INTRODUCT≠ION

The introduction of the book starts with the first announcement - made by the president of the United States,
Harry Truman, in 1949 - of the concept of a ‘fair deal’ for the entire world, in order to solve the problems of the
‘underdeveloped countries’. The intent of this new doctrine was to replicate the characteristics of the
‘advanced’ societies of the time in the ‘underdeveloped countries’ through capital, science and technology.
This doctrine was not just embraced by the Us, but, in a few years, was also shared universally by those in
power (also because of the world order after World War II).
However, this revolution was not seen as an easy task as it is shown in one of the most influential documents
prepared by a group of experts convened by the United Nations whose aim was to design policies and measures
“for the economic development of underdeveloped countries”.
It (the report) suggested a total restructuring of “underdeveloped” societies - they use the words disintegrate,
burst, (expectations) frustrated.
the important thing is to explain why they could speak in such terms? Why did it make sense then, since now we
can see the ethnocentric and arrogant idea behind it. -> this will become hegemonic by the early 1950s.
This books tells how the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite - namely, massive
underdevelopment and impoverishment, exploitation and oppression - but, above all, how the “Third World”
has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early
post–World War II period.

ORIENTALISM, AFRICANISM AND DEVELOPMENTALISM

- Until 1970s the central stake in discussions on Asia, Africa and Latin America was the nature of development,
the kinds of development to be pursued to solve the problems in these parts of the world. No one could doubt
the development itself or the need for it. So development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social
imaginary.

- Although these theories were often unsuccessful, this didn’t stop their development. Reality had been
colonized by development discourse, and subjects who were dissatisfied could only struggle to find their
freedom in this framework.

- More recently, the development of new tools of analysis, during the 1980s, has made possible analysis of this
type of “colonization of reality”, the Foucault’s work on the dynamics of discourse and power and how it shapes
the representation of social reality through the permissible modes of being and thinking.

- Extensions of Foucault’s insights to colonial and postcolonial situations have opened up new ways of thinking
about representations of the Third World.

- Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination and at
the same time to explore the conditions of possibility and the effects of development.

- The study of development as discourse is akin to Edward Said’s study on the discourses on the Orient.
Orientalism can be analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient that decides the permissible
and thus Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.

- Since its publications, Orientalism has sparked a number of creative studies and inquiries about representations
of the Third World that served as markers for the analysis of development as a regime of representation.

- In his book The invention of Africa, the African philosopher Mudimbe states that his aim is to study the theme
of foundation of discourse about Africa and how African worlds have been established as realities for
knowledge in Western discourse. But beyond the study of the invention of Africanism, he concerns Afrocentric
perspectives that try to reinterpret African history. Critical work of this kind, Mudimbe believes, may open the
way for the process by which Africans can have greater autonomy over how they are represented and how they
can construct their own social and cultural models in ways not so mediated by Western knowledge. This notion
can be extended to the Third World as a whole.

- Timothy Mitchell unveils another important mechanism at work in European representations of other societies.
The setting up of the world as a picture, in the model of the world exhibitions of the last century, is at the core of
these methods. For the modern (European) subject, this entailed that s/he would experience life as if s/he were
set apart from the physical world, as if s/he were a visitor at an exhibition. The observer inevitably “enframed”
external reality in order to make sense of it and this enframing took place according to European categories.
This regime is a quintessential aspect of modernity and has been deepened by economics and development. It’s
reflected in an objectivist and empiricist stand that dictates that the Third World and its peoples exist “out
there”, to be known through theories and intervened upon from the outside.

- The consequences of this feature of modernity (empiricism and objectivism) have been enormous. Chandra
Mohanty, for example, refers to the same feature when raising the questions of who produces knowledge about
Third World women. What emerges is the image of an average Third World woman, constructed through the use
of statistics and certain categories. These representations implicitly assume Western standards as the benchmark
which to measure the situation of Third World women. The result is a paternalistic attitude by Western women
toward them and, more generally, the perpetuation of the hegemonic idea of the West’s superiority. Within this
regime, works about Third World women develop a certain coherence of effects that reinforces that hegemony.

- Mohanty’s critique applies with greater pertinence to mainstream development literature in which exist a
veritable underdeveloped subjectivity as if waiting for the Western hand to help subjects along. This image also
universalizes and homogenizes Third World cultures in an historical fashion.

