The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 1444-2213 (Print) 1740-9314 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtap20

Culture, Development, and Social Theory: On

Cultural Studies and the Place of Culture in
Development

John Clammer

To cite this article: John Clammer (2005) Culture, Development, and Social Theory: On Cultural
Studies and the Place of Culture in Development, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 6:2,
100-119, DOI: 10.1080/14442210500168218

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442210500168218

Published online: 15 Aug 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 838

View related articles

Citing articles: 6 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtap20

Download by: [University of the Philippines Diliman] Date: 13 March 2017, At: 23:26
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
Vol. 6, No. 2, August 2005, pp. 100 /119

Culture, Development, and Social

Theory: On Cultural Studies and the
Place of Culture in Development
John Clammer

Debates in development theory have recently swung back to taking seriously the
relationship of culture to development, especially in the face of manifest failures of
conventional approaches to economic growth and social transformation. This has
happened at a moment when, especially within anthropology, the concept of culture itself
is undergoing critical examination, and when cultural studies has emerged as a major
challenge to anthropology’s self-defined specialisation in the social-scientific analysis of
culture. Few attempts have been made, however, to relate cultural studies and
development studies, despite the fact that the relatively recent ‘cultural turn’ in the
social sciences has derived largely from the currently fashionable status of cultural studies
and its multidisciplinary nature. This paper explores this relationship and suggests that a
cultural studies approach, despite its weaknesses, potentially revitalises the significance of
culture in relationship to development.

Keywords: Development; Culture; Cultural Studies; Participation; Subjectivities;

Philosophical Anthropology

Mark J. Smith has recently argued that changes in the meaning of the term ‘culture’
signify important shifts in the broader ways that we analyse society (Smith 2000). The
weight given (or not given) to such themes as psychology, psychoanalysis, identity,
textuality, ethnicity, gender, or the body reveal paradigmatic or even hegemonic
understandings of macroscopic social processes (and hence of political and economic
ones too). This is as true in the field of development studies as it is elsewhere, and the
recent rediscovery of ‘culture and development’ as an approach to, or even sub-field

John Clammer is Professor of Comparative Sociology & Asian Studies in the Department of Comparative
Culture at Sophia University. Correspondence to: Professor John Clammer, Department of Comparative
Culture, Sophia University, 4 Yonban-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0081, Japan. Tel:
/81 3 3238 4000. Fax:
/81
3 3238 4076. Email: m-clamme@sophia.ac.jp.

ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online) # 2005 The Australian National University
DOI: 10.1080/14442210500168218
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 101

within, development studies (for example, Schech & Haggis 2000) signifies such a
shift.
As a response and reaction to the overwhelming economism of so much
development discourse this is probably a healthy innovation, but it is nevertheless
one that requires careful examination and even deconstruction en route to a nuanced
consideration of what culture contributes to or even displaces within conventional
development discourses. Simply ‘adding culture’ will advance constructive debate
very little if it is not recognized that the ‘cultural turn’ in development studies is
taking place at the very time when the concept of culture itself is becoming
increasingly problematised, especially within anthropology (Fox & King 2002) and, as
with the notion of ‘multiculturalism’, also politicised. The debate itself in any case is
not simply an academic one. For, however useful and necessary the attempts to
deconstruct the notion of ‘development’ itself are (for example, Sachs 1995), the
objective problems to which it refers* poverty, gross social inequalities, extensive
/

violation of human rights, hyper-urbanisation and the highly unequal distribution of

the benefits of technological and productive advances* remain and intensify, while
/

new focuses of debate, sustainability, participation, governance, and civil society, to

name just four of the current most prominent ones, have emerged. Conceptual
debates spill over (or should do) into social practice, and the repositioning of culture
in relation to broader development discourse has implications* implications that we
/

must seek to uncover even as we attempt to clarify what it is that we understand by

‘culture’ and to expose the scholarly and ideological baggage with which it is
freighted.

Locating Culture
We are all aware of the common perception of there being a widespread crisis in or of
‘development’ as a practice, and certainly in development theory. In practice, the
‘great development failures’ (Scott 1998, p. 37)* and their environmental con-
/

sequences* have brought the whole project of growth, poverty alleviation, and the
/

spread of universally higher standards of social justice and democratisation into

question. In theory, the ‘impasse’ in development thinking (Schuurman 1996) has left
what, given the magnitude and human centrality of the issues that it addresses,
should be the most imaginative and creative area of social thought, trapped within a
narrow range of conventional options (classical Marxist, neo-Marxist, or neo-liberal),
very weak on alternatives or visionary thinking and still mired in the economism
deplored in principle by its more sociological exponents. Not surprisingly, there are
more than a few voices calling for the abandonment of the term ‘development’
altogether, arguing with some justification that it represents simply the latest phase of
colonialism, but this time wrapped up in more user-friendly terms such as
‘globalisation’.
But, even if we do abandon the term ‘development’, the problems to which it
traditionally refers* poverty, war, displacement of peoples, pollution, and the
/
102 J. Clammer

systemic and systematic injustices to which a huge proportion of the population of

the globe are subject* will not miraculously disappear with it. For want of a better
/

term* the alternatives such as ‘human security’ never quite having caught on* we
/ /

need not abandon the notion of development, so much as to attempt to redefine it

radically, to create a new lexicon for talking about and witnessing the inequalities and
distortions of the contemporary world order and of most, if not all, of the individual
societies that comprise it. And there are of course those who have attempted to do
this* by way of anti-corporatism (Korten 1999; Starr 2000) or its variants (Theobald
/

