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Narratives of Development: Colonizing the Histories of the Poor

Jason Hickel
India 2003

“It is not to the ravages of poverty that the eyes of justice must be cast, but to the hegemony of History – it is this with which we must be ultimately concerned.”

The idea of development has been a central pillar in Western foreign policy since the years following the Second World War.  But despite the relative newness of the term, the ideological premises upon which modern development practice is built have been recycled for centuries.  That this is the case becomes evident when development is understood as a manifestation of a particular Western historical consciousness, the latest in a series of rationalizations dating back to the first whispers of European imperialist ambition.  In the following pages I will attempt to illustrate the forceful materiality of this totalizing conception of history by exploring the methods by which it is imposed, specifically with reference to the ways in which these methods are embodied in the discourse of development.  I will argue, however, that this hegemonic history does not go uncontested, but is mediated by the dynamism of local pasts which afford people some agency in resisting subjectivity within the dominant narrative.

Understanding Modern Development Discourse

Toward the middle of the twentieth century, following the end of the war, the colonial elites of Britain and France were beginning to realize that their imperial enterprise was at risk of being ideologically sabotaged, and in response sought to formulate a more indirect way of managing the economic production of their colonies.  The solution they came up with was a full-scale reform of political and economic processes – initiated by colonial experts but eventually transferred to their local counterparts – that would ensure that colonies developed along the paths that the West had envisaged for their own purposes.  The confidence of colonial powers that their subjects would follow this trajectory was a product of the belief that such development was the natural progression of history – a logic that eventually led to the willingness of the European imperialists to agree to the widespread decolonization which began in the 1960s (Cooper 64).  As they had suspected, their abandoned colonies did indeed take over and begin to adopt, in some form or another, the particular project of development that was prescribed for them, and began to aggressively seek the foreign financial aid with which to do so.

Meanwhile, on the western flank of the Atlantic, the United States had abolished its isolationist and anti-interventionist policies and cast its gaze outward and – to its apparent surprise – “discovered” the vast poverty that had emerged as a consequence of the global spread of the market economy and the consolidation of capitalism. This revelation came along with the realization that the social unrest fomenting in poor nations posed a serious threat for the industrialized West, and “development” emerged as a strategy for addressing the issue before the levels of instability in the world became problematic (Escobar 1995:22).  The poor, from this perspective, were perceived as a social problem that needed to be managed and contained in order to maintain the prosperity and power that the developed world had begun to enjoy.  The Bretton Woods Institutions, instantiated in 1946 for the initial purpose of reconstructing war-torn Europe, formed a central component of the US strategy for the ostensible “relief” of poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and have since become the coercive enforcers for the Western agenda of neoliberal globalization.  In the wake of decolonization, the World Bank and the IMF – the institutional exemplars of development ideology – were ready to dispense billions of dollars in development loans that were contingent on prescribed structural adjustments intended to press Third World countries into the globalized capitalist world-system sculpted by the West.

In the past few decades a bold branch of scholarship has begun to subject the ideology of development to the serious scrutiny that it has long evaded.  A deconstructionist approach has proven helpful in the analysis of development as a discourse, and has yielded insights into the particular – and arbitrary – character of its central constructs.  Perhaps the most revealing contribution that has precipitated from this analysis is the view of development discourse as predicated on a particular conception of history.  The promotion of development that has come from both sides of the Atlantic is coherent only within a distinctly modernist teleology that defines ultimate purposes in terms of Eurocentric assumptions regarding progress, and which implies a trajectory of unilineal stages of development rooted in a social evolutionary model of human advancement.  Immanent in this metanarrative is an imaginary of temporal positionings that situates the “Third World” behind the West, as a representation of what the industrialized world looked like during its infancy.  So totalizing has this narrative of progress been that the process of development – framed in this particular way – has “achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary” (Escobar 1995:5).  The Western version of history, imposed with devastating force on the rest of the world, has become naturalized to the point of being the dominant heuristic within which nation-states are evaluated.

