Document(s) 12 of 16

Part I Culture

Sarah White

Culture …. however important it may be as an instrument of development (or obstacle to development), cannot ultimately be reduced to a subsidiary position as a mere promoter of (or impediment to) economic growth. Culture’s role is not exhausted as a servant of ends – though in a narrower sense of the concept this is one of its roles – but is the social basis of the ends themselves. Development and the economy are part of a people’s culture.

Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (UNESCO 1995, p15, emphasis added)

From a position of relative neglect, there has been a recent explosion of attention to ‘culture’ in international development. The period 1988–1997 saw the United Nations World Decade for Cultural Development, culminating in the report of the World Commission on Culture and Development led by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (UNESCO 1995). Interest within the World Bank in the significance of culture was promoted under the presidency of James Wolfensohn, and is expressed in the collection Culture and Public Action (2004), which was edited by two of the Bank’s economists (Rao and Walton 2004) and includes a chapter by Amartya Sen. In the human development and capability approach, a similar pattern can be observed: 1995 saw the first explicit engagement with culture with the publication of Women, Culture and Development, a collection of essays edited by Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover. This was followed by the 2004 Human Development Report on cultural liberty, and a later book by Sen (2006), in part paralleling ideas in the report, entitled Identity and Violence.

The growth of interest in culture has also marked a shift in the way it has been positioned in development debates. The oppositions between tradition (or culture), on the one hand, and development, on the other, once a central preoccupation of modernization theory, while by no means absent in contemporary writings, have now been joined by a different voice. Rather than inhibiting progress, culture is now being celebrated as a resource for development. Religious institutions such as churches, mosques and temples, formerly seen to be diverting investment into ‘unproductive’ activities, are now welcomed as potential partners in development. Moreover, understanding (other) people’s cultures is seen as being critical if development effectiveness is to be enhanced (Rao and Walton 2004). While this ‘rehabilitation’ in the perception of culture is in many ways very welcome, it should not simply be taken at face value. It reflects the more general tendency within globalization to re-inscribe the value of the ‘local’. It is also part of a broader disillusionment with (and ideological opposition to) state-led development, combined with the aim of fostering more ‘participatory’ forms of development intervention. Finally one could also read against the grain of development discourse itself, observing in this new celebration of culture the shadow of a perceived threat that still needs to be neutralized. Depicted by Samuel Huntington as a ‘clash of civilizations’, embodied in street protests against globalization and in the destruction of the Twin Towers – culture has become a major site of struggle for those who wish to preserve (or challenge) the hegemony of the present international order.

The first part of this chapter explores how the relations between culture and development have been enunciated and how the human development approach has contributed to this discourse; this part concludes by offering a few principles that bear further scrutiny.

Development perspectives

Writings on international development use the notion of culture in a number of different ways. At root, the term simply means ‘cultivation’ – of land, crops, animals, bacteria. This led to: the cultivation of the mind and representation in art and literature; characterizing elite conduct and lifestyles as being ‘cultured’; and, more recently, a more democratized perspective in the current preoccupation with ‘popular culture’. Traditionally a matter for personal or national investment, this has long been an area of concern for UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), and its place has been consolidated in international policy with recent World Bank interest in supporting sites of ‘cultural heritage’, such as the walled city in Lahore or the Medina in Fez (Serageldin and Martin-Brown 1999).¹

The predominant use of ‘culture’ in development, however, tends to be more general. Talk is usually of ‘other cultures’ or ‘a people’s culture’. ‘Cross-cultural’ is often used interchangeably with ‘cross-national’. Culture thus appears as shorthand for group identity, often coterminous with a nation state, or (increasingly) language-based or ethnic groups within it. This runs counter to many theorizations of identity, which stress the multiple dimensions and scope for variation and change within and between them. Sen’s contributions to the debate press for a vigorous acknowledgement of this diversity, and are central to the advocacy of ‘cultural freedom’, which is discussed in greater detail below. This reflects in part the priority given to the individual in the human development approach (see Chapter 2). It also, however, has a political intention. (Cross)cultural generalizations serve as a fertile breeding ground for the bigotry and identity-based conflict that Sen, especially in Identity and Violence, is at pains to counter. The danger of a renewed emphasis on culture is that it be used to seal off debate, rather than open an additional point of entry into further discussion.

