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Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 2, No. 4 (December 1999)
Culture and the Eurocentrism of Development:
The Noble Third World versus the Ignoble West and Beyond
By Maria Eriksson Baaz
*
Introduction
In recent years there has been an upsurge of voices declaring the need for culture in development. Culture has been presented as the forgotten and neglected dimension of a development theory dominated by political economy. Although the cultural turn of development is a reflection of the more general interest in culture both outside and within academia, it must also, as Tucker (1996) argues, be seen as a result of the often proclaimed 'crisis' or 'impasse' in development theory. According to this reasoning, culture is one of the roads which can lead development theory beyond the impasse or, in the words of the proclaimers of post-development, the road to save us from development.
This article is concerned with what is sometimes termed the 'cultural turn' of development studies. Like several other texts it acknowledges the need for cultural analysis. Culture does, however, mean different things. Not only is the term conceptualised in very different ways, but culture and cultural analysis can also be used to serve various purposes. Questions of perspective and purpose must therefore be put at the centre. This article will address these issues by exploring a certain trend in the cultural turn of development: texts which call for the need for alternative- or post-development. These variations on development have shown a strong interest in culture, and culture is introduced mainly as a tool for critique.
The article is not an attempt to cover the whole range of critical texts on culture and development. Rather, the aim is to point at and probe into a certain trend in 'the cultural turn of development discourses'. There are, needless to say, several writers on culture and development, such as Nederveen Pieterse (1995), Tucker (1996), and Fagan (1999), who approach culture in a different manner. Nevertheless, the analyses proposed by the alternative- and post-development writers dealt with in this article highlight an influential and, as will be argued, problematic trend within development studies.
Revaluation: The Noble Third World and Ignoble West
Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation? (Fanon 1986/1952:123).
One central rationale for introducing culture in the texts of the alternative- and post-development writers is the Eurocentrism of development discourses. As Tucker (1996:3) puts it: "recent attempts to introduce culture into development theory and practice are motivated by an attempt to move away from the ethnocentrism which characterises much development thinking". The argument is that development is a particular Western (and thus Eurocentric) idea which is imposed upon the Third World. According to this Eurocentric idea, Western modernity is the norm and goal which the Third World, presented as backward and underdeveloped, should follow. The verdicts on development are often very fierce. Marglin (1996:2) presented development as a "colonisation of the mind". Verhelst (1990:1), preferring a gender-based metaphor, characterised development as "rape" whereby "whether by force or by seduction" Westernisation is introduced into the Third World. Making a judgement similar to that of the famous verdict of Esteva (1987:135) that "development stinks", Sardar (1996:37) concluded that "there is something rotten at the core of the very concept of development".
How, then, is this Eurocentrism opposed? One strategy, appearing in texts by writers such as Apffel-Marglin and Marglin (1990; 1996), Verhelst (1990), Galtung (1996) and Rahnema and Bawtree (1997) is a reversal of the normative basis of mainstream development by substituting the negative imagery of the Third World with a positive one. The image arising in several texts is one where the problems are located in the West while the virtues are situated within the Third World. While that which is identified as Western culture is presented as bringing several problems, these problems are not evident in the Third World which instead becomes a sign of positive difference to which Westerners should turn in their search for salvation. An image of the Noble Third World and the Ignoble West emerges in the texts and the Third World arises as the alternative to a troubled West.
Verhelst (1990) is one of the critical authors on culture where these discursive strategies are most evident. The vices of the West are, according to Verhelst, primarily to be found in its productivistic, individualistic and materialistic mentality. The European spirit is characterised by a "need to conquer nature and others as opposed to a taste for harmony with the environment" and a "priority accorded to doing and having as opposed to a sense of being" (ibid.:24). The "as opposed to" characteristics are attached to the Third World Other whose cultures are "based on values of conviviality, sobriety and mutual aid" and "reject large-scale agricultural and industrial enterprises, as well as superficial, ostentatious life-styles" and who furthermore "make their own judgements regarding the merits of profit, free time and social harmony" (ibid.:31). A conclusion is that the West has much to learn from the Third World. Among other things, the reader is told that:
Like the Third World, the West is suffering from cultural uprooting. To a large degree, the individual in the West has lost touch with his innermost cultural and spiritual being. He is in exile from himself and all that is most profound in him. The great Promethean adventure, embarked on at least five centuries before the birth of Christ but intensified during the last 300 years, has made him stand aloof from all that surrounds him: his own body, matter, nature, society. From relational beings, many Westerners have become creatures of domination and competitiveness. From being cosmocentric they have become egocentric. ... The present-day white person has an almost masochistic relationship of domination towards the body and treats it like an object rather than inhabiting it as an integral part of the self, the temple of innermost being. There are many Third World peoples who can help him or her to regain contact with their body (Verhelst 1990:72).
