In analysing power, knowledge and the discourse of development it was shown that “the extension to the third world of western disciplinary and normalising mechanisms… and the production of discourses by western countries about the third world” is a means of effecting domination over it (Escobar 1984/85:377; also see Crush 1995b:xiii, Peet 1997:75). To elaborate, certain critiques of development drew on ideas explored by Foucault whereby he illustrated how the state exerts power through the process of normalisation (Foucault 1980). Normalisation is the process through which groups or individuals are ordered and labelled in keeping with “bureaucratically imposed categories that privilege or punish according to certain standards and rationale” (Connelly et al. 2000:23). The subjective nature of these standards is hidden so that they appear ‘normal’ and self-evident. Thus, for example, once a group, people or a nation is labelled ‘traditional’ everything about them appears to be less rational and less relevant compared to that of the so-called ‘modern’ group, people or nation (Connelly et al. 2000:23).
Development had become “a tool of western hegemony… a system of domination imposing western thinking and discourses about how the world should be” (Maiava 2002:1; also see Bell 2002:507-08, McEwan 2001, Sangari and Vaid 1989, Simon 2006, Willis 2005:29). While development projects were being carried out in specific locations, Escobar argued the “vision of development to be international and universalising” (cited in Pigg 1992:492). In many instances colonial hierarchies were perpetuated rather than changed (Parpart 1995b:253). “Orientalism is, in other
words, inscribed in development history and development practice” (Watts 1995:53; Briggs and Sharp 2004:663, Escobar 1995b:213)31.
It was shown that “Knowledge is power, but power is also knowledge” because power determines what is knowledge and what is not (Alvares 1992:230; also see Gardner and Lewis 1996, 2000). An example of this was noted in Chapter One, when the World Bank (cited in Briggs and Sharp 2004:667) talks of determining what indigenous knowledge will be useful to them and argues that indigenous knowledge must be seen as complementary to the development process, rather than leading the way and perhaps transforming this process. The powerful discourse of normative development decides what is and is not ‘useful’ and places indigenous knowledges in opposition to Western knowledges. Development agencies and so-called ‘experts’ who impose Western categories and technical knowledge can displace local knowledge and expertise (Connelly et al. 2000:23), notably, because of the way that they attempt to order the world.
Foucault (1970:xviii) argued language maintains order in the world. This occurs because of the ways in which “syntax causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to hold together” (Foucault 1970:xviii). By this Foucault (1970) means how people in seeking to make sense of the world look to how things in the world are related or not related. Thus things get categorised according to similarities and differences, the world becomes divided by a system of binaries. In particular, and as mentioned above, the binary of normal (self-evident) and not normal (other) occurs.
31 Influenced by the works of Derrida and Foucault, Edwards Said’s (1978) book on ‘Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient’ is an early example of post-colonial analyses which can be applied to development. Said, in illustrating how the Orient was constructed by the West, not as geographical region but as an area of the imagination, explored how the West constructs the peoples of the East as backward and uncivilised, justifying political and economic intervention, such as colonial rule: “Orientalism is a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage – even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (Said 1978:3). While Said argued the Orient to be a creation of the West, based on a combination of images formed through scholarly and imaginative works (Tuhiwai Smith 1999:25), he also claimed that these constructions which rendered people of the East as ‘other’ and different, not only gave them a particular identity but also influenced the identity of those in the West (Said 1978). Post-colonialism also draws on dependency theories with their focus on uneven power relations and its aims also tend to overlap with populist and participatory approaches such as those discussed by Chambers (1983) (McEwan 2001:94).
Western philosophy has habitually placed huge weight on oppositional binaries, for example, inside/outside, pure/impure, good/bad, presence/absence, true/false, unity/diversity, or man/woman (Parpart and Marchand 1995:3). Rather than seeing these pairs as being a natural and normal process, Derrida argued they are constructed, and whilst presenting these pairs as neutral and descriptive, Western thinking had in fact placed “one of these terms as primary or privileged, and the other as secondary, or deprived or inferior or parasitic with respect to it” (Outhwaite and Bottommore 1993:140). In the case of this thesis some examples are, Western/Third World, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, Western women/Third World women or MHHs/FHHs, and of particular concern is the way in which the ‘lesser’ of the pair is seen to be frozen in a static past. Thus, oppositional binaries generally imply a neatly bounded coalescing of identities, meaning that identities are not recognised as having the ability to be fluid, in that they can shift and change as determined by space and time (Malam 2005).
However, it is not possible for things to be so black and white, to be either/or: “We shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and which includes them all” (Foucault 1970:xvii). It is therefore fundamental that attention is paid to what is in between, what is present in the “empty space, the interstitial blanks”(Foucault 1970:xvi), meaning it is important that consideration is given to not only what isstated but what is not stated, that is, what is inside and outside of language (Foucault 1970).
In light of the discussion above, Western nations have utilised a variety of practices to impose modernisation and exert control over the Third World (Connelly et al. 2000:23). Research agendas and methodological approaches are primarily determined by Western institutions, development is dictated from the outside (Gegeo 1998:289) – terms, labels, ideas and perspectives are produced (Chant 1997a:5). As mentioned above, imposed Western categories can displace local knowledge and expertise.
Language is what justifies development, language is fundamental to the way we prescribe, understand, intervene and defend interventions of development, with writings about development producing and reproducing misrepresentation which are
acted upon (McEwan 2001:96; see also Escobar 1984/85, 1988, 1995a, 1995b, Saunders 2002)32.
Crush (1995a) and Escobar (1984/85) have argued that as an area of study and practice, one of the basic impulses of those who write and practice development is a desire to bring order to a heterogeneous and constantly multiplying field. There is a preference for the way in which categories of things can be counted. Mainstream development:
favours views of society as an aggregate of autonomous rational individuals. This has led to an understanding of inequality as primarily about measurable differences or disparity between these categories of individuals as measured by the observer, rather than as experienced by the actor (Eyben 2005:1).
This quote from my field research exemplifies this point:
The powerful apparatus of development and its spin-doctors have turned us into categories…made us part of some grand plan or dream. We are things to be identified and quantified. It is fairly clear that one man’s dream has become another woman’s nightmare (Maria: Business woman, Nov 2001).
Conventional understandings and practices of development have not only produced multiple categories and labels, but they have also taken on board all of the opinions and beliefs that come with many of those labels, notwithstanding the fact that development for the most part creates most of these opinions and beliefs (Shrestha 1995, Simon 2006:11). Chant (2003c) discusses this as constructions having ‘gone global’, noting that many scholars, especially feminists from the South, have acknowledged the inherent problems that lie with this “extrapolation of terminology and concepts across space and time” (p.9). Regardless, these assumptions become stereotypes; they become orthodoxy. Labels thus reflect power relations, as will now be discussed in more detail.