To use culture as an explanation is to view it as a factor whose presence or absence is responsible for development itself. The earliest example of this is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which maintained that the cultural and religious beliefs of early capitalist entrepreneurs were significant to the development of capitalism in Europe. It is noteworthy, however, that Weber saw ‘culture’ as being only one part of the explanation, which came into play only because of the presence of appropriate material factors. More recent authors have been less scrupulous, however: Samuel Huntington (2000) uses ‘culture’ to explain the developmental differences between Ghana and South Korea since the 1960s. This is strongly rejected by Sen (2004), who pointed out that differences during this period also existed in terms of class structures, politics and government, relations with major capitalist economies and levels of literacy. Such ‘cultural determinism’ (to use Sen’s term) tends to fix entire nations within certain cultural coordinates, ignoring many forms of interaction with the wider world and changes in culture over time.

Huntington’s approach echoes the dominant way in which culture has been conceived in relation to international development – as an obstacle. Modernization theories in the 1960s were built on the contrast between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, using culture as a marker of the otherness of peoples who were prevented by primordial bonds from joining the rational pursuit of progress. Psychologists demonstrated how, in the process of ‘making men [sic] modern’ cultural difference (indexed by nation) would eventually slip away (Inkeles, 1969). This form of cultural chauvinism, and the very tangible relations of power over which it was draped, continues to be a significant aspect of the development enterprise, within countries as well as between them. Stacey Leigh Pigg (1992) shows how manuals for health development workers in Nepal reproduced stereotypes by caste and class in their depiction of ‘more’ and ‘less’ developed people, for example. Such stereotypes are not always negative, of course. Since colonial times the relationship has also been seen in the reverse, with development as the threat and ‘indigenous cultures’ as endangered, needing protection if they were to retain their local values and integrity. Such images predominate, for example, in representations of contemporary clashes over the construction of dams or extractive industries in areas where indigenous people live.² Tanya Li (1996) helpfully reminds us that the cultural unity even of such communities is not merely given, but may be represented differentially depending upon the making of claims on specific resources.

Another strong trend in the development literature is to identify culture cognitively, that is, with ideas, beliefs and values. This is a step forward from the simple opposition between subjective perceptions (of individual actors?) and objective measures (of outsiders?), since it recognizes that perceptions do not belong simply to isolated individuals, but are conditioned by societal norms and expectations. Nevertheless, to use Marxist terminology, this still situates ‘culture’ at the level of superstructure, rather than seeing it as structuring society itself in more fundamental ways. A good example of this approach can be found in Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton’s introduction to Culture and Public Action (2004, p9), which was sponsored by the World Bank:

A culturally-informed perspective is thus not so much a prescription as it is a lens – a way of seeing. It sees individuals as (being) driven by a culturally-influenced set of motives, incentives, beliefs and identities that interact with economic incentives to affect outcomes.... We believe that incorporating this lens into more conventional economic ways of understanding will, in many situations, lead to more effective policy.

This approach has much to recommend it over the simplistic notion that beliefs and values are somehow fixed or given for any nation or social group as a whole. Instead, culture is viewed more flexibly, as a prism that offers people particular ways of seeing the world. However, the move is not perhaps as welcome as it might at first appear. Seeing culture as a ‘lens’ does not undermine the ‘analytic primacy of the rational, value-maximizing individual’ (Good, 1994, p39, after Sahlins, 1976), which is so foundational to Western economic thought. Individuals and the economic incentives to which they respond remain, it would seem, outside culture, and even motives, beliefs and identities are only ‘influenced’ by them. Similarly, the confidence that such a lens might be ‘incorporated’ within existing approaches suggests that there is no need for a fundamental shift in existing institutions of international development. This rationale for taking culture into account is in fact highly reminiscent of arguments for increasing people’s participation in development projects: the more people are involved, the more effective projects are likely to be. As many critics have pointed out, however, instituting participation in public projects does not necessarily signal any real shift in power relations. It may simply neutralize and de-politicize potential threats (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Selznick, 1949; White, 1996). If a ‘cultural lens’ is to be used to enhance policy effectiveness, this leaves the bigger question open: who owns the policy or the development intervention?