The direct and sometimes poetic manner in which Verhelst puts his argument seems to go unmatched by other writers. Yet the same discursive strategies are found with other authors, e.g. in the Ecofeminist school of thought (Kiely 1999).
The Idea of Separate Development
A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man - or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged (Fanon 1986/1952:114).
The development or post-development strategy proposed by several critics (besides the substitution of negative with positive imagery as described above) is cultural pluralism. It is, however, a very specific version of cultural pluralism that is proposed - that of separate or autonomous development, an idea based on the principle of cultural difference. According to this vision and strategy, the world consists of separate and discrete cultures. Those identified as 'non-Western cultures' should be protected from the West. 1 The ultimate task is to find and keep the cultural difference and specificity, and realise this specific cultural potential. According to Apffel-Marglin and Marglin (1990:26), the aim is to "preserve the option of organic growth for non-Western cultures". They continue:
Cultural diversity may be the key to the survival of the human species. Just as biologists defend exotic species like the snail darter in order to maintain the diversity of the genetic pool ... so should we defend exotic cultures in order to maintain the diversity of forms of understanding, creating, and coping that the human species has managed to generate (ibid.).
Some theorists argue for a separate development along civilisational lines. For instance, Sardar (1996:36) claims that the notion of development is "totally unsuited to both the needs and requirements as well as the visions and aspirations of non-western cultures no matter how it is changed, modified and rethought". According to him, the future will be multi-civilisational, consisting most notably of Islam, India and China. In this future:
... the west would not only lose its power to define and enforce its own definitions of what it means to be free, civilised, rational etc. on the non-west, but each non-western civilisation would rediscover and put into practice its own way of knowing, being and doing (Sardar 1996:36).
To give a last (and quite extreme) example of the calls for separate development, Galtung, the old critic and propagator of "Another Development" (cf. Nerfin 1977), can be mentioned. In his texts, separate development is tightly interwoven in the definitions of development. Development is defined as "the unfolding of a culture; realising the code or cosmology of that culture" (Galtung 1996:127). This model also includes a dimension of unavoidability. The development of culture is presented in terms of a flower metaphor where the unfolding is:
... pre-programmed in the seeds, as a genetic code in the flower, as a cultural code or cosmology in the civilisation. There is a programme to be realised; neither the flower, nor the civilisation, has real freedom of choice (ibid.:128).
What is very important to note is that separate development is a strategy proposed not for all, but for the Third World. While it is often suggested that the West would benefit from learning from and adapting to the many cultural virtues of the Third World, on the contrary the opposite is not true. This is especially evident in the accounts of 'the Westernised Third World person', a figure appearing in several texts. This type is not presented as a sign of both the West and the Third World. Instead, he/she is placed within the category of the Western and becomes a sign of unauthenticity, someone who undoubtedly has borrowed too much from the West. The Westernised Other has come to play the same role as the Westerner; the 'crook', implementing, and at the same time a sign of 'the colonisation and Westernisation of the mind'. Moreover, as a result of the boundaries and binaries underpinning the argument, the role allocated to the Third World person is that of betrayal and misery. He/she is losing their authentic cultural values and traditions. In his/her unauthenticity, 'the Westernised Third World person' also becomes a pathetic figure and as such sometimes also a source of amusement.
The Pitfalls of Cultural Strategies
[t]he man who adores the Negro is as 'sick' as the man who abominates him (Fanon 1986/1952:10).
There is no doubt a need to counter the Eurocentrism of development. The strategies and cultural analyses proposed are, however, problematic in several ways, not least when considering efforts to oppose Eurocentrism. Rather than transcending it, there is a risk of remaining within and confirming the otherwise opposed Eurocentrism.