1999), varieties of basic needs and sustainability theories, a range of eco-socialist,

mixed economy and technological liberationism models (Frankel 1987), social
movements and civil society possibilities, and through movements based in religion
(Engaged Buddhism, Latin American liberation theology, or intriguing recent
attempts to define Islamic alternatives (for example Jomo 1993)). It might even be
argued that much of what passes for postmodernist thought, although usually anti-
foundational and apolitical, actually represents a contemporary variety of utopian
thinking.
Common to all of these approaches is a central concern with culture. Not only is
development seen as (rightly) as much a political process and a politically contested
terrain as it is an economic one, but also development is viewed as pre-eminently a
social and cultural process. It is one that is based upon, transforms, or destroys
cultures, both as a whole and as represented in the elements that anthropologists
often identify as characteristic of culture* values, systems of belief, material artefacts,
/

expressive, and performative practices, modes of livelihood, kinship patterns and

strategies, and so forth. What they all recommend is to put culture back into the
analysis of social change and into the analysis of stubborn development problems
such as why poverty apparently will not go away despite the resources and variety of
policy options devoted to its eradication, not only as a theoretical move, but with the
very practical intention of suggesting solutions.
But much of this we already knew. It was inherent in the older ‘social change’
paradigm in sociology associated among other things with modernisation theory as
the flavour of choice in the 1950s and 1960s, which, with all its functionalist
overtones, was aware of the role of culture (the peasant ‘resistance to change’
arguments of the time reflecting exactly this approach). So simply to relocate ‘culture’
within contemporary development debate, while in many ways a positive move, is not
in itself enough, for two main reasons. Especially in the context of the modernisation
paradigm, ‘culture’ was often the explanation of last resort, not a central or integral
primary factor in the understanding of human behaviour. Second, without an
accurate and critical understanding of culture itself as something much more than
simply the residue of other (primarily economic) explanations, no great advance
towards a deepening understanding of development problems along cultural/
sociological lines is going to be made. Indeed without this step, the reinsertion of
culture into development debate could even prove to be counterproductive, only
confirming in the eyes of those who self-identify themselves as being members of the
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 103

‘hard’ development sciences (especially economics, management, and policy

sciences), the fuzziness and indeterminacy of a cultural approach and the validity
of the exclusion from the core of development debate and policy of the cultural
sciences* anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It consequently behoves the
/

practitioners of these disciplines to clarify exactly what it is that they propose to

contribute, and to this we will now turn.
It was suggested above that the central paradox of ‘culture and development’
debates is that culture is being reintroduced into development discourses at exactly
the time when the concept of culture itself is being problematised. Older notions of
culture of the kind that can be found in any ‘introduction to anthropology’ textbook
of the 1960s to the 1980s* of culture as a ‘system’: a functionalist whole, and one
/

largely essentialised, with the map of the world being divided into discrete ‘cultures’
(echoes of which are still evident in such positions as Huntington’s ‘clash of
civilizations’ thesis)* have now largely been displaced by views that understand
/

culture as process rather than system, as fragmented rather than holistic, and as
negotiated and constructed rather than a ‘given’ transmitted through unproblematic
processes of socialisation and acculturation (Friedman 1996). The so-called ‘cultural
turn’ in the social sciences, within which the ‘culture and development’ move can
presumably be located, has recentred culture at the time when, under poststructur-
alist and postmodernist pressure, concepts themselves are being decentred and
relativised. Culture in these intellectual and political circumstances may indeed be
given back its central place (assuming that is, that its previous displacement has left
an impoverished and diminished, and practically inadequate, notion of development
occupying the high ground), provided that we are operating with a clear under-
standing of what culture can now be considered to be, and how it articulates with
other analytical levels of social conceptualisation. This again assumes that all levels of
social analysis* the cultural, social, economic, political, and psychological* are
/ /

intellectual constructs that divide up what is actually a whole, a totality made up in

reality of the intersection of all these elements.

The Meanings of Culture

Culture, I would suggest as a starting point, is a reflexive concept. Except as a totally
abstract category its definition is always contingent upon its historical location,
contemporary understandings of the relationships between culture and nature, the
politics of the moment, the uses within social theory to which it is being put (one
might compare T. S. Eliot’s use of the term ‘culture’ with the definitions being
proffered in anthropology textbooks of the immediate post-war years or, for that
matter, with that of his contemporary, Raymond Williams), and its own inherently
grounded nature. Japanese understandings of culture, for example, assume a
relational model in which the person (and hence concepts of the self and of the
body) can be understood only as nodes in a network of forces (often over-crudely
referred to by commentators as ‘the group’) and never as atomistic individuals. This
104 J. Clammer

places Japanese conceptions of culture (or rather lived practice of culture since it is
rarely conceptualised in any abstract way given its concrete expression as the
experiential outcome of organised interactions), much closer to those of India or to
Melanesia than it does to the West (Clammer 1995; Roland 1991). Given then that
‘culture’ is itself a cultural concept, it is, I think, possible to map a number of
contemporary approaches to it. In general these can be divided into the following
categories.
1. The idea of culture as process. This has a number of exponents, among whom
might be included Jonathan Friedman with his notion of culture as a complex
negotiation of identity now irretrievably embedded in globalisation and linked
also with consumption as the dominating cultural form of late capitalist society
(Friedman 1996). Likewise Arjun Appadurai who also locates contemporary
understandings of culture in the context of globalisation and the flows and
hybridities that characterise that culture, locates it too in relation to modernity,
localities in which global cultures are reproduced and modified, and ideas of scale
and spatiality (Appadurai 1996). Mike Featherstone elaborates on the ideas of the
‘decentred’ nature of contemporary culture, the significance of ‘travelling cultures’
and of the syncretisms and trans-social processes that now form our experience of
culture* at least in the rich First World societies to which he refers (Featherstone
/

1997) and which he understands as ‘postmodern’.

