered among those very beneficiaries. Development practitioners and development thinkers alike are puzzling over the implications of culture for the participation of beneficiaries, for the success of projects and how culture contributes to non-economic goals of development. This volume examines cultures and the puzzles they throw up for development thinking and practice, by analyzing the “why, how, when and where” questions of culture and development. By starting from specific historical, social, and geographical locations, the chapters illustrate what happens when culture is taken seriously in grappling with development practice “on the ground.”

Despite the breadth of the development field, there is no doubt that culture has arrived in development. Development thinking in the past decade has experienced a cultural turn (Chua, Bhavnani, and Foran 2000; Schech and Haggis 2000; Clague and Grossbard-Shechtman 2001), in what Kliksberg presciently termed “the new development debate” (Kliksberg 1999: 84). The emergence of culture at the heart of mainstream development debates has been a core feature of development since the late 1990s (Worsley 1999: 41). Major international initiatives such as in the United Nations Decade for Cultural Development from 1988 to 1997 have placed culture and development together, while multilateral development agencies have began to talk about the need for “culturally appropriate development” (Davis 1999: 28; UNDP 2004). Among a broad group of development practitioners from applied anthropologists through to World Bank economists, a general agreement exists that “culture in its broadest sense needs to be brought into the development paradigm” (Davis 1999: 25). Bringing culture into development, however, requires a rethinking of development’s objectives and its treatment of the complex concept of culture.

The cultural values that underlie the global context for development thinking and interventions are by now increasingly widely recognized and analyzed (Escobar 1995; Schech and Haggis 2000). Studies have demonstrated how postcolonial legacies of cultural interaction and the contests over development’s meanings and practices have long been questions of culture. Yet as traced in this introduction and the following chapter, a recent paradigm shift has occurred in development’s approach to culture as cultural difference is now treated explicitly as a significant variable in the success of development interventions (Rao and Walton 2004). In order to understand the reasons for this new development debate, however, we must first look at how development itself has been conceptualized. In the mid-twentieth century, development was equated with poor countries’ economic growth and modernization that were expected to replicate Western experience. To summarize a complex history (see Schech and Haggis 2000; Watts, this volume), development thinking was increasingly challenged by Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial writers and activists, and began to reconsider its own specific institutional, historical, and cultural location. The approaches of these critical writers demonstrated how development included not only the specific interventions – projects, programs, loans, and aid flows – usually included in definitions of development, but that it was additionally embedded in the cultural economy of Western capitalist political economies and the cultural histories of European colonialism.

In current understandings, development includes the reworkings of relations of production and reproduction, and of sociocultural meanings, resulting from planned interventions and from uneven political economies. Development comprises “an uneven motion of capital finding, producing and reproducing places and people in particular and differentiated relation to peculiar strategies of accumulation . . . [Its] signal form in the second half of the twentieth century demarcated a specific relationship between the global north and south or between the ‘first’ and ‘third worlds’” (Katz 2004: ix). As it encompasses both intentional practice and broad political economic processes (Cowen and Shenton 1995: 28), development’s double-sided essence has to be kept in creative tension in any discussion of development’s constantly shifting horizon of global and local change (Hart 2001).

The context for taking culture seriously in development arises from a number of cognate issues, processes, and debates. In order to explain development’s “cultural turn,” commentators identify five main reasons for the recent prominence of culture as a key concept in development thinking. These reasons include the failure of previous development paradigms; perceptions of globalization’s threat to cultural diversity; activism around social difference (gender, ethnicity, anti-racism); the development success stories in East Asia; and the need for social cohesion. These views are not found together, and even one reason for taking culture seriously covers a number of different political, analytical, or ideological perspectives.

One of the key prompts for a rethinking of development’s relationship with its cultural field was the widespread disillusionment with development among practitioners, thinkers, and grassroots actors from the 1980s. While the impasse in development thinking was argued by sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers to be due to the inability of development thinking to overcome its economism and teleological frameworks, the practical failure of projects on the ground to deliver satisfactorily was a key component (Nederveen Pieterse 2001a: chapter 3). During the 1980s in many parts of the majority world, development indicators were reversed due to the combined effects of debt burden, falling productivity and job availability, and loss of development directions. In Ecuador for example, rural credit and various development programs of the Inter-American Development Bank and UNDP were suspended or terminated due to conflict and poor project performance (Griffiths 2000: 33). The following chapters give other examples of development rethinking following negative experiences with development work.