The effects of this discourse have been powerful.  Not only does this temporal positioning implicitly deny the possibility that the structures of inequality endemic to this discourse might be responsible for the poverty and underdevelopment that it purports to ameliorate, but it effectively reinscribes old patterns of colonial domination.  Instead of the formal, direct, and tangible hegemony of colonial administrations, control is now enforced discursively through the ubiquitous rhetoric of development, originally deployed by the West but to varying degrees internalized by the “periphery” through the apparatus of the global capitalistic order and the military strength that enforces it.  As Akhil Gupta has so trenchantly put it, “development discourse has served to naturalize the control of the ‘underdeveloped’ world by the West after the demise of formal colonial rule” (Gupta 1998:11). 

The Power of Representations in the Production of Subjects

The efficacy of this discourse in maintaining post-colonial control lies in its power of representation.  As Arturo Escobar argues in Encountering Development (1995), the success of development discourse is contingent on its ability to produce the “Third World”, not only in the Western mind, but in the minds of the people whom it seeks to control as well.  Development can be defined, in this sense, by the subjectivities that it fosters, “through which people come to recognize themselves as developed or underdeveloped” (10).  The Third World is constructed in diametric opposition to a picture of Western superiority, and the perpetuation of Third World representations depends upon the propagation of depictions of each side of this opposition.  Escobar outlines a sketch of the generic representation of the Third World in the following passage:

there exists a veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as powerlessness, passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency, as if waiting for the (white) Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry, illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness, lack of initiative, and traditions.  [Escobar 1995:8]

The pervasive acceptance of this description – perfectly coherent within the Western historicity – is a sign of the power that is held over the Third World, and is best understood not as true in any realist sense, but “true” as a powerful social fact that has been forceful enough to define (to varying degrees) the lived lives of the subjects that it produces. 

The force of these representations constitutes what David Thomas (2000) has identified as the power of naming, which, he notes, “ultimately reflects the power to conquer and control.”

Naming, in this sense, is a power-laden process that involves the production of identities.  In the words of Bourdieu, official naming is “a symbolic act of imposition which has on its side all the strength of the collective, of the consensus, of common sense, because it is performed by a delegated agent of the state, that is, the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence" (Bourdieu 1994:239).  The process of naming is a sign of inequality and of the domination of one logic over another, for naming only makes sense within the rules of a certain system of valued classifications.  It is the imposition of this system of logic over others that gives naming its force.  Furthermore, naming, according to Thomas, “is central to the writing of history, and history is a primary way we define ourselves.  The power to name becomes the power to define one’s identity and very existence” (Thomas xl).  Drawing history into this analysis is a useful move, for it allows us to understand the discourse of development, in its various manifestations, as a powerful historicizing force.  Its efficacy in the production of the histories of the nation-states and local communities that it touches is contingent on the power with which it can impose key representations upon the Third World and situate them within a totalizing scheme of history that posits the primitive against the modern. 

To make such a claim, however, demands that the actual materiality of this discourse be carefully examined in order to determine how effective it has been, in reality, at producing these subjects.  Clearly, given the extent to which so many countries have adopted the Western schema of development, the discourse has to some degree been internalized in the ways that national leaders in the postcolonial period have imagined their states.  This seems to lend weight to the theory that Third World communities possess limited agency in how they are represented, and that they are constrained in their freedom to construct futures based on their own cultural models simply because their activities in the world-system are mediated by the force of Western historicity.  But even a cursory understanding of historiography reminds that the power of hegemony in history production is never perfect.  The impact of development discourse in the construction of historical identities is operative only in the dynamic process that characterizes the tension between global, national, and local stories of the past.  The hegemonic narratives of development and progress – as imposed by the West onto the Third World as well as by state governments onto rural or minority communities – can never perfectly produce the subjects that they envisage.  Their efficacy is governed, rather, by the creative processes of both adoption and resistance that inevitably take place in the negotiations of the past.  Before the intricacies of these negotiations can be explored, however, a more thorough understanding of the tools of development discourse must be in place.  For this purpose the Foucauldian notion of governmentality has the potential to be analytically useful.