2. The rediscovery or recovery of ‘indigenous knowledge’. The ‘crisis of representa-
tion’ in anthropology has led to a ‘crisis of relevance’, and I suspect that it is largely
in response to this that anthropologists, especially those working in the
development field, have begun to search for ways in which their discipline can
be applied without it simply becoming a tool of mainstream development
planners. One solution to this has been to emphasise anthropology’s ability,
through the participatory application of the ethnographic method, to assist
empowerment at the local level by acting as a midwife to the recovery by
indigenous people themselves of the richness of their knowledge systems and of
the potential application of these to the solution of development problems
(Sillitoe 1998). While this is not the only approach taken by anthropologists who
wish to rethink the somewhat problematic relationship of anthropology to
development (for example, Gardner & Lewis 1996), it is important because it
relativises knowledge in a significant political sense* by making the knowledge
/

(read ‘culture’) of the developed as valid as the knowledge of the developers

(Sillitoe et al. 2002).
3. Culture and political economy. Conventional development thinking has of course
separated the economic from the cultural, hence the reaction marked by the
‘culture and development’ debate. However, as economic anthropologists have
long been aware, not only is the economy embedded in culture, but it is itself
culture* a system of values, evaluations, processes of production, consumption,
/

and exchange, and of social arrangements predicated upon particular patterns of

 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 105

organising these processes* something that I, among others, have been arguing
/

for years (Clammer 1985). The growing critiques of neo-liberal economics as a

failed system both theoretically and in practice have fuelled this approach once
again, which I foresee as rapidly gaining new currency, especially as it intersects so
directly with critiques of economic globalisation.

These perspectives have an interesting relationship to the emerging literature in

what might already be called mainstream culture and development discourse. The
older literature here (for example, Dove 1988) took a relatively unproblematic
approach to culture, understanding it essentially from an older anthropological
perspective and then asking how it ‘modified’ or even interfered with development
programmes being largely imposed from the outside* a kind of pre-indigenous
/

knowledge approach. Later moves have gone primarily in one of two directions. One
is towards, again rather unproblematically, ‘bringing culture and development
together’ without seriously problematising the concept of culture itself, but instead
largely replacing it with a vocabulary of globalisation, feminism, human rights, and
nation constructing (Schech & Haggis 2000) while hiding behind the label of the
‘critical’. Another is in the direction of taking a more everyday definition of culture* /

as literature, theatre, art, and so forth* and then examining how autonomous forms
/

of such enterprises might be developed and how such development might transform
political cultures and understandings of economic embeddedness by decolonising the
minds and expanding the creation and ownership of knowledge on the part of the
indigenes. Such approaches (Carmen 1996), while they have close connections to
older community development styles, are even more closely linked to ideas of
participatory development, not as an adjunct to interventions from the outside, but
as the source of renewing the ‘soil of cultures’ from which true autonomy grows
(Esteva & Prakash 1998). The interface here becomes increasingly one with alternative
or even ‘post-development’ movements rather than with simply harnessing culture to
the locomotive of conventional interventionist modes (Munck & O’Hearn 1999).
While this discussion is far from exhaustive (nor could it ever be given the diverse,
culturally rooted, and ever-evolving nature of understandings of culture), two things
stand out. The first is that much of the most interesting debate is coming out of
cultural studies not out of anthropology, the social science that used to consider itself
the specialist discipline for the study of culture. In fact, given this commonality of
interest, in both the concept of culture itself and its expressions, anthropology and
cultural studies are increasingly talking to each other, and cultural studies is
beginning to escape from its self-imposed Western captivity (Chen 1998; the new
journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ironically published in London). But so far
cultural studies and development studies have hardly spoken to each other. To
explore the potentialities of this interface when and if they do is an important task,
and one which will be outlined here. The second is that the concept of culture being
utilised in culture and development debates, for all that it is beginning to borrow
from sophisticated debates in wider social theory, is still in my estimation inadequate
106 J. Clammer

to a full grasp of the depth of the cultural issues involved in what are in fact the deeply
existential problems disguised by the term ‘development’. If Amartya Sen has argued
that ‘development is freedom’* that is returning the power to make autonomous
/

decisions to those who are effected by them (Sen 1999)* I am here going to argue
/

that ‘development is meaning’, a notion that I will shortly deal with in detail.
From a development studies perspective* when confronted daily with the realities
/

of poverty, inequality, and massive violations of human rights* a great deal of

/

cultural studies work appears narcissistic, focused on issues of popular culture such as
body building and beauty contests, game shows, and comics among other things
(Scott & Morgan 1993), on ‘lifestyle politics’ rather than on emancipatory politics,
and with a preoccupation with a peculiarly Western vision of the self and its ego-
centric and Eurocentric needs, in particular the emotions and sexuality. And to a
large degree these criticisms are correct, but not entirely so, since the preoccupations
of cultural studies do illuminate what are actually very central aspects of the human
experience, but which have been occluded by the overly sociological and external
methodologies of approaches to society that have neglected the phenomenology of
everyday life (the interesting exceptions, apart from North American ethnometho-
dology, being largely French* for example, Lefebvre 1971; de Certeau 1984). In fact,
/

issues such as the emotions, the body, and conceptions of the self are central to
‘development’ and indeed in a sense constitute it, something apparent when we have
the perspective to see these elements (or their exclusion) in the failure of so many
development policies, in the rise of civil society organisations and social movements
as contestors of the meaning of development, and even in the shift of such anti-
humanitarian organisations as the World Bank to a language of participation and
values in its recent annual World Development Reports. All discourses have their
silences, but, in the case of development theory, we are at last able at least to identify
some of the most glaring ones, and hopefully to begin to fill them with some more
satisfactory harmonies.
These silences are in part revealed by the movements that have taken place around
the edges of development studies and which provide an implicit critique of its
absences* a growing concern with the ‘politics of meaning’ (Lerner 1996), with the
/