Prominent in discussions about culture in development are concerns about the potentially homogenizing cultural effects of globalization. In the words of the United Nations report on culture and development, a “danger looms of a uniform global culture” (United Nations Report 1998: 22). Voices from the global South also raise the specter of loss of cultural diversity. In Africa, the erosion of cultural heritage under the experience of development is argued to “precipitate development crises” causing alienation and disorientation for ordinary Africans (Yakubu 2002: 8–9). Similarly, Prah argues that “the brooding presence of Western culture [in Africa] is singularly blighting and fossilizing indigenous cultures” (Prah 2001: 96). During its Decade on Culture and Development (1988–97), the United Nations argued that “the defense of local and regional cultures threatened by cultures with a global reach” (UN Preamble 2003) required in turn action for “preservation of the diversity of cultures” (UNESCO 2003). According to development anthropologists, the way in which globalization tends to lead to the “leveling of national and local cultures and its consequent social dislocations and economic crises” (Davis 1999: 31) needs to be addressed. In order to challenge or halt cultural homogenization, cultural policies beyond the national scale are being promoted at inter-regional and even global scales (UN Report 1998: 22). Such policies can provide “an antidote to globalization” according to the Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation (quoted in UN Report 1998: 85). Yet cultural globalization occurs in the context of global markets, complicating the agendas of democratic national policies in their attempts to shape increasingly complex individual consumption patterns (Sen 2004: 52–3). Trajectories of desire often encompass goods produced around the world, making the substitution of “national” products for “global” products problematic (Sen 2004: 52–3).

Anti-discrimination measures connected with postcolonial political struggles have also played their part in questioning the implicitly Western cultural focus and expectations that long underlay development thinking and practice. Efforts to challenge Eurocentric visions of progress and development modernity thus form part of a broad agenda to question culture’s power to proclaim what is an appropriate or inappropriate culture in a development context. For example, some African commentators argue that development occurring after colonialism brings a profound malaise to the region’s cultures by undermining their autonomous values (Prah 2001). As a result of these broad critiques, development policy has explicitly attempted to understand and encompass a regard for cultural diversity during the last decade (Allen 2000). Often analyses from these perspectives are informed by diverse Third World feminist movements, and by campaigns to ensure rights for populations marginalized by ethnic/racial hierarchies (such as the global indigenous rights movement). While in fact most people around the world live with the overlap and juxtaposition of multiple cultures (produced by variable combinations of local societies, nation-states, international consumer and religious cultures), anti-discrimination and anti-racist work has to grapple with the persistent hierarchies between cultures and groups in multicultural and multiethnic societies. Building bridges of communication and mutual respect creates intercultural understanding and speaks to an agenda of working across/through social differences. Hence the United Nations’ “commitment to pluralism” works from the need to build policies around cultural diversity and intercultural understanding (UN Report 1998: 22), a position endorsed by applied anthropologists (Davis 1999: 28). The economic benefits of working for intercultural understanding have also been pointed up by development economists who argue that development of flexible labor markets and employment opportunities are impeded by employers’ misperceptions of workers’ cultural attributes, thereby causing the waste of human capital (Kliksberg 1999; Hojman 1999).