Governmentality as an Analytical Tool

The power of naming that inheres in development discourse as “regimes of representation” (Escobar 1995) is most evident in the twin notions of “poor” and “backward” that are commonly employed as labels of underdevelopment.  The idea of backwardness implies that the population so labeled is viewed as somehow inconsistent with a dominant official history, failing to operate according to the values and morals that have been officially nominated, and therefore pathologic and in need of discipline and rehabilitation.  Labeling a population as “immoral” in this sense is central to the tactics of modern governmentality, for the creation of immorality and the identification of deviants produces a social pressure for self-induced reform.  Power, in this technique of government, is de-centered from formal administrative coercion (of the sort typified by colonialism) and is transformed into a pervasive discourse that regulates the behavior of individuals from the inside, and therefore compels them to play an active role in their own self-governance (Foucault 1991).  This discursive coercion is accomplished through the naturalization of the logic of particular institutions such as – for our purposes – the globalized capitalist economy.  Those who behave according to values that are incommensurate with the goals of capitalism are therefore conveniently identified as backward – a label which carries incredible coercive power – and cast as pariahs in the story of human history.

            The functional logic of such labeling is obvious.  The growth of capitalism is predicated on the existence of a particular type of consumer: one who is amenable to the allure of material well-being and who can be counted upon to demonstrate a perpetual expansion of “needs”.  The vast population of peasants who subsist on the periphery of capitalist centers typify what Giovanna Procacci recognizes as “the extreme version of the consumer in need of management… representing in caricature the threat lurking on the rosy horizons of production, personifying the mechanism of crises of underconsumption” (Procacci 1991:155).  By dint of their refusal to buy into the cultural logic that would compel them to pursue material comfort as voraciously as we do, this population of peasants embodies a potential subversion of the capitalistic order which endangers the system of wealth itself.  In order for the fruits of this system to be retained by its beneficiaries, the populations that evince this social problem must be managed.  And the most effective way for this management to be accomplished, short of physical coercion, is by grafting “morality” onto economics, where “‘morality’ signifies a discursive mediation which allows a whole range of technologies to be brought to bear on the social as behavior” (Procacci 1991:157-8).  It is critical to realize that the social danger that is feared in this system is not poverty per se (as in indigence), but pauperism – the sets of values and motives and goals that constitute the “uncooperative” mindsets and forms of conduct of those who are labeled backward.  Building on Procacci’s points, we can infer that the purpose of “development” is not the elimination of social inequality (poverty), but the elimination of difference (pauperism).  After all, the perpetual existence of the poor as poor is essential to the interests of the rich; for the wealthy to work for the elimination of inequality would be to undermine the very pillars upon which they stand.  Difference is the problem with which the discourse of morality is concerned, if we understand morality to be adherence to a particular set of (Western) cultural values.  The danger of difference is that the persistence of alternative systems of conduct and rationality among non-European peoples renders them impossible to subordinate and integrate into the system of production and consumption.  As long as they are satisfied with their traditional institutions, their indigenous religions, and their particular configurations of kinship they will lack the unique motives that animate modern capitalism (Weber 1930).  The solution, the most effective method for transforming deviant populations into dutiful subjects, is the influence of “religious ideas” (Procacci 1991:160), i.e., by socializing them into a certain way of ordering the world and behaving within it that is consistent with the discourse of development. 

But how is it that this socialization is accomplished so effectively?  How is it that so many countries actually began to identify themselves as underdeveloped after the 1940s?  Escobar suggests that its efficacy lies in the discursive colonization of reality: the fact that “certain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon” (1995:5).  It is the representations themselves – the names and identities of pauperism and backwardness – that become models for the social imaginary.  This colonization of reality is the true purpose of development, which is evident in that decade after decade of development plans have not only failed to achieve the ostensible goals of improving real living conditions, but have in fact contributed to their deterioration.  The fact that this retrogression does not seem to phase development strategists is indicative of the fact that true equality simply does not feature as a real goal.  The end of development is control, period. 

