Culture and Development

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Culture and Development

• Lecture One

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Course Outline

• Eight weeks of lectures
• Seminars
• Readings (reading pack)
• Assessment
• Learning outcomes
• Attendance

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WEEK ONE

• Introduction to Culture and Development
• Relation between two terms/concepts
• CULTURE and DEVELOPMENT have a history how
  we understand these terms is framed by our own
  history and our own (culturally informed) values
  and ideas about the world.
• BUT also want to think about the way other
  cultures engage with development.

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WEEK TWO

• Development and the Idea of Progress
• Intellectual heritage of development
• Max Weber
• Cultural conditions that facilitate development
  or take off
• Clifford Geertz, Peddlars and Princes.

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WEEK THREE

• NGO Cultures and Cultures of Consultancy
• What (cultural) ideas inform the way development
  consultants work?
• Why are we so attracted to the idea of NGOs is
  it justified?

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WEEK FOUR

• Actors and Brokers at the Development Interface
• Think about development as an arena in which
  different actors with a range of cultural
  backgrounds meet
• What does this tell us?
• Is it useful?
• Case of Costa Rican coffee cooperatives and their
  involvement with Fair Trade

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WEEK FIVE

• Human Rights and Moral Issues
• Different ways of seeing the world
• Can the idea of universal human rights be
  defended?
• On what grounds can this be done?

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WEEK SIX

• Gender and Development
• Issues around representation of women
• Questions of cultural relativism (on what basis
  do we make judgements about other cultures is it
  justified?)
• Case of Muslim women

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WEEK SEVEN

• Knowledge, the Environment and Sustainable
  Development
• How can we gain purchase on the idea of
  sustainable development?
• What can academics (anthropologists) contribute?
• Case Studies Africa and Central America

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WEEK EIGHT

• Development and Cultural Politics
• Role of cultural politics in development what
  is cultural politics, how does it work?
• Contributions of Appadurai and Escobar

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Introduction to Culture and Development

• What is the history (genealogy) of the concept of
  culture?
• What kind of meanings does it carry?
• Why is it so complex?
• What is the relation between the culture concept
  and ideas about development?

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DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGEWhy does change happen?

• Human intentions
• Planned change (project implementation)

• Escape from human intentions
• Unintended consequences
• Contradictions

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Culture

• one of the two or three most complicated words in
  the English language (Raymond Williams, Keywords,
  1976)
• a concept-metaphor (catachresis)

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CULTURECULTIVATION

• derives from nature Latin root colere, means to
  cultivate (crops, animals, and the mind)
• Horticulture
• Agriculture
• manurance of the mind (Francis Bacon)

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Three meanings of the term Culture

• Culture as the ideal
• Culture as romantic critique of modernity
• Culture as different ways of life

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Culture as the ideal

• the best that has been thought and
  said in the world
• (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy 1869)

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Inner qualities

• art
• music
• books
• Cultivation of the self/mind
• Class inflections Civility
• To be cultured

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Culture as quality
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Social Ideals

• Civilisation
• Cultivation of society
• Improvement

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Culture as progress
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The Enlightenment

• workings of human society are subject to natural
  laws that can be discovered by scientific enquiry
• society can be moulded for individual and
  collective benefit

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Culture as the Critique of Modernity
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Romanticism/Expressivism

• Rejects mechanical rationality, and
  materialism.
• In its place puts sentiments, expression,
  beauty, quality etc.

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OUTCOMES

• Criticism, or critique of the idea of universal
  progress
• acceptance of different ways of life as equally
  valid and rational (questioning of universalism)

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Culture as different ways of life

• Diversity of human groups
• relativism
• Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)

• Focus on meaning, often with a focus on language
• structuralists
• anthropology as an interpretive quest
• Clifford Geertz and thick description

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Culture and Development

• Culture as shared, common meanings and values
  implies people inhabit a world with
• 1) clear boundaries
• 2) static, unchanging
• 3) traditional
• From one perspective culture then becomes a
  barrier to progress
• From another perspective culture provides grounds
  to criticise modernity progress

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SUMMARY

• Culture is a term or a concept that has a
  history, but no precise meaning that everyone
  agrees on
• Three meanings
• Improvement and human perfectibility
• Criticism of progress
• Different ways of life as valid on their own
  terms