Anthropological perspectives

In contrast to this ‘bird’s eye view’ of culture and development, anthropological debates on culture take us, as one might expect, somewhat closer to people’s lives and to their everyday social practice. In his discussion on ‘the capacity to aspire’, Arjun Appadurai discusses how development ‘needs’ are always grounded in culture. Aspirations, he claims, ‘form parts of wider ethical and metaphysical ideas which derive from larger cultural norms’ (Appadurai, 2004, pp67–68).

Appadurai identifies three levels that ground people’s aspirations in culture. The first and most immediate level consists of a ‘visible inventory of wants’. These contain the specific wants and choices for this piece of land or that marriage partner that people consciously identify and seek to pursue. It is this level that commonly appears – though usually in a rather more generalized way – when people are asked to itemize their goals or needs by development agents. At the next level are the ‘intermediate norms’, which may not be explicitly expressed but nevertheless structure specific wants through local ideas about marriage, family, work, virtue, health and so on. These in turn relate to ‘higher order normative contexts’, which comprise a larger ‘map’ of ideas and beliefs concerning such matters as life and death, the value of material goods versus social relationships, this world and other worlds, peace and conflict, etc. ‘Culture’ is thus not something separable from everyday life, but instead structures material and relational desires through a cascade of associations that make them meaningful and even, at times, pressing and urgent.

The relationship between culture and materiality in human welfare is discussed at length by Marshall Sahlins in his Culture and Practical Reason (1976). For Sahlins, the construction of meaning is the key distinguishing characteristic of humankind. It is not that materiality does not matter, he argues, but that social and cultural life are in fact shaped by ‘nature’ and the economy rather than the other way around: ‘No society can live on miracles... None can fail to provide for the biological continuity of the population in determining it culturally. . . Yet men do not merely “survive”. They survive in a definite way’ (Sahlins, 1976, p168).

That ‘definite way’ – the aspiration, as Appadurai might put it – not just for shelter but for a particular kind of house, not just for calories but for a particular kind of food, is mediated by culture. The material and cultural are thus not separable, such that one can separate ‘objective reality’ from ‘cultural values’, but are in fact inextricably linked:

It is not that the material forces and constraints are left out of account, or that they have no real effects on the cultural order. It is that the nature of the effects cannot be read from the nature of the forces, for the material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The very form of social existence of material force is determined by its integration in the cultural system. (Sahlins, 1976, pp205–206)

As an example, he offers the fact that, in the US, dogs are considered inedible, unlike cattle, which is considered to be ‘food’ (1976, p169). The fondness for beef in the North American diet has major material outcomes, in terms of prices of meat, land use, agricultural subsidies, health issues and so on, with effects that tend to ricochet around the world. But the basis for choosing cattle over dog meat – the root cause of all these different effects – is neither ‘nature’ nor ‘utility’ but culture.

Veena Das (2000) explores how culture and agency interact at the individual level. She describes how a Punjabi woman, named Asha, responds to the disasters that the partition of India and Pakistan wrought on her family life. She shows the practical work that Asha conducts in building a sense of self and a life worth living out of a context of violence and subjugation, ‘not through an ascent into transcendence but through a descent into the everyday’ (2000, p208). Culture, in this reading, can be deeply imbued with power: the overall cultural terms that have defined Asha’s identity were patriarchal ones, and even in pursuing the relationships that were important to her (with her dead husband’s sister and her son), she had to adopt a patriarchal idiom. At the same time, Das stresses how Asha did not allow her life to be simply defined by the power of patriarchy, but actively worked instead to achieve a positive way of being in the world. This involved careful repair work over many years of damaged relations with her first husband’s family, guided by her love for key individuals and the way in which she saw her relationships as being fixed in the long term. The meaning of this was inscribed by culture, since she saw in her first marriage the connections that she would carry into eternity. But the settled cultural world to which these meanings belonged was smashed by the disaster of Partition and the fracturing of family relations that followed. Critically, therefore, this cultural meaning and these relations were also re-claimed by her, and re-inhabited as a long act of witnessing to the hurt she had suffered through them. The cultural ‘work’ that she took on was transformative – not sweet and easy, but hard and painful – not simply an inflection of goals, but rather a lived experience achieved through a lifetime of struggle.