The dramatic growth and improved living standards for populations in certain East Asian countries, often termed the Asian Tigers, has generated considerable debate about what lies behind their success story. Early economic discussions attributed much weight to the region’s ancestral and long-standing cultures, arguing that the Confucian tradition provided sociocultural rules that assisted accumulation. Such arguments finally put to rest the assumption, embedded in mid-twentieth century modernization models of development, that Western-style development was the only trajectory to growth (Worsley 1999: 34). Certainly, the West is no longer a privileged interlocutor in definitions of development and modernity (Nederveen Pieterse 2001a; on Japan, see Goodman 1999; Sen 2004: 48–9). Yet attributing a broad historical influence to culture was ultimately unsatisfactory as it attributed a coherent cultural web over highly diverse meanings, practices, and social relations (Ong 1999). Analysis began to focus instead on daily performances of cultural economic practices that underpin, say, Japanese business behavior, such as the “after-hours sessions in the bars and nightclubs . . . where the vital personal contacts are established and nurtured slowly” (Lohr, quoted in Granovetter 1985: 67). In other words, the Asian Tigers demonstrate variable organizational and social cultures through which economic transactions and values are expressed and reproduced. In Singapore for instance, a complex interaction between social Darwinism, Confucianism, and specific leadership styles contributed to its development experience (Chang 2002). By focusing on the state and the firm as locales for culture, distinctive practices and meanings have been identified in the forms of governance, workplace dynamics, and education that are now thought to contribute to economic growth. By examining culture as a mode of organization at a number of levels therefore, the selectivity and flexibility of cultural relations across spheres of production and reproduction have been highlighted without reducing culture to a “catch all” category (also James, this volume).

Another agenda behind development’s cultural turn is the objective of overcoming tensions and potential conflicts between human groups. Departing from the insight that the resource of culture is held by every individual and social group regardless of their economic or political power, a number of different strands of policy have emerged. Emphasizing the non-economic facets of development, the right to freedom of cultural expression represents a development goal that depends upon security, democratic openness, and accountability (Friedmann 1992; Sen 1999). One of the first contexts for development’s explicit attention to culture was in conflict resolution, where tension and violence were attributed to a lack of cross-cultural understanding, and where the rebuilding of post-conflict societies departed from the cultural resources of local groups (Davis 1999: 37; compare Watson, this volume). In this vein, UNESCO promotes an agenda of social cohesion to attempt to overcome potential conflicts and inequalities along a number of axes of social difference (UN Report 1998).¹ Such approaches offer a constructive response to heightened global security concerns that are wrongly reduced to culturalist explanations (see below for a discussion on culturalist explanations). “Dialogue between . . . flexible, multiple and open identities and cultures should become the basis for a concord to cultures rather than a ‘clash of civilizations’” (UN Report 1998: 23; Rao and Walton 2004: 10). The promotion of social cohesion and rights to cultural expression has recently been at the heart of measures to recognize the cultural capital of the poor. Whereas impoverished people may have little more than cultural identities, this cultural capital is viewed in recent policy as the launch pad for transforming their relative position in multicultural societies. However, the means of achieving a change in status is far from straightforward (UNESCO 2003), as the following chapters illustrate.

As Bjorn Hettne argues, the new emphasis on culture has farreaching implications and constitutes a major challenge to the rethinking of development (Hettne 2001: 9). Moreover, the varied engagements of development with cultural questions outlined above give rise to different trajectories for theorization and policy-making. If cultural development is a response to anxieties about globalization, then policy measures to enhance cultural diversity in global world become adopted, as illustrated by various United Nations initiatives. Tackling discrimination raises different challenges for policy, not least the difficulty of transforming the terms of knowledge, power, and hegemony of Western (colonial and contemporary) cultures of modernity and development into more plural, open, and empowering mechanisms. If, by contrast, the development agenda is informed by the Asian Tigers’ case, policy questions are oriented to bring about the necessary managerial, work culture, and political transformations within a capitalist political economy. Yet each distinct concern brings us back to the fact that development thinking and practice has, over the past 10 to 15 years had to rework its understandings of development while refining its conceptualization of culture.

What is culture? What is development? Debates across disciplines

---

Culture has come out of the seminar room discussions and gone into the manuals for development fieldworkers and institutions. Yet the term “culture” has no universal or agreed meanings, and indeed varies in its significance and theoretical background across anthropology, development studies, geography, and cognate disciplines. Drawing on recent debates in a number of theoretical and substantive fields, this section outlines a broad-based characterization of culture. We explore in detail the ways in which culture and development have been defined and used by key disciplines in order to work towards an interdisciplinary understanding of how culture and development can be conceptualized in relation to one another. Anthropology and development studies – focused on issues of culture and development respectively – start off this discussion, before turning to critical approaches (including feminist and postdevelopment work) and then to economics and economic geography. The aim of this section is to work towards multidisciplinary definitions of development and culture that are mutually comprehensible.

