Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World

Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development : the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. Goal: That the essential trait of the Third World was its poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-evident, necessary, and universal truths. This chapter analyzes the multiple processes that made possible this particular historical event. (24) Method: Escobar uses an historical approach to understand the origins, development, and effects of the discourse of development. Main Argument: 1) Development conceives social life as a technical problem to be entrusted to development professionals, 2) the development discourse is a real historical formation articulated around an artificial construct, 3) development is a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated peoples and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down charts of progress (44).

y early post-World War II discovery of poverty - war on poverty - The discourse of war was displaced onto the social domain and to a new geographical terrain: the Third World. (21). y relationship between capitalism, a rupture of community ties, and poverty: Whatever these traditional ways might have been, and without idealizing them, it is true that massive poverty in the modern sense appeared only when the spread of the market economy broke down community ties and deprived millions of people from access to land, water, and other resources. With the consolidation of capitalism, systemic pauperization became inevitable. (22) y the poor became the assisted : The transformation of the poor into the assisted had profound consequences. This modernization of poverty signified not only the rupture of vernacular relations but also the setting in place of new mechanisms of control. (22) y the poor became objects of knowledge management: More perhaps than on industrial and technological might, the nascent order of capitalism and modernity relied on a politics of poverty the aim of which was not only to create consumers but to transform society by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management. (23) y the social : The result was a panoply of interventions that accounted for the creation of a domain that several researchers have termed the social. As a domain of knowledge and intervention, the social became prominent in the nineteenth century, culminating in the twentieth century in the consolidation of the welfare state and the ensemble of techniques encompassed under the rubric of social work. (23) y history of modernity = history of the social: The government of the social took on a status that, as the conceptualization of the economy, was soon taken for granted. A separate class of the poor (Williams 1973, 104) was created. Yet the most significant aspect of this phenomenon was the setting into place of apparatuses of knowledge and power that took it upon themselves to optimize life by producing it under modern, scientific conditions. The history of modernity, in this way, is not only the history of knowledge and the economy, it is also, more revealingly, the history of the social. (23) y ...the globalization of poverty entailed by the construction of two-thirds of the world as poor after 1945. (23) y This economic conception of poverty found an ideal yardstick in the annual per capita income. (23)

y the narrative of three worlds: It was and is a narrative in which culture, race, gender, nation, and class are deeply and inextricably intertwined. The political and economic order coded by the tale of three worlds and development rests on a traffic of meanings that mapped new domains of being and understanding, the same domains that are increasingly being challenged and displaced by people in the Third World today. (24) y Salvation: In this representation, salvation entails the conviction that there is one right way, namely, development; only through development will Colombia become an inspiring example for the rest of the underdeveloped world.... Fortunately, adequate tools (science, technology, planning, and international organizations) have already been created for such a task.... these tools are neutral, desirable, and universally applicable. (26) y o The infantilization of the Third World was integral to development as a secular theory of salvation. (30) y ...this development strategy became a powerful instrument for normalizing the world. (26)

y the interwar period: ...the ground was prepared for the institution of development as a strategy to remake the colonial world and restructure the relations between colonies and metropoles. (26) y y y 1920-1950 - overlap of colonial and developmentalist regimes of representation (27) Woodrow Wilson - intervention + goal of promoting republican democracies (28) 1912-1932 - US goal to have ideological hegemony in addition to military and economic (28)

y medicalization of political gaze : State interventionism became more noticeable, even if within a general model of economic liberalism, as an increase in production began to be seen as the necessary route to social progress. This awareness was accompanied by a medicalization of the political gaze, to the extent that the popular classes began to be perceived not in racial terms, as until recently, but as diseased, underfed, uneducated, and physiologically weak masses, thus calling for unprecedented social action. (30) y notions of underdevelopment and Third World = discursive products post-1945

y factors shaping development discourse: anticolonial struggles, nationalism, cold war, need to find new markets, fear of communism and overpopulation, faith in science and technology (32) y 1944-1955 - rise of US hegemony in world capitalist system (32)

y Marshall Plan 1948 - attention to rescuing Europe that was markedly different from the kind of treatment given to the Third World (33) y role of Cold War and fear of communism in development discourse (34)

y the population problem : ...the discourses on population were being redeployed within the scientific realm provided by demography, public health, and population biology. (35) y Technology: ...technology was theorized as a sort of moral force that would operate by creating an ethics of innovation, yield, and result. Technology thus contributed to the planetary extension of modernist ideals. The concept of the transfer of technology in time would become an important component of development projects. (36)

y production of knowledge, scientific basis, tree of research transplanted from North to South, The new objectivity ensured accuracy and fairness of representation. (37) y y 1950s, 1960s - stages of economic growth theories (38) Discourse: ...the process through which social reality comes into being... (39)

y elements of development theory: process of capital formation, technology, population and resources, monetary and fiscal policies, industrialization and agricultural development, commerce and trade, education, need to foster modern cultural values, need to create adequate institutions for carrying out complex tasks such as IMF and World Bank and national planning agencies (40) y Development...was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements...it was rather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations to form a whole.... To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies; it determines what can be thought and said. (40) y system of relations: ...the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game; who can speak, from what point of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory, or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into a policy or a plan. (41) y development discourse: The development discourse defined a perceptual field structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry and registration of problems, and forms of intervention; in short, it brought into existence a space defined not so much by the ensemble of objects with which it dealt but by a set of relations and a discursive practice that systematically produced interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and the like. (42) y development discourses formative elements - class, gender, race, nationality (43)

y The most important exclusion, however, was and continues to be what development was supposed to be all about: people. Development was - and continues to be for the most part - a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of progress. Development was conceived not as a cultural process...but instead as a system of more or less universally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some badly needed goods to a target population. (44) y development as historical construct: To speak of development as a historical construct requires an analysis of the mechanisms through which it becomes an active, real force. These mechanisms are structured by forms of knowledge and power and can be studied in terms of processes of institutionalization and professionalization. (45) y development as a network of power (46)

y understanding of the problem ...in terms of national limits, topography, physical space, and social reproduction, calling for solutions such as improved management, new technologies, and population control. (47) y the trope of the village (48)

coming up as miraculous transformation (50)

y The forms of power that have appeared act not so much by repression but by normalization; not by ignorance but by controlled knowledge; not by humanitarian concern but by the bureaucratization of social action. (53)