Building on Das’s approach, it may be useful to consider culture not so much as a lens but a form of ‘work’. The idea of ‘the work of culture’ was first proposed by Obeyesekere (1990). Writing at the boundary between psychoanalysis and anthropology, he saw the ‘work of culture’ as the process whereby the deep and often darkly painful sides of human existence rooted in the unconscious could be symbolically transformed into publicly shared meanings and imagery. In terms of development, approaching culture as a form of work has four main advantages: first, it sees people as agents of culture, who use the resources culture has given them and reproduce or transform them through their actions. In addition to bringing culture to the ground, this emphasizes its flexibility and capacity to change over time. Second, it recognizes that culture is at once material and symbolic. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977) has recognized in the notion of ‘habitus’, it is expressed in how we hold our bodies, how we decorate our houses, how we bring up our children – all parts of life, not limited to ideas, values or meaning. Third, it puts power into the picture. The work of culture, like other kinds of work, is clearly conditioned by broader social and cultural structures of class and patriarchy. As Roger Keesing remarks, criticizing the widely used and somewhat idealist formulation of culture by Clifford Geertz: ‘Cultures do not simply constitute webs of significance, systems of meaning that orient humans to one another and their world. They constitute ideologies, disguising human political and economic realities... Cultures are webs of mystification as well as significance’ (Keesing, 1987, p161). Finally, viewing culture as a form of work recognizes that it is not free-floating, but is shaped by the specific institutional context in which each encounter takes place. ‘Culture’ can thus be seen to be affected as much by institutional setting – legal, therapeutic or educational – as by national or religious contexts (e.g. Spencer, 1997).

Taking culture seriously means analysing it always in the context of social structure and political economy. Without due attention to material resources and the power relations that govern them, a focus on ‘culture’ could obscure as much as it enlightens. For those not driven by ideology, simple declarations about ‘culture’ as a homogenous entity shared by large collectivities of people are no longer available. Appadurai (2004, p61) helpfully summarizes the current points of consensus on culture in anthropology: relationality – cultural meaning lies in the relationship between different elements, rather than inhering intrinsically within a particular item considered in isolation; dissensus – culture is non-unitary, subject to considerable internal negotiation and dispute; and leakiness – the boundaries of culture are highly porous, such that flows, borrowings and interactions across borders are the norm rather than the exception.

Does this complexity suggest that culture is no longer a useful analytic category? Attractive though such an option might appear to be, it does not do justice to much that can be gleaned from cultural readings. But, just as explanations of ‘culture’ make no sense in the absence of an awareness of the social structures and political economy that inform them, cultural analysis cannot be done in abstract terms. While class, gender, ethnicity, disability and age may be common axes of differential advantage, they do not always and everywhere mean the same things. This links back to Sahlins’s statement above – that people do not only survive but do so ‘in a particular way’. But it also goes beyond this because the making of social difference is not simply coloured by culture: culture, in fact, lies at the heart of social difference. The current enthusiasm for cultural celebration in development circles notwithstanding, it should be noted that the creation of differing value, the affirmation of some and the debasement of others are absolutely central to the work of culture itself. As Sahlins (1976, p102) puts it: ‘the creation of meaning is the distinguishing and constituting quality of men – the “human essence” of an older discourse – such that by processes of differential valuation and signification, relations among men, as well as between themselves and nature, are organized.’