On one level, the post-development approach and the Eurocentric modernisation approach are based on opposing strategies. While the dominant modernisation version has tended to recreate a vision of an ignoble Third World, by seeing it in terms of underdevelopment and the West as developed and the final goal of development, the critics have gone in the opposite direction. Here, cultural criticism of the West is a central strategy. The problems are located in the West while the virtues an1d the road to salvation are situated within the Third World Other. The two opposing representations do, however, share one main discursive strategy - the representations of difference. Whether ignoble or noble, the non-West is constructed as the West's Other, through the absence of the characteristics attached to the West. Further, several of the central binaries which legitimised colonial intervention and later a modernising development, such as mind versus body, reason and rationality versus emotion and intuition, active versus passive, remain. In many instances, the representations echo those of the earlier modernisation theorists (Inkeles and Smith 1974) where the traditional Third World person is presented according to the attributes of tradition - as passive, not receptive of new ideas, disinterested in new information, fatalistic, concerned only with the short term etc. - in opposition to the active modern man who is open to new ideas, eager to seek out new information, rational, value planning etc. The classical rhetoric thus remains intact; by portraying the Third World as lacking in hunger for profit and material goods, poverty can still be attributed to 'African' or 'Oriental' culture (regardless of whether the post-development proponents consider this a vice or a virtue).
As already pointed out by Fanon (1986/1952), the discourses of Otherness have been central in supporting and maintaining exclusionary and marginalising practices. Discourses of Otherness and practices of separate development have been central, not least in legitimising colonialist expansion. As Bhabha (1994:86) put it, colonial discourses were characterised by the "ironic compromise of mimicry" - the desire for a reformed recognisable Other that is "almost the same, but not quite". According to the colonial logic, the colonised should become like the coloniser but always remain different. On the one hand, the colonial project (just like the later modernisation discourse) rested on the idea of Western culture being universal. It was something the colonised should repeat, copy and internalise, and it was this project that constituted and legitimised 'the white man's burden'. On the other hand, however, the colonial rhetoric and practice was dependent on the opposite idea, namely that the colonised must remain different - that they, as Bhabha (ibid.) put it, should become "almost the same, but not quite". According to the colonial rhetoric, the colonised were never able to really internalise European culture and they could not be allowed access to its 'universalism' and 'universal rights'. The white man's burden depended on the continuation of this 'not-quite' situation, necessary to secure and maintain the continued power and privilege of the coloniser. Without the construction and maintenance of these borders, where the colonised were defined as different and excluded from the universal humanism and rights, the colonial conquest and the 'white man's burden' could not be legitimised. 2
The idea of separate development is thus highly problematic. In the case of the critics of development (although articulated as a critique of Eurocentrism), it risks counteracting struggles against economic inequalities and exclusionary politics. By supporting an argument that since 'they' or 'we' (depending on who articulates it) are different from the West, rooted in different cultural and political values, 'they' or 'we' have nothing to do with, and should not make claims to, 'our' or 'their' universal rights, the idea of separate development tends to maintain and support marginalisation and exclusion. By confirming difference, it runs the risk of confirming the paradoxical logic of colonialism where the coloniser claimed proprietorship of a universalism which was not to be accessible to all. In the words of Minh-ha (1988:89), "as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardisation" planned authenticity or separate development "constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression".
Another problem arising in the texts of those who emphasise culture follows from the strategy of substituting negative imagery with positive imagery. By directing the attention to the authentic and the unspoilt, the romanticised representations of the Third World run the risk of relegating questions of poverty and economic inequalities to the margins. The Third World is, in the general anti-modernist rhetoric, often presented as 'poor but still happy', or 'happy because they are poor'. A risk in stressing "noble forms of poverty" devastated by development (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997:x) is of course that poverty ceases to be a problem, that the focus is removed from global economic inequalities. As Fagan (1999:180) rightly concludes, those who propose anti-development in this way are themselves displaying Eurocentrism: "adopting the privilege of being antidevelopment is not ... politically or morally viable when sitting in an 'overdeveloped' social and individual location".
As Fanon showed, Négritude - an effort to oppose Eurocentrism by searching for and valorising difference, in this case "the sum of the cultural values of the black world' 3 - did not turn out to be the salvation. After the initial question quoted earlier in this article, the first enthusiasm is replaced by disappointment when encountering the white man's answer:
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank, 'Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.' I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably. I had won. I was jubilant.
'Lay aside your history, your investigations of the past, and try to feel yourself into our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialised to the highest degree, dominated by scientism, there is no longer room for your sensitivity ... Oh, certainly, I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children - to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. You are so real in your life - so funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite civilization and let us relax, bend to those heads, those adorably expressive faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves.' ...
I wanted to be typically Negro - it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white - that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic (Fanon 1986/1952:131-2).