recentring of values (Clammer 1996; Fekete 1987), with the moral dimensions of
social movements (Jaspers 1997), with a revived study of ethics in sociology and
anthropology (Smart 1999; Howell 1997; Etzioni 1988), with trenchant critiques of
modernity (the very phase of history and mode of thought of which development is a
reflection and expression) in the works of such sociologists as Zygmunt Bauman
(1995, 1999), and with the whole large area of post-colonial studies. It would be
much too simplistic to equate these movements with just a reaction to the
economism of most conventional development studies: they also represent a reaction
to or even rejection of modernity and constitute individually and collectively
attempts to redefine development along what are implicitly cultural lines* as /

attempts to define the good life, the desirable form of society and the mechanisms for
achieving it. And this is to leave aside utopian and futurist forms of thinking, New
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 107

Age and new religious movements initiatives and what Jan Nederveen Pieterse calls
‘alternative development’ and ‘post-development’ movements, most of which also
place cultural concerns and notions of human fulfilment in a more holistic sense at
their core (Nederveen Pieterse 2001).
Nederveen Pieterse in fact places ideas of culture so centrally in his arguments
about the nature of development theory that it is worth turning briefly to his thesis.
His synoptic view of current development thinking begins by seeing the prioritising
of culture (the ‘culture and development’ approach) as providing one of the main
foundations for alternative or critical approaches to development (Nederveen Pieterse
2001, p. xi). But, to do this adequately, a workable concept of culture must be
deployed. This has several elements* locating culture within the context of
/

globalisation, and understanding that it is hybrid, historically layered, contains

internal diversities, and has both temporal and spatial dimensions (ibid. pp.1, 70). In
Nederveen Pieterse’s view, the importance of the culture and development movement
is that it prioritises agency over structure, and hence draws attention to enablement
and choices, to the strategies and resistances that Pierre Bourdieu (1979) understands
as being the voluntarist nature of culture itself. ‘Participation’ in such a view
becomes, not just a new methodology in development thinking for getting things
done more efficiently, but the essence of a cultural approach to development. People
always ‘participate’ in their own lives; what is significant is their mode of
incorporation into the possible forms of autonomous (or otherwise) decision-
making and individual and communal empowerment, something that sociologists
who have privileged the status of ‘everyday life’ have long known (de Certeau, for
example). Such an approach has both practical and theoretical implications. At the
level of practice it means that in any discussion of civil society culture is one of the
inevitable components (Nederveen Pieterse 2001, p. 10), and at the level of theory the
broad turn in the social sciences towards constructivism, hermeneutics, semiotics,
discourse analysis, and agency apply as much to the study of development discourses
as they do to any other level of cultural production (ibid., pp. 11, 28). ‘Development’
then does not float above or outside discourse: it is a specific language game that, like,
say, theological language, has attempted to define its specific discursive strategies as
privileged, while in fact being as much subject to deconstruction as any other world
view.
Given this, how is ‘culture’ to be reinserted into ‘development’? Here Nederveen
Pieterse has a number of pertinent points to make, including the observation that, for
any effective progress to be made in the culture and development debate, it must be
recognised that culture is ‘an arena of struggle’ (p. 60, emphasis in original). It is not,
that is to say, simply some abstract category, neutral in its political and ethical
implications. Culture has and will be used in the pursuit of nationalist goals (Kusno
2000) and, even in the context of cultural studies, in the construction of civilisational
agendas, and not only of the Huntington variety (Nandy 1998). The uses of culture in
post-colonial discourse too are not innocent, often embodying not only nationalism,
but myths of uniqueness and new forms of ethnocentrism, and at worst a narrow
108 J. Clammer

localism in which appeals to tribalism and ‘tradition’ are disguised under the idiom of
‘indigenisation’. If I am reading Nederveen Pieterse correctly, he is arguing that only a
critical understanding of culture is informative in relation to development thinking.
A notion of culture that fulfils this primary condition becomes immensely enabling as
it potentially provides the basis for alternative understandings of development, not
least because it problematises the idea of development itself by introducing the often
unasked question of the goal of development, places development discourse beyond
both ethnocentrism (the localist/indigenising Scylla) and Eurocentrism (the uni-
versalising Charybdis), and it enables the relativising and reflexive advances in
development anthropology, in particular the turn to the study of indigenous
knowledges, to be incorporated significantly into mainstream development thinking.
It is not then just a question of ‘add culture and stir’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2001, p. 68),
in much the same way that feminist arguments have pointed out the fallacy of just
‘add gender and stir’: what is at stake is the much more fundamental move of
reproblematising the very notion of development from the perspective of the values
and practices embodied in human cultures and life worlds, the holistic decolonisation
of which (to modify Habermas’s celebrated phrase) becomes the objective of
development (or socio-cultural transformation, if you prefer). In the course of
this, many elements of culture itself might have to be rejected, rethought, and
renegotiated. If development is freedom, as Sen suggests, or, better still, if it is
understood as meaning, then alternative understandings of development are crucial:
what we have is not delivering this result.