Human development perspectives

Three significant ‘moments’ are noteworthy in the human development approach to culture. The first, in 1991, discusses culture but does not explicitly acknowledge it: this is Sen’s analysis of the ‘cooperative conflicts’ involved in intra-household bargaining in India. The second is the edited collection on women and culture noted above, in which Martha Nussbaum has a prominent voice. The third is the 2004 Human Development Report on ‘cultural liberty’ and Sen’s (2004) linked paper in the Culture and Public Action volume, also mentioned above.

Cooperative conflicts

In ‘cooperative conflicts’, Sen (1991) builds on the work of feminist scholars on intra-household divisions to propose a model for gender-based bargaining at the household level. Here he notes that there is a contrast between women’s real interests as individuals and their perceptions that they should put their families first – a theme that permeates his work on adaptive preferences (see Chapter 2). Perceptions cannot be taken, he argues, as real indicators of well-being, which are given by a person’s capabilities. Subjective perceptions of utility, in contrast, ‘can be moulded by social conditioning and a resigned acceptance of misfortune’ (Sen, 1991, p133). Perceptions are significant, however, because they affect the bargaining positions of the parties in terms of how they perceive their interests and how they perceive their relative contributions. ‘Perception biases unfavourable to women’ (1991, p137) combined with a sexual division of labour that strongly favours men leads to a worse breakdown position for women (i.e. what would happen if the marriage were to fail) and thus a significantly weakened voice in intra-household conflicts.

While culture is not mentioned here, it is clearly lurking behind discussions of ‘perception’. The approach is straightforward: the perception is wrong (ideological, though this is not Sen’s language) and an individual-based capability approach would yield the ‘true’ (or ‘truer’) picture. The paper by Das (2000) discussed above might caution us to seek a rather more nuanced analysis, in which women do not simply accept what is given but work with (and on) it to achieve the aims they have reason to value. It is also important to recognize that men’s understanding of their interests is equally socially constructed, and should be subjected to similar analytic scrutiny in terms of whether or not it reflects their ‘true’ well-being. Following Das, this might open the question of whether the pursuit of individual advantage is the whole story in assessing well-being. However, Sen’s analysis is valuable in introducing into an economics-dominated discourse the social construction of ‘preferences,’ firmly placing power asymmetries at the centre of analytic thinking.

Culture in Nussbaum’s capabilities approach

Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach takes a broader, philosophical approach, which is ‘frankly universalist and “essentialist”’ (Nussbaum 2000, p63). Her attention focuses on women in developing countries and her starting point is that culture itself is a problem. As Nussbaum and Glover state on the first page of Women, Culture and Development: ‘Cultural traditions pose obstacles to women’s health and flourishing’. And, even more strongly, they continue on page 3: ‘Customs, in short, are important causes of women’s misery and death’.

The primary response to culture is thus conceived in moral terms, and concerns ‘the relationship between culture and justice’ (Nussbaum and Glover 1995, p6), especially as a riposte to cultural relativists who appear to value cultural continuity above human life chances. Nussbaum takes as her starting point the (pre-cultural) human being and ‘the capacities and needs that join all humans, across barriers of gender and class and race and nation’ (Nussbaum, 2000, p61). Her project is then to define the set of functionings that are essential for a human life, and to identify a further threshold, beyond which that life may be said to be ‘good’. She sets out a list of central human capabilities to construct a universal measure against which to assess the lives of women in developing countries ‘who are currently being deprived of their full “human development”’, and to launch claims for justice on their behalf (see Chapter 2).

A fundamental problem with this is discussed in Chapter 2: the objection, by Sen and others, that such lists are inherently problematic because they are far from universal and represent a very particular point of view. Still, they can serve as a basis for dialogue about what constitutes a ‘good life’. This draws attention to the list’s particular cultural assumptions and values (rather than denying them) in a way that has opened them up to further debate. Nussbaum’s approach is somewhat different. She deliberately makes the list general, allowing ‘for the possibility of multiple specifications of each of the components’ (2000, p93). In theory, then, there is considerable scope for accommodating cultural difference. In practice, however, there may be relatively little room for manoeuvre. For example, as a liberal feminist, she rejects the possibility of gender-differentiated norms in functionings, even though all human societies and virtually all species have some distinction of function on the basis of gender. This suggests that the range of cultural forms she would deem acceptable as a means to express these capabilities could be rather limited.