            One of the key mechanisms for creating representations of the Third World is the use of statistics.  Fundamental to the operation of development agencies is the consolidation of a corpus of baseline statistics that represent poor communities in terms of arbitrary categories such as annual per capita income.  In this sense, “the perception of poverty on a global scale [is] nothing more than the result of a comparative statistical operation” (Escobar 1995:23).  Nominating the Western standard of wealth as the paramount virtue, such statistics provide the framework for qualitative representations of the poor as ignorant, unproductive, lazy, uneducated, tradition-bound, animistic, kinship-oriented, etc.; each of which has as its point of reference a certain way of being human that is supplied by the model of the modern industrialized world.  In this formulation of history, tradition must be abolished in order to make way for modernity.  

            The ignorance that is supposedly associated with poverty is redressed by the capillary distribution of development discourse on a variety of levels, ranging from institutions for savings and loans on the one hand to the social worker who is dispatched to promote behavior change on the other.  Central to this project of reeducation is what Cooper (1997:64) terms “the imperialism of knowledge”, embodied in the assumption that poverty is a consequence of the inadequacy of local forms of knowledge, and that progress can only occur if Western technical knowledge is adopted along with Western models of thought itself.  With the force of these three factors – the colonization of reality, statistical categorizations, and the imperialism of knowledge – the representation of the Third World as backward has been thoroughly disseminated.

The concept of governmentality, as the process of power which I have described, is useful in explicating the historicizing force of development discourse.  Governmentality is concerned with the production of subjects motivated by a particular morality, and this requires that they adopt notions of the identity of their communities or nations with reference to the source of governance and the historicity upon which it operates.  It is this process of identity formation that constitutes the materiality of the discourse. 

It is critical to ask – to return to an earlier question – how effective this discourse actually is at producing these subjects.  Assuming, as we must, that the hegemony of development discourse in the colonization of historical identities is limited, we will now turn to the creative processes of adoption and resistance that govern the negotiation of historical narratives. 

Negotiations of Identity and History

The process of adopting and internalizing the discursive subjectivities produced by development narratives necessarily involves the reconstruction of local pasts.  In the tumult of rapidly changing spaces, communities are forced to recast their histories in order to make sense of themselves within the context of a developing world.  In this process they find themselves, to varying degrees, buying into the historical trajectory suggested by the progressive thrust of development.  Generally this entails no more than positioning community identities in terms of a primitive past, a developing present, and a modern future.  But in many cases people are compelled – often by virtue of extreme poverty or famine – to internalize negative representations of themselves (as poor and backwards, for instance) in the struggle to fit into development schemes and enhance their claims to resources (Woost 1993).  As Gupta notes, “underdevelopment becomes a form of identity… something that informs people’s sense of self” (1998:ix).  In adopting the dominant ideological framework for imagining themselves, people in the local sphere help reproduce the general contours of a cultural hegemony inflected by the coercive power of a totalizing history. 

The work of Michael Donovan (1996) offers an instructive example of the less extreme of these two forms of subjectivity.  In examining the impact of rural development in Kenya he describes the rapid structural changes that have been inflicted on rural landscapes and explores people’s efforts at historicizing their changing milieu in an attempt to “locate themselves within a developing world”, which entails the process of “drawing this reconfigured landscape into descriptions of a reconfigured self” (Donovan 1996:658).  The incursions of capitalism into rural Kenya radically altered the structure of traditional livelihoods. The subsistence lifestyle of herding and shifting cultivation was supplanted by settlers who established enclosed family farms oriented towards more intensive production and capital accumulation.  The privatization of land converted the countryside into smallholdings and new techniques of agricultural production were introduced, all of which subverted local knowledge and forced the adoption of new ideas of the commodity-value of land.  The force of capitalist agriculture in redefining rural space had the effect of reconfiguring traditional networks of social relations, forcing the revision of basic ideas about fortune, and ultimately creating subjects more compliant with production-intensive lifestyles.  In this vein, Donovan demonstrates that the promotion of progressive farming policies “were part of a broad, post-war project to manage agrarian change and development and, more ambitiously, to recast African social structures throughout Kenya by promoting a base of market-oriented peasant farmers (669).  The important historiographical point of this description is that the efforts of people to learn to live in this new setting involved “the creation of narratives that describe how their countryside has changed” (682, emphasis mine).  These narratives, Donovan suggests, locate the pre-capitalist lifestyle in a distant, primitive past and conceptualize the changes since then as a linear series of teleological developments.  By superimposing these narratives upon the past people sought to cast the modern landscape as something of their own making (683), but in so doing they were compelled to borrow from and internalize the story of development in order retain a sense of their own agency.