Cultural Studies and Development Theory

The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has thus emerged not only from
anthropology, despite the claims of that discipline to be the ‘specialist’ in cultural
analysis. Much of the contemporary discussion of culture has shifted from
anthropology to the newer discipline of cultural studies, at the moment when
culture itself has begun to interrogate anthropology on its colonial past, its modes of
representation of the ‘Other’, and its recent appropriation of the field of ‘indigenous
knowledge’ as one of its special areas of expertise. With the dilution or expansion of
the space or identity of cultural specialists* people who do not necessarily create
/

culture, but spend their time studying what others have created (those whom
Featherstone characterises as cultural intermediaries such as academics, critics, book
and film reviewers, and cultural journalists)* the centre of gravity of scholarly
/

activity has shifted. If cultural studies is now a main location for the analysis of
culture, it is necessary to explore its potential relationships to development studies.
This interface might in fact prove to be a highly fruitful one. While the field of
contemporary cultural studies is far too large and diverse to survey in its totality, I
will at least try to draw out what I think some of its major implications for
development studies might be.
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 109

I would suggest that the ‘cultural turn’ is signalled principally by a shift of interest
from structure to agency and from explanation to hermeneutics. While this turn has
its weaknesses (very evident in many self-proclaimed forms of postmodernism),
principally that its political direction or implications are obscure and that its
eschewing of structural analysis greatly weakens its ability to formulate a systematic
critique of large-scale social processes such as capitalism or globalisation, it also has
its major strengths. First among these strengths, I would argue, is that cultural studies
addresses implicitly the silences and absences of conventional development theory.
And what are these? First, I would say its ignorance of psychology, and its general
occluding of the fact that social change (read ‘development’ or ‘social transforma-
tion’) involves as its central element the reconstruction of subjectivities. Here we
immediately encounter a paradox* that, while ‘development’ can be seen as a central
/

plank in the modernist project, development theory itself has not for the most part
assimilated or even entered into any meaningful dialogue with either the large body
of debate in social theory about the nature of modernity (for example, Giddens 1990)
or its significant failure to deliver on its promises (for example, Bauman 1999), to say
nothing of an almost complete absence of a consideration of postmodernism and
what it might mean for a new vision of the world and the place of development
studies within it. To an alarming extent, development studies has remained as a self-
contained discourse, unforgivably so given its vital positioning in relation to the great
moral questions of the day.
While cultural studies itself, and its largely postmodernist/deconstructivist
framing, has not for the most part directly addressed these moral issues either
(although its sympathetic commentators are increasingly aware of this lacuna
(Bauman 1995)), a generous reading of cultural studies quickly reveals a vision of
human reality closer to that of actual experience than that found in the work of even
most development sociologists. For here is a language largely absent from
development theory. As suggested above, all social change involves a reconstruction
of subjectivity* new conceptions of the self, of identity, of the persons’ relationship
/

to nature, to God, to others in general and to the other gender in particular. Old
categories of self-understanding are dissolved, and new ones constantly constituted.
The possibility of the individual creating an identity rather than having it imposed is
enhanced, and while, in Ulrich Beck’s sense of the term, ‘risk’ increases, so do either
new forms of personal autonomy or new forms of surveillance and control, or both.
Ontologies are recast (Clammer et al. 2004)* and with them conceptions of justice,
/

rights, freedom, and happiness.

Central to such shifts in subjectivity are shifts in the organisation of desire* /

whether for things and the pursuit of identity through consumption or in the
ordering of feelings and the emotions (Clammer 2000; Zeldin 1995)* and with them
/

the significance of memory, nostalgia, and the ways in which narratives of person,
identity, and history are constructed and reconstructed. The surge of recent literature
on memory in the social sciences is symptomatic of this, as is the equally large
efflorescence of interest in the body and the growing interest in the sociology and
110 J. Clammer

anthropology of the emotions. With this has come a renewed interest in human
spatiality as well as temporality, an expanded interest in the visual aspects of culture
(film, art, popular culture, including such manifestations as comics) in addition to
the more classical written forms, and with this the burgeoning of visual anthropology,
media studies, and sociological interest in public spaces and renewed forms of urban
sociology and anthropology drawing on semiotics, landscape architecture and
ecology, on feminism, and on fresh appreciations of the impact of technology on
social and cultural organisation. When merged with critical and process under-
standings of culture, not only is the notion of culture itself expanded and redefined,
but its significance for the study of development is revolutionised.
In essence this revolution consists of the formulation of a new philosophical
anthropology, one that attempts to capture the wholeness of human beings while
refusing to reduce them to abstract categories. It implies a notion of human beings as
culturally ‘in process’; as unfinished and permanently mutating; as having a complex
and symbiotic relationship to nature; as sexual, embodied, emotional; as having
personal histories constructed subjectively out of narratives of struggle; as suffering;
as having spiritual aspirations; as constantly constructing the future and reconstruct-
ing the past out of hope, desire, and intentions; as being the key agents in their own
destinies; and as mortal* as having life trajectories that involve ageing, transforma-
/

tions in the passage from one life-phase to the next, and ultimately individual death.
The main failure of conventional development thinking has been to ignore the
existential qualities of human life, what makes it actually worth living, which confers
meaning on it for its participants. An economistic, over-socialised and much too
rationalised conception of the human person can never capture the reality of actual
life worlds. These life worlds involve joys as much as they do struggle (the latter being
reflected in the recently introduced idea of ‘social suffering’ as a mode of analysis in
the social sciences (Kleinman et al. 1997) and any adequate conception of either
culture or of development must include these elements, without which both are (as
indeed they are) severely impoverished. The contribution of cultural studies has been
to put these factors back on the intellectual map. The task then remains to relate them
more systematically to development studies, to bring together the hermeneutics of
the cultural approach with the political economy and politically informed approach
of the best development theory, while seeing both as open ended, future oriented and
sensitive to actual changes in the nature of culture and the world economy. The
‘impasse’ in development theory has arisen from its failure to seek new models in
unexpected places and its deafness to those that have recommended themselves from
those quarters, in a situation in which in fact it is the discourse itself that has to be
changed, not a mere reshuffling of the elements already within it.
Culture represents the constant creation of meaning, in particular to render valid
disordered experiences (illness, disasters, poverty) precisely into cultural experiences.
This is done to a great extent through storytelling, myth, ritual, and the
domestication of those experiences, many of which are in fact traumatic. Culture
then should be thought of as narrative rather than as structure, not in the
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 111

deconstructionist sense of a ‘text’ outside which there is no other reality, but in the
sense of an ever-evolving and constantly edited response to a very insistent reality
constantly impinging on the human subject. This both accounts for the ambiguities
and inconsistencies of actual lived culture and also signals the dangers of an over-
abstract and disembodied conception of culture, the very form of explanation that
leads rapidly to a culturalist rather than cultural mode of explanation.