A further concern is with the politics of the thresholds themselves. Nussbaum’s ‘minimum’ threshold of functioning, below which a life is not seen as a human life, seems to open rather wider questions than are necessary to address the ethical questions that she raises concerning severe disability and the beginning and end of life. The politics of the second threshold are even more problematic, as it appears to say that a whole set of people – in practice the vast majority of the global population – are not living ‘a good human life’. Without glorifying struggle or minimizing hardship, it is essential to recognize that people often achieve meaningful, valuable lives under even the most difficult circumstances. One cannot read off the quality of a life lived simply on the basis of the constraints people face – or indeed the apparent advantages they enjoy.

This relates to a third point: the politics of agency. One of the foundational criticisms of cultural imperialism in colonialism and in development as a whole concerns its codification of agency and subjectivity. This deploys a series of binary tropes to specify the subjects and objects of agency: the ‘developed’ and the ‘underdeveloped’; those who do and those who need development; those who ‘give’ and those who ‘receive’. Work on the ‘status of women’ since colonial times has offered a paradigmatic instance of this, with its highly coloured imagery of downtrodden women needing the salvific intervention of colonial powers to protect them from male oppression (Shehabuddin 2008). While this is far from Nussbaum’s intention, the morally-charged generalizations she makes raise uncomfortable resonances of this. The positioning of subject and object is brought into focus by her invocation of two impoverished women from India and Bangladesh, whose stories she narrates, but who have no opportunity to respond with their own respective points of view.

In sum, then, we would agree with Susan Wolf, the discussant of Nussbaum’s chapter in Women, Culture and Development, that her capabilities approach could be tempered with considerably more modesty and openness to other points of view. It is equally important to note that all available options are not exhausted by the two modes offered by Nussbaum: the cultural relativism of ‘anything goes’ so long as the ‘local culture’ endorses it; and universalist essentialism – both advocated, incidentally, by empowered external observers of ‘other’ lives. Rather, as the discussion above suggests, culture (at ‘home’ as well as ‘abroad’) is a primary bearer of power, which always needs to be analysed critically for its implications on political economy. Also, insiders are typically much more adept agents than many stereotypes allow us to see.

Cultural freedom

The 2004 Human Development Report asserts the importance of culture as a serious part of life and entitlements, the denial of which leads to ‘significant deprivations’ (p13). With its emphasis on ‘freedom in cultural spheres’, the report is a blast of liberalism in a field in which group rights have predominated over individual rights and concerns for cultural conservation over advocacy for change. As the report states, ‘cultural liberty is an important aspect of human freedom, central to the capability of people to live as they would like and to have the opportunity to choose from the options they have – or can have’ (p13). The fundamentals of a particular vision of the human development approach are thus re-stated: secular states are apparently the most likely to expand human freedom and human rights, and to recognize democracy.

The report is very clear that the recognition of culture derives from, but is ultimately of secondary importance to, the ultimate value of freedom. As the overview observes, cultural liberty is about defending individual choices, not about preserving values or tradition as an end in itself. Cultural liberty is about ‘being able to choose one’s identity – who one is – without losing the respect of others or being excluded from other choices ...’ (UNDP, 2004, p10).

Much of this is familiar from the ‘cultural rights’ enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights: the right to nationality (article 15); to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (article 18); to participate freely in community cultural life (article 27); and duties to the community, including to respect the rights and freedoms of others. What is distinctive is the overwhelming emphasis on choice and the individual, and the tendency to elide ‘culture’ with ‘lifestyle’. This needs to be subjected to far more critical discussion. While the power relations of cultural conservatism do gain some recognition, there is no general examination of ‘individual choice’ (and, for example, its implication in global marketing) in the way that Sen cautioned against taking ‘subjective preferences’ in intra-household bargaining on their own terms.