- The deployment of this discourse in a world system has profound political, economic, and cultural effects. The
production of discourse under conditions of unequal power is what Mohanty and others refer to as “the
colonialist move”. This entails specific construction of the colonial/Third World subject, in/through discourse in
ways to allow the exercise of power over it.

- Colonial discourse, according to Homi Bhabha, is “crucial to the binding of a range of differences and
discriminations that inform the discursive and political practices of racial and cultural hierarchization”. The
development discourse is governed by the same principles. It has created an extremely efficient apparatus for
producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power, over the Third World. This apparatus came into
existence in the period 1945 to 1955 and has not since ceased to produce new arrangements of knowledge and
power, creating a “space for subject peoples” that ensures control over it.

- This space is also a geopolitical space. The development discourse inevitably contained a geopolitical
imagination. It’s implicit in expressions such as First and Third World, North and South, center and periphery.

- The author proposes to consider development as a historically singular experience, the creation of a domain of
thought and action, and analyze the characteristics and interrelations of the three axes that define it: the form of
knowledge through which it comes into being; the system of power that regulate its practice; and the form of
subjectivity fostered by this discourse. The ensemble of forms found along these axes constitutes development
as a discursive formation.

- The analysis will be couched even in terms of regime of representation, analyzed as places of encounter where
identities are constructed and also where violence is originated, symbolized and managed. Hypothesis developed
by a Colombian scholar to explain violence in her country. A regime of representation took place in the 1940s
with the emergence of development, also accompanied by specific forms of modernized violence. This regime is
a final theoretical and methodological principle for examining the mechanisms for, and consequences of, the
construction of the Third World in/through representation. Charting regimes of representation of the Third
World brought about by the development discourse represents an attempt to draw the “cartographies” or maps of
the configurations of knowledge and power to define the post WWII period.
- The book is a study of developmentalism as a discursive field, but paying closer attention to the deployment
of the discourse through practices. The author wants to show that this discourse results in concrete practices of
thinking and acting through which the Third World is produced, and furthermore there is the consideration of a
part of colonial power not owned entirely by the colonizer, but even by resistance of local people.

- The author also wants to unveil the foundations of an order of knowledge and a discourse about the Third
World as underdeveloped. She wants to map the invention of development, like Mudimbe’s study of Africanism.
He contextualizes the era of development within the overall space of modernity, particularly modern economic
practices. From this perspective, development can be seen as a chapter of what can be called an anthropology of
modernity, that is, a general investigation of Western modernity as a culturally and historically specific
phenomenon. If an “anthropological structure”exists, this must be analyzed and to understand how this structure
gave rise to the regime of development.

DECONSTRUCTING DEVELOPMENT

Since the late 80s, several attempts to analyze the discourse of development have been made but just few works
took forward its deconstruction.
Among them:
James Ferguson (The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho1990) wrote a book on development in Lesotho in which analyzes the results of some programs
implemented in the rural areas under World Bank sponsorship. Although some achievements have been reached,
the stress has to be put on the failure of their stated objectives (as far as i’ve understood, the formers were not
their stated objectives)
Wolfgang Sachs (The development dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power.1992) in his book analyzes the
origin (in European civilization), the uses and the transformation -from the 1950s to his present - of several key
words of the development discourse in order to expose the arbitrary character of the concepts, their cultural and
historical specificity, and the dangers that their use represents in the context of the Third World.
-> there’s a related group project based on the ‘system of knowledge’ approach.
These authors point out that cultures are also shaped by ways of knowing and the one that has been imposed is
the modern Western one. Thus, in the development discourse those ideas supported by non-Western researchers
or activists have been marginalized and disqualified.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a new field grew, women in development (WID), since women had been ignored
by development interventions until then.
Several feminist researchers - as Adele Mueller and Chandra Mohanty - centered their works on the analysis of
the practices of dominant development institutions in creating and managing their client populations, but also
importantly contributed in the study of development subfields like economics and the environment.
Through the study of a group of Swedish anthropologists (Kam-ap or take-off : local notions of
development - Dahl and Rabo - 1992), it is possible to observe how closely linked are the concepts of
development and modernity to the local culture. In their works emerge how these concepts are used and
interpreted by different populations that use complex processes as traditional practices, histories of colonialism,
symbols…
Works that focus on the role of conventional disciplines within the development discourse:
- Irene Gendzier (1985) -> examines the role political science played in the conformation of theories of
modernization and its relation to issues of the moment
- Kathryn Sikkink (1991) -> confront the emergence of developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s
and 1960s -> developmentalism as an economic development model
- Pedro Morandé (1984) -> analyzes how the adoption and dominance of North American sociology in the
1950s and 1960s in Latin America influenced the conception of development (intended as the transformation of
“traditional” into a “modern” society)
- Kate Manzo (1991) -> analyzes the shortcomings of modernist approaches to development and suggests to
pay more attention to “countermodernist” alternatives that are grounded in the practices of Third World + call
for a return of culture in the critical analysis of development, particularly local cultures
Escobar justifies himself and tries to give the editor a reason to publish his work although there are already
46956305834 - we will never know if they think it was worth it
he says that this book provides a more general view of the historical construction of development and the Third
World + exemplifies how the discourse works applied to a specific case
goal: contribute to the liberation of the discursive field so that the task of imagining alternatives can be
commenced