Reasserting Culture
The ‘cultural turn’ that has finally reached development thinking from the other
social sciences and in particular from anthropology and cultural studies is a positive
development, not least in that it helps to ward off the baleful effects of economism.
Reinserting the cultural, if done in the way suggested, reinserts real people into the
development process, people with emotions and values, who suffer and seek meaning
in their suffering, and who seek continually to expand their capacities and range of
experiences. Simply to bring together ‘culture’ and ‘development’ is unhelpful unless,
on the one hand, the notion of culture is expanded to include what here I have called
the existential and, on the other, the silences of conventional development theory are
directly addressed. It is this second move that in essence constitutes what collectively
is called ‘alternative development’. To undertake such a project requires not only an
expanded or deepened concept of culture, but also a critical one, critical of both the
content of actually existing cultures and of forms of facile postmodernism which, in
their eagerness to deconstruct master narratives, have also rejected in principle the
idea that there can indeed be such things as human nature and human needs. The
anti-humanism of a cohort of thinkers, of whom Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and
Althusser are exemplars, has made the very human subject unstable or even
untenable. But, paradoxically, structuralism (rather like the deep grammar of
Chomsky) requires and posits a stable human subject, subject to transformations,
but transformations deriving from a basic universal pattern. There is a careful course
to be steered here between essentialising, illegitimate universalising (indeed
thoroughly critiqued by the deconstructionists) and the assertion of a post-
poststructuralist new foundationalism in which basic needs, including rights,
freedoms, spaces for cultural and psychological fulfilment, emotional growth, and
at least a minimum level of material satisfaction, are recognised as the ground of
human unity and of responsible development.
A potential way around this problem is taken by Marilyn Strathern in her analysis
of selfhood and society in New Guinea (Strathern 1988). There she suggests that
society is provisional accomplishment rather than functional reproduction, and that
it is consequently necessary to move away from the older anthropological
preoccupation with codes and systems to the study of practical enactments and
improvisations. In such a model the concepts both of ‘society’ and of ‘culture’ as
essentialised or rigid notions are destabilised, and so their status as universals,
systems, or as units of comparison is radically undermined. And certain characteristic
112 J. Clammer

assumptions of much social science analysis (for example, in social psychology), such
as that society and individual stand in tension with each other or that their
‘relationship’ needs ‘explaining’, are similarly and as a consequence also displaced.
In what is effectively a commentary on Strathern, Nick Thomas goes on to point
out that, if this is true, then what we have previously thought of as groups, cultures,
or collectivities, are in fact not social aggregates, but what he calls ‘images of unity’
(Thomas 1997, p. 257). He goes on to comment:

Strathern’s category of ‘collectivity’ is relevant to contemporary nationhood

precisely because nations are prejudiced by economic and cultural globalisation
that undermines their sovereignty and ideological particularity. Collectivity is not
the same as society; it is not a continuing field or container of relationships, but
rather an expression of a kind of unity or difference that may be belied by other
expressions and affiliations. Particular forms of collectivity are therefore likely to be
imagined episodically, even though they may exist implicitly, as memories,
potentialities and sources of tension, at other times. (Thomas 1997, p. 258)

Culture then is accomplished or potential accomplishment* a field of potentialities

/

the realisation of which follows complex and only partly determined paths. Both
rituals and artefacts for Thomas are ‘ways of imagining a collectivity that may not
otherwise be invoked’, not as the reflection or expression of ‘society’, but as rhetorical
efforts (ibid. p. 259). In much the same way that the notion of ‘self ’ organises and
gives a sense of continuity to what may in fact be fleeting and constantly evolving and
relational attributes of being as an individual (Battaglia 1999), so ‘culture’ similarly
organises the processes of collective identity into what appear to be patterns and, in
appearing as such, become so through repetition and socialisation.
Such an approach also carries with it a certain humbleness that contrasts with the
hubris of so much conventional development thinking, its development decades, five-
year plans, and announced dates for the eradication of poverty. It recognises the
limits of explanation in the social sciences, the fact that, as scholars of such fields as
religion and suicide have had to recognise, there are areas of human action that lie
beyond their categories and which cannot be ‘explained’ except by the crudest and
most tentative models. Invoking culture exposes us to these mysteries and reveals that
‘development’ for the most part operates at the most superficial levels of human
experience and desire and does not touch at all many of the most basic problems of
existence. Its own inherently unstable nature in any case renders culture itself
vulnerable and precarious, never finished and always contested, and capable of
becoming a tool not of liberation but of violence when it is invoked (often in the
guise of ‘tradition’) as a powerful and subtle mechanism of social control and
subordination.
But this last thought of course opens up a possibility. If culture is process, is
dynamic, negotiated and constantly under construction, then the future is open.
Which it is, except that it is full of the same risks for all of us* accelerating ecological
/

degradation, retreat into fundamentalisms, the severe disruptions created by

 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 113

globalisation and a crisis, more apparent than real (a product of the farther reaches of
postmodernism), in identity. It is here that we realise that the cultural turn is not just
a theoretical one, but is intensely political as well. It is no accident that the ‘politics of
identity’, ‘lifestyle politics’, ‘cultural politics’, the ‘politics of recognition’ and
multiculturalism, to say nothing of feminism, post-colonialism, and many forms of
religious revival, now dominate the landscape of political discourse, a very different
set of issues from those of class struggle and the attempts to define a ‘New Left’ a
generation ago. Paradoxically again, with the ‘decentring’ of the human subject,
culture has reasserted itself in an unexpected form. The human subject just refuses to
go away. Which might suggest to us that, under the conditions of globalisation, it is
up to us not to simply accept culture as a given (which its negotiated nature shows
that it clearly is not), but to decide what kind of culture we now need in an
interconnected world in which the problems of some of us are the problems of all of
us.