There is partial recognition of the materiality of culture, in discussions of its impact on poverty and in leading to the relative deprivation of being unable to participate in social life in accordance with local norms (UNDP, 2004, p14). The language of exclusion also links it to the social and political. Cultural exclusion is said to take two forms: ‘participation exclusion’ – discrimination in education, employment, politics, etc; and ‘living mode exclusion’, which ‘denies recognition of a lifestyle that a group chooses to have’ (ibid.).

As mentioned above, the report’s analysis of ‘culture’ owes much to recent theorizing of identity. It usefully draws attention to the multiplicity of identities that any individual has, thereby contesting approaches that apply a single label to an entire national, ethnic, cultural or religious group:

Typically, each individual can identify with many different groups. A person may have an identity of citizenship (for example, being French), gender (being a woman), race (being of Chinese origin), regional ancestry (having come from Thailand), language (being fluent in Thai, Chinese and English, in addition to French), politics (having left-wing views), religion (being a Buddhist), profession (being a lawyer), location (being a resident of Paris), sports-affiliation (being a badminton player and a golf fanatic), musical taste (loving jazz and hip-hop), literary preference (enjoying detective stories), food habits (being a vegetarian) and so on. (UNDP, 2004, p17)

The problem with this list is that it mixes up the socially significant (class, gender, ethnicity) with the trivial (liking badminton or hip-hop). This takes away from the serious points it could potentially make. The report admits that the choices are limited – you cannot choose to be a Sumo wrestler if you are not one – but goes on: ‘Within the range of the memberships that you actually have, you can choose what priority to give to one membership or another, in a particular context’ (UNDP, 2004, p17).

In reality, however, there are some aspects of our identity – such as, for most of us, gender, age, ethnicity and perhaps class – which we cannot change. We may be able to choose how we represent them by how we dress, use makeup, style our hair, etc., but we do not, crucially, have power over how others read them, and how they act towards us as a result. While, for privileged people in particular, these basic identifiers may not appear to be of particular importance much of the time, when caught on the wrong side of town at the wrong time of day, they can suddenly become all that you are seen to be. Even in ordinary times, as West and Fenstermaker (1995) argue in their paper ‘Doing difference’, women may be treated equally but are always ‘at the risk of’ a gender assessment, just as people of colour are always ‘at the risk of’ racial assessment. These basic forms of social difference may affect the way that you play badminton or how your choice of music is perceived, but they operate at a very different level, and should not be equated with such contingent preferences. The critical issues concern freedom from discrimination or victimization and the right to respect and equality of opportunity, regardless of one’s gender, age, sexuality, disability or racial/ethnic/religious community. And while this affects the life chances of individuals, it cannot simply be analysed at an individual level.

Other parts of the report are more useful. Recognition of the plural histories of tolerance and democracy is an important ballast against Eurocentric views. The discussion of multicultural institutions is valuable, although it would be good to see more discussion of the Indian experience of caste reservation, and the ways in which policies to address disadvantage can often end up re-enforcing the very identities they recognize. However, as the closing statement of the overview makes clear, the main thrust of the report is a robust assertion of liberalism: ‘Individuals have to shed rigid identities if they are to become part of diverse societies and uphold cosmopolitan values of tolerance and respect for human rights’(UNDP, 2004, p23).

In closing, it may be helpful to reflect upon Inga-Britt Krause’s (1998, p2) description of how, when beginning psychotherapy with clients from different cultural backgrounds, there is a common experience of paradox. At first, there is an easy personal connection, but then this is followed by a gulf of unknowing. It is perhaps this sense of unknowing that development academics and practitioners need to rediscover. Rather than thinking of the culture of others as a lens, it may be equally useful to become more aware of how ‘our’ higher order, intermediate norms, positions within social structure and political economy, institutional cultures, disciplinary persuasions and professional techniques themselves act as lenses, condition us and, in turn, pre-shape our understanding of other lives.