Misrecognising Hybridity, Discourse and Power
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man (Fanon 1986/1952:231).
The proposed argument and culture emphasising strategies of development rest on a particular notion of culture and identity. The strategy of separate development is based, on the one hand, on the idea of the existence of separate bounded cultures and, on the other, on the possibility to retrieve the 'real' or 'unspoiled' culture and identity existing prior to oppression. The corrupted should be peeled off in order to reveal and develop the 'real' and 'authentic', two concepts which often appear in texts of alternative and post-development. What is lacking in the texts of the critics is an acknowledgement that cultural identity is something, not already present, but constructed in certain contexts in relation to different discourses and the operation of power. By this, they also neglect the ways in which colonial and racist discourses are shaping contemporary cultural identities, whether articulated in terms of 'Westernness', 'Afrocentrism' or a more general 'anti-Westernness'.
If it is acknowledged that cultural identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, identity cannot be seen as fixed in the subject beforehand but as temporary points of identification, a process never completed. In this perspective, identity cannot be seen as determined in the sense that there is a 'real' identity which can be found or lost. 'Westernisation' cannot, as proposed by Verhelst (1990), be seen as a kind of 'superficial varnish' which can be peeled off in the search for the real or authentic. 4 Furthermore, if the operation of power is acknowledged, the local or the Third World cannot be presented as an unchallenged basis for alternatives. Development discourses are produced at different sites which come to be implicated in the power of development and contribute to its authority. Development discourses are produced in local settings in both the so-called Third and First Worlds where people and organisations define and identify themselves, their work, and others in relation to the overarching principle of development. While it is through the workings of power that people come to internalise racist or sexist imaginary for themselves, this internalisation of making it one's own also makes people part of the power processes supporting racist and sexist imaginary and practice. This is why the infatuation with the local or Third World in development discourses is problematic. Unprivileged power positions do not imply a position outside the workings of power and discourse.
Moreover, the workings of cultural processes, of the ways in which cultural signs are constantly being appropriated and reinterpreted are neglected. The conceptualisation of culture in terms of the language metaphor proposed among others by Bhabha (1994) is useful here. This metaphor represents culture in semiotic terms as functioning and assigning value in the same way that systems of language provide meaning. The argument relies on a proposition that the narratives and symbols with which a given culture represents and understands itself are not amenable to attempts to translate them 'transparently' into the terms of another culture in the same way that it is impossible to make a perfect match between for example Hindi and Swahili. 5 This means that 'cultural encounters' must be read in terms of interpretation and translation which always involves some kind of 'misunderstanding' or 'misreading'.
In the essay Signs Taken for Wonders, Bhabha (1994) cited the example of the dissemination of the Bible in India, where the reading of the supposedly unchangeable Word of God is transformed by Indian interpretations, readings and other uses of it. According to Bhabha, the distribution and eager reception of the Bible demonstrated the way in which the colonial power, together with its authority and message, is fractured by a culture that will always accept it differently to what is given. The Bible was often not read but willingly received so as to be sold or bartered and was used as waste or wrapping paper. At the same time, the conceptions of missionaries and catechists were challenged by local and cultural differences such as the vegetarian Hindus' understanding of Christian communion in terms of cannibalism (and thereby their refusal to take the communion). The questions came to problematise and challenge the English presence in itself with questions such as 'how can the word of God come from the flesh-eating mouths of the English' and 'how can it be the European Book, when we believe it is God's gift to us?' The interpretations and demands for an Indianised Gospel challenged the terms and boundaries of discourse and constituted a disturbing questioning of the supposedly unchangeable 'English Book'. According to Bhabha (1994:33) "in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid - neither the one thing nor the other". Colonial power is seen as "production of hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions" (Bhabha 1994:133).
According to this conceptualisation of culture as hybridity and translation, there are no pure cultures. Moreover, by recognising agency (and not only the conscious and transitive aspect of agency but also unconscious and intransitive aspects) the conceptualisation of hybridity also comes to challenge the image of development interventions as a mimetic and transparent process whereby Western values are imposed upon and adopted by powerless receivers, an idea which underpins the arguments of the those highlighting the cultural aspects of development (as well as the homogenisation thesis in the discourses of globalisation). The perception of development intervention (or globalisation processes) as a destruction of local culture through Westernisation or homogenisation is, from this perspective, a simplistic idea which does not acknowledge agency and resistance. If conceptualised in terms of hybridisation, development intervention should instead be seen as a translation process whereby the intervention package is appropriated and reinterpreted by different actors. Both the intervention process in itself and the outcome should be seen as a process of hybridisation whereby the outcome is neither a replication of the intervention nor the 'receivers'' position. In this light, the 'homogenisation' and 'Westernisation' threat scenario must be questioned. The operation of power and thus the dominance of the West (evident in the development aid industry as well as in the general production of cultural signs) of course cannot be neglected, but nor can we neglect the inadequacies of translation. Development does not have to imply an end of diversity but rather the constant creation of 'new' diversities.
