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Review of Countering Development: Indigenous

Modernity and the Moral Imagination by David D. Gow.
Duke University Press, 320 p....

Article · November 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2011.01171.x

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Page 356 PoLAR: Vol. 34, No. 2

study is not for the beginning student, nor for the disengaged. As Nelson reminds
us in the last pages: “We can’t settle for postwar inaction. The global stakes are too
great.” (2009:324) Following Pink Freud, there is no place for becoming comfortably
numb; read (and act) with courage.
After finishing Reckoning, I swiveled in my office chair to look at the ticket stub
taped to my file cabinet from a screening of Last Year in Marienbad, Alain Resnais’
hauntingly gorgeous 1961 film. It is renowned for its ambiguous flashbacks and
disorienting shifts, as well as for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which much is
open to question. Viewers are left feeling uncertain, unsure and deeply unsettled. Did
it happen? If it did, what happened and how did it happen? The ticket stub is my visual
reminder: this is what disorientation, unsettling and uncertainty feels like. Plus, it is
my way of “fixing” a fact: I really did see it, in 2008, at the Film Forum. Like the
film, Reckoning will develop a cult of ardent fans, and there will be those who prefer
their postwar analysis differently. Love it or not, it is hauntingly beautiful, raising
provocative questions, analytic complexities, and fascinating interconnections. It
convincingly captures what it means to question assumptions, to challenge what we
know, as it shows us some of the myriad ways that Gautemalans make sense of
violence, loss, and the future.

Mark Goodale
George Mason University

Countering Development: Indigenous Modernity and the

Moral Imagination
David D. Gow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)

David Gow’s much anticipated new book is a welcome addition to the anthropology
of development and social movements, to the study of indigenous mobilization and
identity, and to the anthropology of moral knowledge and identity in Latin America.
It is also an essential study of local political, social, and economic processes dur-
ing a period of wider neoliberal consolidation in the now iconic region of Cauca,
Colombia.
Gow’s study “counters development” in at least two important ways. First, the
book is an ethnographic response to the legacy of the now well established
critique of developmentalism within anthropology that was marked by James
Ferguson’s study of development in Lesotho (1994) and Arturo Escobar’s (1995)
critical history of the postwar development project itself. In this sense, Gow does
not counter development so much as counter, or reply to, the anthropological cri-
tique of development. Although the book’s greatest contribution comes from the
rich ethnographic accounts of local mobilization and the appropriation of the ma-
chineries and imaginaries of development, Gow is clear that much of the criti-
cal development literature is unduly distant from the practices of development.
November 2011 Page 357

By contrast, Gows suggests the possibility of “other ways” of doing develop-

ment, ways that are deployed and managed by the very subjects who for Es-
cobar, for example, are mere objects of a wider global discourse of control and
dependency.
And second, Gow’s book is a reply to another body of literature that is not necessarily
critical of development as such, but of the fact that development projects directed
by international institutions and their national counterparts privilege nonlocal actors
and frameworks and therefore impede the pursuit of local politics as a response to
structural inequalities. Gow rejects the implied dichotomy in this second strand of
critique of development, in which the top down imposition by the actors of post-
war benevolence is counterposed to the mobilizations of local actors committed to
what Gow describes as “unrealistic radical transformation” (p. 17). Rather, Gow’s
multiyear study, which perhaps not coincidently began in the year that Escobar’s
own Encountering Development was published (1995), offers a true longitudinal por-
trait of the life of development that problematizes even the most well-intentioned
critiques.
More specifically, Gow’s study focuses on three resettled Nasa communties that
emerged in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Cauca in part through the direct
involvement of the Nasa Kiwe Corporation (CNK), a new governmental agency that
was created to address the numerous social, economic, and environmental conse-
quences of the natural disaster. In one of the book’s most fascinating and far-reaching
ethnographic findings, Gow describes how indigenous Nasa did not fight the govern-
ment’s plans for resettlement; indeed quite the opposite. They struggled actively to
“take advantage of the window of opportunity offered by the disaster. .. to improve
their lives,” which, many realized, had been characterized by “centuries of isolation
and extreme poverty” (p. 79).
Gow quotes from one community leader, who explained this desire to move as a
form of local development: “Means of transportation—don’t even think about it.
We did not have means of communication. Let’s say we are in a half-developed
indigenous zone. It needs a lot to be developed, but you get things by struggling”
(pp. 79–80).
Perhaps the most important theoretical contribution of Countering Development
comes in the book’s middle chapters, which examine the ways in which the ubiquitous
discourses of technocratic planning, capacity building, and community workshops
have become essential mechanisms of “alternative development” in Cauca. Through
a series of detailed ethnographic and historical accounts of the rise of these tech-
nocracies of alternative development, Gow argues that the local institutionalization
of planning and work shopping around various problems has become for indigenous
peoples in the resettled areas of Cauca a kind of subversive intentionality through
which the seemingly mundane procedures of development have reinforced in new
and empowering ways local communities and have given them new means for ar-
ticulating demands and desires. In the end, Gow makes a fairly convincing case
for seeing the subversive intentionality of alternative development as a new kind of
citizenship.
Page 358 PoLAR: Vol. 34, No. 2

References Cited

Escobar, Arturo
1995 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James
1994 The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Anne S. Lewinson
Berry College

Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany

Gisa Weszkalnys (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010)

Through the case study of a symbolically-laden square in East Berlin (Alexander-

platz), Weszkalnys illuminates the multifaceted intersections of neo-liberal ideology,
urban planning, citizenship, individual identity, and history. Berlin, Alexanderplatz
effectively gives insight into the political meanings, debates, and processes of renovat-
ing urban spaces in postsocialist societies. This plaza has had enduring significance
since the early 20th century: a post–World-War I monument to state power, it went
through rebuilding after World War II to become a visual symbol of the socialist
German Democratic Republic. Weszkalnys describes how East Germans and other
residents of Berlin perceived Alexanderplatz as tumbling into decay over the 1990s
(after German reunification in 1989), and she explores how plans to revitalize the
square developed, using perspectives ranging from media portrayals to government
planners to groups of citizens. As sources of data, Weszkalnys draws on participation-
observation on the square, analysis of media debates, and interviews with activists,
youth social workers, and long-time residents of the area. Rather than simply view-
ing the 1990s’ planning process as inscribing neoliberal free-market, “democratic”
(individual voice centered) ideologies into the cityscape or enacting resistance from
East German citizens to the erasure of their history and values, she demonstrates that
the social reality cannot be reduced to a simple “global ideology wins” or “individual
agency wins.”
This volume contributes significantly to the now well established body of literature
analyzing urban places, and it does so by viewing a specific plaza ethnographically.
The range in her analysis underpins one strength of the book, namely the ability to
move between broad system-level theoretical perspectives; urban planners’ sketches
of proposed buildings; citizens’ experiences of the objects, people, and events around
them; and individuals’ midrange theoretical interpretations of those experiences. For
example, as she argues that the planned renovation of Alexanderplatz erased the GDR
era from Berlin’s built environment, the evidence includes summaries of the prevailing

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