International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge PDF
Preview International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge
Page i International Development and the Social Sciences Page ii Sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Page iii International Development and the Social Sciences Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge Edited by Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard Page iv University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1997 by the Regents of the University of California Part of this book has been published previously in somewhat different form. Chapter 7: Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, chapter 4 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). © 1996 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher. Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Cooper, Frederick, 1947– International development and the social sciences : essays on the history and politics of knowledge / Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0520209567 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0520209575 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Economic development—Research. 2. Developing countries— Economic conditions—Research. 3. Social sciences—Research. I. Packard, Randall M., 1945 . II. Title. HD77.C66 1997 338.9'0072—dc21 9726697 CIP Manufactured in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984. Page v CONTENTS Preface vii List of Contributors xi Introduction 1 Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard Part One the End of Empire and the Development Framework 1. Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India's 45 Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective Sugata Bose 2. Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development 64 Concept Frederick Cooper 3. Visions of Postwar Health and Development and Their Impact on Public 93 Health Interventions in the Developing World Randall Packard Part Two Intellectual Communities and Connections 4. Intellectual Openings and Policy Closures: Disequilibria in Contemporary 119 Development Economics Michael R. Carter 5. Anthropology and Its Evil Twin: "Development" in the Constitution of a 150 Discipline James Ferguson Page vi 6. Population Science, Private Foundations, and Development Aid: The 176 Transformation of Demographic Knowledge in the United States, 1945–1965 John Sharpless Part Three Ideas and Development Institutions 7. Redefining Development at the World Bank 203 Martha Finnemore 8. Development Ideas in Latin America: Paradigm Shift and the Economic 228 Commission for Latin America Kathryn Sikkink Part Four Development Language and Its Appropriations 9. "Found in Most Traditional Societies": Traditional Medical Practitioners 259 between Culture and Development Stacy Leigh Pigg 10. Senegalese Development: From Mass Mobilization to Technocratic Elitism 291 Mamadou Diouf 11. Agrarian Populism in the Development of a Modern Nation (India) 320 Akhil Gupta Index 345 Page vii PREFACE This book, as much as the institutions which are its subject, comes out of a particular history, a certain intellectual climate, and specific funding possibilities. It consists of papers selected and revised from a considerably larger number presented to a series of three workshops held between December 1993 and October 1994 at Emory University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. The idea behind these workshops first came under discussion in 1987 when its two editors were members of the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. As Africanists, we were concerned that a powerful apparatus of social scientific inquiry was being turned toward Africans—their histories, their cultures, their literatures, their politics—without a comparable examination of the investigatory apparatus itself, or indeed of those institutions of the western world which impinged directly and indirectly on Africans' lives. Our concerns were certainly shared by other scholars, particularly in anthropology and literature; Valentin Mudimbe's book The Invention of Africa (1988) was notable around this time as much for its probing examination by an African philosopher of the ways in which Europeans created their own Africas as for its assertions that Africans might have their own Africas. But it was far from clear that this concern was a general one in the social sciences, least of all in those parts of the field most concerned with change. The development concept, our own historical studies were suggesting, was at the heart of the conceptual apparatus with which American and European social scientists and policymakers since the 1940s had come to grips with Africa's place in the world and their own concerns with changing that place. What was most striking about these concepts—as distinct Page viii from those which governed Europe's relation to Africa in the previous century or more—was the appeal they had to many Africans, most notably those struggling to find an alternative vision of the future to that set out by colonial rulers. Equally striking was the extent to which development constructs started with an imagined future and a repudiated past rather than a carefully spelled out analysis of the present. We felt that the concepts themselves—and the historical and political context which shaped them—deserved further examination. From the start, we were concerned that such an examination should not be limited to Africa. In some ways, Africa represents the quintessential object of a very particular approach to development, one focused on the project, on the target population, whereas regions that had decolonized earlier in Latin America and Asia had a different conception of change and their own role in it. Yet by the 1960s, which the United Nations proclaimed the Development Decade, the idea of being a developing country or a part of the third world was being seized by a quite varied array of national leaders and radical dissidents to assert leadership and make claims on the rest of the world. Our efforts to make this project more inclusive soon ran up against the limits of our own knowledge and connections, but the Social Science Research Council and numerous colleagues were extremely helpful in bringing in people with a variety of regional specialties, different disciplinary affiliations, and different points of view. There ensued a series of planning sessions interspersed with discussions within the Joint Committee about how to define the project; there was far from a uniformity of viewpoints. In the end, the present editors—with a great deal of help—put together a proposal for an internal Social Science Research Council funding competition that was successful and allowed a more extensive meeting (crossdisciplinary and crossarea) held at Berkeley in 1992. We are particularly grateful to Michael Watts for his role in hosting this session. Besides some enlightening discussions of the basic issues, there emerged proposals for organizing a coherent set of workshops and considerable discussion of what kind of work was being done, and—a point that emerged throughout the process—how little actually was known about development institutions. This plan called for six workshops divided into two sections, one—whose result is the present volume—focused on Development Knowledge and the Social Sciences, and the second on Development Encounters. The idea was to move from an historical, sociological, intellectual, and political analysis of the institutions that constituted the development apparatus toward a closer examination of the dynamics of interaction that occurred on the sites of development activities. A successful application was made to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the first series, and we are very grateful to the Page ix Endowment for its generous support, as well as to the staff of the Social Science Research Council, which administered the grant and provided the logistic support for the three workshops. The staffs of Emory University, especially the Institute for African Studies; the University of Michigan, notably its International Institute; and the University of California, Berkeley, particularly its International Center; generously provided time, material, and logistic assistance, as well as supplemental funding. The second series of workshops—shortened to two and put together by Frederick Cooper and Pauline Peters of Harvard University—was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and hosted by the Harvard Institute of International Development. The first of these workshops took place in October 1995, the second in May 1996. A special word of thanks to Tom Lodge and Priscilla Stone, the staff associates for the Africa Committee during the period of gestation and birth of this project; to Michael Watts who hosted the October 1994 workshop as well as the earlier planning meeting and who came to all three workshops; and to Priscilla Stone, James Ferguson, and Thomas Biersteker, who (along with the editors) gave the series continuity by participating in all three workshops and in planning decisions. At each of the three host universities, faculty commentators were enlisted to add a variety of perspectives to the workshops, and we learned much from these efforts to frame issues and point to problems that needed to be pondered. The editors would like to thank not only the authors of the papers in this volume for their efforts, but all participants in the workshops, paper givers, and commentators, whose intellectual contribution to the endeavor was considerable. We have tried at some points in the introduction to indicate the range of material covered in the workshop papers and some of the points emphasized in discussion. For careful criticism of earlier drafts of the introduction, we would like to thank Sara Berry, Sugata Bose, James Ferguson, Martha Finnemore, Akhil Gupta, and Michael Watts. This has been a collective endeavor, characterized by much constructive criticism and contributions of different perspectives, and it is our hope that the present book will encourage others to push the inquiry well beyond where we have gone.
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