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT ENCOUNTER

Talal Asad in Anthropology of the Colonial Encounter in 1973 raised the question of the structure in which
anthropology as a discipline has taken shape, insisting on the role of colonialism and neocolonialism and
their political economy and institutions.

He asks since we cannot consider anthropology without colonial encounter does not that also apply to the
context of development encounter?

Anthropologists inside or outside development?

Many anthropologists have opposed development intervention, but a large number have been involved with
development organizations.
Their stance is for the most part either inside development, as applied anthropologists or outside
development, as the champions of the authentically indigenous and native’s point of view. Thus completely
overlooking how development operates as an arena for constructing identities and impacting cultures.

The absence of anthropologists from discussions of development as a regime of representation is regrettable

because, if it is true that many aspects of colonialism have been superseded, representations of the Third World
through development are no less pervasive and effective than their colonial counterparts.

Critic: Western scholars' intellectual neglect of Third World voices on subjects such as colonialism is
remarkable and the total absence of any reference to American imperial intervention as a factor affecting the
theoretical discussion is problematic.

Fast Forward to the 80’s when a deep change in anthropology occurred. It was finally examined how
anthropology is bound up to Western ways of creating the world leading to an important conclusion: “nobody
can write about others any longer as if they were discrete objects or texts.” Moving to a new idea of an
enhanced political and historical sensibility that can imagine different approaches and transform cultural
diversity.

- This process of reimagination of anthropology has been criticized, but it is still taking shape and has to be
further explored. After the moment of textual critique, anthropology has to reenter the world. To do this,
anthropologists have to rehistorisize its practice and knowledge taking into account the forces that shape this
practice.

- In order to recenter the debates there needs to be deconstruction and self-critique and the processes of
dismantling has to be accompanied by constructing new ways of seeing. Deconstruction and reconstruction in
this case have to happen simultaneously.

- There’s a central problem which is the limitation of the West’s self-critique, thus a need for alternative
questions for the construction of anti colonialist discourses.

- The needed liberation of anthropology from the space mapped by development encounter -> this process may
provide new paths towards the radicalization of the discipline’s reimagining process that started with
enthusiasm during the 80s.
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

​ hapter 2: post WWII “Problematization of poverty” and consequent birth of strategies for development
C
(“professionalization of development” and “institutionalization of its practices”)​.

Chapter 3: Cultural critique of development economics: identification of possible “communities of

modellers” to critically examine it and to ”neutralize” current dominant development discourse​.

Chapter 4: Analysis of how development works in relation to malnutrition and hunger issues. Therefore,
focus is on the development of strategies/programmes in the Third World countries by WB and the UN (like
the SAPs in the 70s-80s). Escobar’s field work in Colombia. ​

We have identified possible examples of standard models of development in the implementation of

developmental programmes in the 70s and 80s(such as the SAPs), applied to every country deemed
"underdeveloped" according to Western standards.

Chapter 5: focus on regimes of representation of peasants, women and environment. Therefore, focus on
World Bank’s role in shaping and putting in to practice the Western idea of development and its links between
representation and power.​

Chapter 6: Need to find alternative ways to represent and put into practice the idea of development (such as
the “hybrid cultures” approach in Latin America). Escobar suggests an approach based on a local perspective,
“in contexts of hybridization, collective actions and political mobilization” (focus on ecological struggles –
global capital vs local communities) thus with cultural and social awareness.

Escobar therefore suggests that a new approach based on local perspective should be implemented, focusing on
social and cultural awareness as development programs cannot be standardized. There is a need to take into
consideration the local environment and the social and cultural structures of each place