Beyond Path Dependency: Theoretical and Practical Implications

Such a view of culture, and of its relationship to development, has certain
implications, for social and development theory, on the one hand, and for strategies
of practical application, on the other. The concept of culture is transformed under the
impact of globalisation in diverse ways. While the hybridity of actually existing
cultures has to be recognised, it is also true that globalisation both triggers off the
search for the authentic or indigenous (the ‘local’) and forces (or should force) our
explanatory framework to encompass but then to move beyond a language of post-
colonialism and Eurocentricity into a fresh paradigm where the multicentred nature
of the world is grasped and with it the complex, subtle, and contradictory flows of
‘cultures’ (themselves already hybridised), and in which representations do not flow
only in one direction, but are refracted, mirrored, partial, and kaleidoscopic. All
attempts at representation in which culture as essence has been supplanted by culture
as process face the problems that anthropology has faced in the recent past, and the
attempts by academic disciplines to impose a kind of closure on phenomena should
not be mistaken for the nature of the real cultural world that operates on principles
closer to that of chaos theory than it does to the structured and classificatory axioms
of conventional social science. Globalisation should in principle liberate alternative
epistemologies, and with them alternative anthropologies; that it tends to impose
hegemonic intellectual structures is one of the reasons why it should be struggled
against, and indeed subverted by the elaboration of those alternatives. If, to coopt
Habermas’s celebrated term, the negative expression of modernity is the colonisation
of the life worlds of people, then alternative development becomes the decolonisation
of those same life-worlds, the liberation of everyday life from necessity into meaning
and freedom.
The decolonisation of the life world, while it involves personal transformations
implicit in the restoration of culture, empowerment, autonomy, and the rediscovery
114 J. Clammer

of sociability (Murphy 1999; Carmen 1996), also involves social transformations* /

liberatory structures and institutions within which the decolonised mind and
lifestyles can flourish* and changes in the methodology and mode of thinking of
/

development studies itself, towards a concept of the open future, culture as the ‘not
yet’ or ‘in progress’ in which there is a search for new models, new forms of social
knowledge, and visions of integrated development in which social, economic,
cultural, political, spiritual, and environmental elements are holistically related.
Development studies then becomes, in the best sense of the term, futurology. The
violence of development needs to be confronted in the same spirit in which the
violence of colonialism has been confronted, and both placed within the framework
of the violence of modernity, to which there are indeed alternatives, of which
postmodernism, with its absence of either political or spiritual values or strategies, is
only one among many.
And it is precisely here that the notion of participation once again enters the
picture, as it is through ‘participation’, that is, autonomous management of one’s life
space, that new forms of liberatory thinking and practice emerge. Civil society also
means civil culture. As Boris Frankel argues, in attempts to think through what could
constitute post-industrial society, culture becomes not something that simply exists,
but the constructive process of redefining both the private and public spheres, in
redefining their relationship and in getting from ‘here to there’* from our current
/

social crisis and disorder to a more humanised state of post-industrial society

(Frankel 1987). Frankel also recognises squarely that culture is a field of conflict, of
competing social visions, deep contradictions, old religions, identities, and traditions
struggling with new ones being born, and notes rightly that any future society would
have to manage these same tensions. All social policies and plans have unintended
consequences, and these are themselves part of cultural dynamics, a problem that all
social movements have sooner or later to confront.
For this reason, as social movements theorists such as Alberto Melucci have
recognised, the boundary between the cultural and the political in the examination of
the nature of such movements is porous (Melucci 1989). In his view, cultural
processes are totally implicated in the conduct of politics in general and ‘life politics’
in particular, and social movements involve reflexive actions in which collectivities
reorient themselves in terms of values and strategies within an existing field of
constraints and opportunities, aimed ultimately at breaking the ‘compatibility’ of that
dominant or hegemonic system (Buechler 2000, p. 179). In Melucci’s model, social
activism is largely a response to intolerable forms of social control, many now based
on symbolic control, the manipulation of symbolic and cultural capital, new forms of
surveillance and the control of information. Resistance to such control, even or
especially when it takes cultural forms, is a political act, a challenge to prevailing
systems of power, themselves, as we know so well from Foucault, embedded or
embodied in discourse, in the taken-for-granted structures of everyday life where
inequalities and domination are constantly and subtly reproduced.
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 115

While it is easy to trivialise the role of culture in resistance (which I prefer to think
of as the struggle to achieve autonomous ‘spaces’)* for example, shopping as
/

resistance in some of the literature on commodification of society in late capitalism

or the assumption that ‘anti-corporate’ bands or artists are really outside the nexus of
commercialisation* it is nevertheless true that cultural practices do provide
/

(especially in a ‘postmodern’ context with its relativisation of identities and possible

subjectivities) a place where agency can be expressed, even if in the gaps and
interstices of ‘the system’ (Starr 2000, pp. 34 7). As the urban sociologist Sharon
/