Concluding remarks
This article has dealt with the question of culture and cultural analysis in development. It has argued that the cultural analyses evident in some alternative- and post-development texts are problematic in several ways. Rather than going beyond the Eurocentrism which they oppose, they often tend to remain within and support its logic.
This article is not an argument against the need to oppose Eurocentrism. On the contrary, one central proposition here is that contemporary cultural identities cannot be seen as situated outside the history and discourses of colonialism and Western domination. To analyse and understand these processes is of crucial importance. As Fagan (1999:188) argues, the central issue is the politics of cultural analysis, "to engage with specific cultural problematics in a way that underscores their relevance to the production of global and local divisions and hierarchies". However, what has been shown in this article is the danger in playing out a critique of modernity upon the Third World, to involve the Third World as an instance of the unspoilt pre-modernity showing the way to 'a happy future'. What is called for is a cultural analysis and a critique of Eurocentrism which recognises the hybridity of cultures, one which recognises that cultural identities are constructed within discourse and power. This means, among other things, that a critique of Western hegemony must be carried out in concert with a questioning of the very concepts of the West/Third World, modernity/tradition. A critique of concepts such as the 'West', 'Third World' or 'African' for masking 'similarities between' and 'differences within', does not, however, imply their total rejection. The struggle against Eurocentrism should thus not be put in terms of a simple choice between 'either/or': either the 'Western' or the 'African', universalism or particularism. As Munck and O'Hearn (1999) argue, the goal cannot be to develop a unified, and one might add, non-contradictory, paradigm to counteract the dominant modernisation theory and practice.
In the opening article of this special issue, Hettne and Söderbaum argue for a Global Social Theory, in which different world views are accommodated in a 'dialogical process' and where there is a genuine global cultural pluralism. What has been attempted in this article is to show that there are different versions of cultural pluralism, but certain versions tend to have problematic consequences. Moreover, notions of 'cultural dialogue' and 'pluralism' must take into account the hybridity of cultures and thus the difficulties in drawing cultural boundaries. In an increasingly 'globalised world', culture is not confined to specific territorial boundaries, nation-states etc. Cultural meanings and identities not only transcend the nation-state but also the regional and local dimensions.
October 1999
Endnotes
*: Maria Eriksson Baaz is Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Göteborg University, Sweden.Back.
Note 1: In a recent article, Preston (1999:10), though not a proponent of post-development, seems to pursue a similar argument. In directing critique against Hettne for staging the scene for European concerns, he draws the conclusion that "we cannot step outside the culture which we inhabit". As a result of this, he insists that "the outlines of a plausible development theory can only be sketched out in terms of the resources of the culture which the particular theorist inhabits". Back.
Note 2: In light of this, the strategy of mimicry does of course turn out slightly differently. It not only becomes a sign of the power of the coloniser. According to Bhabha (1994), mimicry came to destabilise the colonial discourse as the coloniser sees traces of himself in the colonised. Thus, within the differences constructed by colonial discourses, to resemble is also to threaten the basis of power and discrimination. Back.
Note 3: This is the definition of Négritude given by one of its central proponents Léopold Sédar Senghor (Serequeberhan 1994).Back.
Note 4: According to Verhelst (1990:41): "The Westernisation of certain countries seems to have been, in some fields, a purely superficial veneer. Eurocentric blindness, along with the setting up of neo-colonial elites fashioned along Western lines has meant that we have often taken for deep-rooted and widespread a process which was in fact nothing but a superficial varnish." Back.
Note 5: The idea that language is a neutral medium is, according to Bhabha (1994:36), an illusion: "meaning is never simply mimetic or transparent". Derrida's (1968) notion of différance is central to Bhabha's theorising. According to the notion of différance, words are not identical in meaning but operate by their difference from other words, creating a partial split in meaning. The central point here is that meaning is not present but absent. A full stable meaning is never arrived at, but is always deferred and postponed by the operation of différance. Back.
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