Anthropology

Although central to the discipline of anthropology, culture remains a highly ambiguous concept and one that arouses much controversy (Gardner and Lewis 1996; Fox and King 2002; Mitchell 2002). Whereas historically focused on small-scale societies with contiguous cultural boundaries, anthropology increasingly has to engage with a global stage in which cultural mixing, hybridity, and multiple and crosscutting flows of people, meanings, and artifacts are taken for granted (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Buroway, Blum, and George 2000). Anthropology’s own complicity in the hierarchical labeling of Other cultures has been traced back to colonial times (Abu-Lughod 1999). Under colonialism, although “Western civilization” was pronounced to be the model for non-Western societies, in practice non-Western culture was selectively regularized to facilitate colonial rule and early postcolonial politics (Worsley 1999: 35–6). Colonial models of power attributed culture with a central significance in the ordering of the world.

However, to attribute culture with the ability to determine all aspects of social life is to fall into the trap of culturalism whereby any social feature is linked causally and directly back to a broad category of “culture” (Worsley 1999: 37). Culturalist explanations tend to assume that culture is an unchanging “bundle” of beliefs and practices that are coherent and homogeneous across a large population. In recent years, culturalist explanations have gained widespread media and popular prominence; broad-brush associations between religious or historical identifications have been offered as the explanation for political attitudes and responses to modernity. Culturalist frameworks including Islamic/Christian and East/West binaries claim to differentiate between groups yet they suppress long-term historical patterns of connection and internal cultural diversity in their search for headline “explanations” (Ong 1999; Hart 2002; Berger 2003). In such binary frameworks, cultural difference is reduced to being a source of conflict or a source of functional integration (Huntington 1996; Harrison and Huntington 2000; Landes 2000), although in each case culture is accorded a unity and primacy that anthropologists abandoned long ago.

Culturalist explanations in effect ignore the key dimensions that anthropologists now place at the heart of the culture concept, namely its flexibility, its strategic deployment by different actors to make interventions, its contested content, and the interplay between material and symbolic components.² By taking culture for granted – as a “traditional way of life” (Werlin 2003: 337) or as a template for action – culturalist approaches ignore struggles over cultural meaning, the state’s role in shaping culture, and the coexistence of different cultural registers. In practice, culture is used flexibly, each variation in meaning and each social relationship passed – or not – through time or over space, mobilized or forgotten in turn (Fox and King 2002). Hence in order to retain a robust definition of culture, its limits need to be recognized. While culture does include a broad range of components such as the discursive understanding of contested meanings (e.g. elite versus popular culture), material culture (which embodies socioeconomic organization, meanings, and inequalities), structures of feeling, and forms of social organization (such as kinship, religion), it does not explain or control everything in social life.

One key limit of culture’s power came with the recognition that in the past the concept was too often equated with – or treated as a coded word for – racial difference. From the colonial period into the 1920s, the term culture became to be interchangeable in the West with the new notion of ethnic group, and both concepts substituted for race (Visweswaran 1998: 76). In such a way, today culture can operate as an alternative term to race. However, race/ethnicity and culture cannot be collapsed down into each other, despite the concepts’ entangled history in Western thinking and policy. Instead, the separate yet interconnected realms of culture and race need to be acknowledged, and in each case the historical and power-infused relationships that underpin a society’s “culture” and its racial relations have to be acknowledged (Trouillot 2002: 41). Racial categories are not biologically given; rather, “the social process by whi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Culture in Development Thinking: Geographies, Actors, and Paradigms
• 2 Culture, Development, and Global Neo-Liberalism
• 3 Culture and Conservation in Post-Conflict Africa: Changing Attitudes and Approaches
• 4 Indigenous Groups, Culturally Appropriate Development, and the Socio-Spatial Fix of Andean Development
• 5 Laboring in the Transnational Culture Mines: The Work of Bolivian Music in Japan
• 6 Social Capital and Migration – Beyond Ethnic Economies
• 7 Social Capital as Culture? Promoting Cooperative Action in Ghana
• 8 On the Spatial Limits of Culture in High-Tech Regional Economic Development: Lessons from Salt Lake City, Utah
• 9 Mobilizing Culture for Social Justice and Development: South Africa’s Amazwi Abesifazane Memory Cloths Program
• 10 Conclusions: The Future of Culture and Development
• Bibliography