As Donovan’s ethnography suggests, development discourse – along with the historicity upon which it is predicated and the representations that it deploys – has a powerful material affect on the identities of the people that it touches.  In understanding development as a regime of discursive representation, however, it is critical that the trap of Said’s Orientalism be fastidiously avoided.  In describing Orientalism, Said assumed far more potency on the part of Western hegemony than we should be willing to assert.  Orientalism, by his definition, is

the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient… [the discourse of Orientalism is an] enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient. [Said 1973:3]

Such a notion of unmediated hegemony fails to account for the sites of resistance that discursive representations inevitably encounter.  The totalizing narrative implicit in development discourse is never passively adopted, but is contested and reworked in a complex process of cultural and historical negotiations.  This resistance takes place in a multiplicity of forms as people invoke collective identities, reassert the value of indigenous knowledge, and conceptualize alternatives to the direction of development.  The incursions of capitalism are forced, therefore, to accommodate to some extent to local social realities.

Gupta explains this process of local mediation well.  He argues compellingly that the imposition of development discourse does not automatically produce the subjects that it imagines.  Rather, what occurs is a confluence of different narratives, situations “in which contradictory logics and incommensurable discourses are intermingled with one another” (Gupta 1998:6), with one never fully subordinating the others.  It is this complex hybridity that characterizes the local development milieu.  This dialectic, however, is not as simple as a set of structural oppositions between systems of “indigenous” meanings and symbols and “Western” ones.  On the ground it is never a matter of a strict traditional-modern dichotomy; reality is far messier than such a picture would suggest.  According to Gupta, “Modernity may have been instituted as a global phenomenon through colonial capitalism, but it was, in the process, resisted, reinvented, and reconfigured in different social and historical locations” (1998:9).  In fact, Gupta argues that the trajectory of development – in India, for instance – is itself influenced by peasant resistance and activism. The global processes of modernity “did not impose themselves on a pliant and unwilling peasantry: they were actively resisted, accepted, and modified in the process… Global discourse like ‘development’ is profoundly transformed through crises of realization in different locations” (15).  The cultural idiosyncrasies of the local, therefore, exert a strong mediating influence upon the governmentality that development seeks to impose, and ultimately upon the meanings that will be imputed to the process of capitalist restructurings.

Because it offers a compelling way of imagining the historical trajectory of a nation-state, development discourse is often tightly imbricated with nationalist narratives – which presents a correlation that warrants some attention.  The very premise of the modern nation-state implies a nation-building agenda that seeks to incorporate the disparate cultural logics of a bounded territory and subject them to a process of discursive homogenization.  As David Thomas (2000) has noted with regard to American Indian populations, the process of naming that began with colonization was an attempt to incorporate the Indian into mainstream history as part of the nation-building process, which acted to effectively silence their histories by rendering them irrelevant to the nation at large. The production of nationalist histories demands silencing the stories of the destruction that has been wrought on indigenous populations in the name of national progress in order to construct a narrative that justifies the existence, power, and activity of the state.  This sort of narrative, however, faces the perpetual threat posed by the panoply of subversive histories that could dismantle the national unity and destabilize popular acquiescence to national goals.  This serves to reiterate the central point here: the pumping out of incommensurable historicities is a central goal of a governmentality of (national) development.