Questions

11.1 How, as a development worker, would you respond to a context in which most men claim that it is inappropriate for them to share household tasks with women?

11.2 Is the human development and capability approach, with its focus on freedom, a culturally embedded approach to development?

11.3 How do you see globalization as reducing and/or emphasizing cultural difference?

Notes

¹ See the topic of ‘Cultural Heritage in Sustainable Development’ under the heading ‘Urban Development’ in the ‘Topics’ section of the World Bank website at www.worldbank.org.

² See for example www.survival-international.org.

Readings

Appadurai, A. (2004) ‘The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition’, in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds) Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (eds) (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny?, Macmillan, London

Das, V. (2000) ‘The act of witnessing: Violence, poisonous knowledge, and subjectivity’, in V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele and P. Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity, University of California Press, Berkeley

Good, B. J. (1994) Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Huntington, S. P. (2000) ‘Foreword: Cultures count’, in L. E. Harrison and S. P. Huntington (eds) Culture matters: How values shape human progress, Basic Books, New York

Inkeles, A. (1969) ‘Making men modern: On the causes and consequences of individual change in six developing countries’, American Journal of Sociology, vol 75, no 2, pp208–225

Krauss, I. B. (1998) Therapy Across Culture, Sage, London

Leigh Pigg, S. (1992) ‘Inventing social categories through place: Social representations and development in Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol 34, no 3, pp491–521

Li, T. Murray (1996) ‘Images of community: Discourse and strategy in property relations’, Development and Change, vol 27, no 3, pp501–528

Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Nussbaum, M. and Glover, J. (eds) (1995) Women, Culture and Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Obeyesekere, G. (1990) The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds) (2004), Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA; see also www.cultureandpublicaction.org/

Sahlins, M. (1976) Culture and Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Selznick, P. (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organisation, University of California Press, Berkeley

Sen, A. K. (1991) ‘Gender and co-operative conflicts’, in I. Tinker (ed.) Persistent Inequalities, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Sen, A. K. (2004) ‘How does culture matter’ in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds), Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA

Sen, A. (2006) Identity and Violence, W. Norton, New York

Seralgeldin, I. and Martin-Brown, J. (1999) Culture in Sustainable Development: Investing in Cultural and Natural Endowments, The World Bank, Washington, DC

Shehabuddin, E. (2008) Reshaping the Holy. Democracy, Development and Muslim Women in Bangladesh, Columbia University Press, New York

UNDP (2004) Human Development Report: Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World, UNDP, New York; available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/

UNESCO (1995) Our Creative Diversity, Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development, UNESCO, Paris

UNESCO (2000) World Culture Report, UNICEF, Paris

West, C. and Fenstermaker, S. (1995) ‘Doing difference’, Gender and Society, vol 9, no 1, pp8–37

White, S. C. (1996) ‘Depoliticising development: The uses and abuses of participation’, Development in Practice, vol 6, no 1, pp6–15

Further Readings

Cooper, F. and Randall, P. (eds) (1997) International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, Berkeley

Crush, J. (ed.) (1995) Power of Development, Routledge, London

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, Basic Books, New York

Hall, S. and du Gay, P. (eds) (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage, London

Keesing, R. (1987) ‘Anthropology as interpretive quest’, Current Anthropology, vol 28, no 2, pp161–168

Kuper, A. (1999), Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. (eds) (1990) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, Clarendon Press, Oxford

Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. (1996) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Clarendon Press, Oxford

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2005) ‘The Human Development Report and cultural liberty: Tough liberalism’, Development and Change, vol 36, no 6, pp1267–1273

Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A. K. (1989) ‘Internal criticism and Indian rationalist traditions’, in M. Krausz (ed.) Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN

Schech, S. and Haggis, J. (2002) Culture and Development, Blackwell, Oxford

Spencer, J. (1997) ‘Fatima and the enchanted toffees: An essay on contingency, narrative and therapy’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 3, no 4, pp693–710

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