Given the interpenetration of development and nationalist narratives, it can be argued that resistance to development discourse often comes in the form of resistance to the homogenizing force of nationalism.  Often enough in this sort of scenario the people who become marginalized in the national narrative – or those who are in some way adversely affected by the impact of development strategies – take concrete steps to reassert their unique identities in opposition to that presented by the nation.  Leslie Witz (2003), in her exposition of the attempts of Apartheid South Africa to unify the nation under the banner of “progress”, “development”, and “enlightenment”, noted the efficacy with which African peoples were able to boycott and contest that narrative.  In effect, Africans were challenging the European monopoly on the history of the nation by staking their own claims to it and by refusing to allow their own histories to be represented as “primitive” or “underdeveloped” in the life of the nation.

In a different manner of resistance to nationalist narratives, marginalized ethnic groups in Northeast India that have not yet been granted the status of scheduled tribes work hard at consolidating – and reinventing – their collective identities in order to qualify for certain rights and privileges.  Though in strictly economic terms this could be read as a form of capitulation to state designs, in the realm of identity formation and history production the act of acquiring official recognition as a distinct cultural group can act as a powerful symbol of autonomy.  Furthermore, local discussion over the right to the status of a scheduled tribe constitutes a forum in which the grievances that indigenous populations have against the state can be officially aired rather than suppressed.  It is in such forums that the development narrative of the modern nation-state, and the depredations wrought by its incursions in the local sphere, can be contested in light of the stories that indigenous people attempt to tell about themselves.  Often these alternative local histories are content to exist as enclaves in the midst of larger national narratives, but in some cases resistance to development strategies foments more violent and lasting unrest.  The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico is a case in point.  Discontent with the various forms of suffering that the liberalized capitalist economy has inflicted on rural native peoples, many communities have elected to reassert their “indigenous” identities in the quest for a politico-economic order that will allow them a space within which to flourish according to the virtues that they have chosen to nominate for themselves.

Conclusion

I have attempted to argue here for an understanding of development as a historicizing force that is consistent with – and ultimately tantamount to – the imperious narrative of Western “history”.  Through the discourse of development as a socializing agent, this dominant mode of history – based on scientific rationality and Enlightenment theories of progress – seeks to absolutize the pasts of those who live outside of it (Nandy 1995).  The process of ossifying these disparate pasts and situating them on a trajectory of global development has the effect of producing powerful representations of the Third World that work to colonize the realities of those societies and coerces the adoption of certain modes of thought and economic behavior.  But, as I have attempted to demonstrate, this hegemonic history does not go uncontested.  The process of silencing and forgetting that it demands is never perfect.  Rather, this dominant historical consciousness is mediated by the dynamism of local pasts, the assertion of which allows non-Western peoples to resist their subjectivity by challenging the direction of development.  To understand the nature of this hegemonic historicization is vital, for until its processes are denaturalized and subjected to scrutiny, the violence and exploitation with which it is so frequently complicit will continue to go unchallenged.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre

1994. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cooper, Frederick

1997. “Mobilizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept.” In International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Cooper, F. and R. Packard (eds.).  Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Donovan, Michael

1996. “Capturing the Land: Kipsigis Narratives of Progress.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History. 38(4): 658-686.

Escobar, Arturo

1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel

1991. “Governmentality.”  In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Burchell, G., Collin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gupta, Akhil

1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India.  London: Duke University Press.

Nandy, Ashis

1995. “History’s Forgotten Doubles.”  History and Theory.  34(2):44-66.

Procacci, Giovanna

1991. “Social Economy and the Government of Poverty.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Burchell, G., Collin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Said, Edward

1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Thomas, David Hurst

2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books.

Weber, Max

1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Witz, Leslie

2003. Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Woost, Michael D.

1993. “Nationalizing the Local Past in Sri Lanka: Histories of Nation and Development in a Sinhalese Village.” American Ethnologist 20(3): 502-521.