Zukin has argued, while culture always needs to be tied to political economy,
‘Focusing attention on cultural practices and cultural categories has had the great
virtue of enriching an experiential understanding of social justice’ (Zukin 1996, p.
224), an idea extended at length by Ed Soja (1996) in an essay in which he
reconfigures the relationship between justice, culture, and subjectivities in such a way
that the historical (rather than political-economy) nature of social experience is
recentred and in which culture is seen as expressed in spatiality. The relationships
between space, time, identity, and justice are thus remapped, and all seen as
constituting the sphere that Melucci too would presumably call ‘cultural politics’, the
point at which cultural and political struggles become indistinguishable. As such,
culture and governance also merge, and indeed the field of development anthro-
pology is exactly the disciplinary point at which anthropology (the science of
culture?) becomes ‘part of the practice of governmentality’ (Moore 1996, 1999).
Culture has re-entered debates on citizenship (Ong 2000), peace-keeping, naming
and addressing ‘cultures of terror’, poverty, capacity-building, NGO mobilisation and
effectiveness, democratisation, corruption, and a host of other locations that take
culture out of the realm of conventional cultural studies into that of politics. And
development is nothing if not political, and, however fluid the notion of culture
might be and however ‘open’ the self might be that claims to live within culture,
culture is a fundamental ‘reality’, the means through which agency is characteristically
exercised upon the world, and the way in which a notion of the self is integrated
around relatively stable categories of understanding. It links the individual to patterns
of meaning, and condenses meaning in such a way that it can become the vehicle for
political intervention, transformations in subjectivity at one level (the individual)
being mirrored sooner or later by the desire to create transformations at others (in
society at large).

Closing Meditation on ‘Spaces of Hope’

In my view, one of the most important works in social theory to have appeared in
recent years is David Harvey’s splendid volume Spaces of Hope (Harvey 2000), an
extended meditation on the geography of late capitalism and globalisation, the
possibility of a refurbished socialism and the recovery of the idea of the utopian
project as a necessary step to carry us into a future worth inhabiting in the face of the
massive economic, ecological, and political crises that we now all encounter. His
116 J. Clammer

argument is too complex and subtle for me to be able to summarise, but in closing I
should like to draw out a few ideas that I think frame and speak to the themes that I
have been discussing here, and which I think provide a fitting conclusion to this
paper.
The first of these is that to grasp in any way the fullness and richness of the idea of
culture, it is necessary to confront the power of the human imagination. For Harvey
the key element in any future political project is the preparing of our imaginations for
alternative futures and the liberation of them, in so far as we are able, from the
existing material and institutional conditions which so fence them in. His question
then is not whether such imagination exists (his own book shows that it does), but
whether we are prepared for radical change and are prepared to undertake the work
of cultural reconstruction necessary to achieve it.
The second is the idea, derived directly from Marx, of our ‘species being’ and the
confronting directly of what such a concept implies for the nature of our political and
cultural projects. This involves, among other things, examining seriously but without
falling into geneticism or the ideologically charged waters of most reactionary socio-
biology, the biological/physical basis of human nature and of our ecological location
as creatures within nature, not above or outside of it. As Harvey puts it:

We are a species on earth like any other, endowed, like any other, with specific
powers that are put to use to modify environments in ways that are conducive to
our own sustenance and reproduction . . . . This conception defines the ‘nature
imposed condition of our existence’. We are sensory beings in a metabolic relation
to the world around us. We modify that world and in so doing change ourselves
through our activities and labors. Like all other species, we have some species-
specific capacities and powers, arguably the most important of which are our ability
to alter and adapt our forms of social organization (to create, for example, divisions
of labor, class struggles, and institutions), to build a long historical memory
through language, to accumulate knowledge and understandings that are
collectively available to us as guides to future action, to reflect on what we have
done and do in ways that permit learning from experience (not only our own but
also that of others), and by (e.g. tools, technologies, organizational forms, and
communication systems) to enhance our capacities to see, hear, and feel way
beyond the physiological limitations given by our own bodily constitution . . . . The
argument for seeing human nature in relative terms, as something in the course of
construction is not without weight and foundation. But it also points to a
connection between the concept of ‘species being’ and ‘species potential’ (Harvey
2000, pp. 207 /8).

The various contemporary sociologies of the body and of nature are elsewhere
making the same point, and indeed elsewhere in his book Harvey does discuss in
some detail the relationships between the physical body and the body politic, a term
missing in almost all discussions of development.
Third, Harvey notes that culture accumulates. We do not in fact construct our
culture anew in every generation, but we build on, even when rejecting, our particular
history, a history now expanded and relativised by globalisation that in a sense, as
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 117

postmodern theorists have been fast to point out, makes everybody’s history available
to all of us. Culture does indeed represent openness, but it is also necessary to
remember that in making cultural choices (for example, quite literally to build
something) we are foreclosing on other possibilities, and it is in fact within this field
of foreclosures imposed on us by previous generations that we actually live much of
our lives. Fourth, he suggests that what deep ecology, socialism (and he might have
added, Buddhism) teach us in an intellectual environment dominated by ideas of
difference is the need to understand the self in relation to the other, to search for the
great Self that surpasses difference in a larger unity (as philosophers in the tradition
running from Buber to Levinas have recognised).
And, finally, following in the steps of such neglected thinkers as Ernst Bloch and his
principle of the future as the ‘not yet’, that which can be brought into being, Harvey
argues for the vitality of the utopian impulse as that which keeps the future open,
inspires the imagination and provides the raw material out of which actual futures are
constructed, and constructed moreover to a great extent out of cultural choices. I
think that he is right, and that development studies is the science and art of
conceiving and bringing into being that future, the one we want, not the one imposed
upon us.

References
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization , University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Battaglia, D. (1999) ‘Towards an ethics of the open subject: writing culture in good conscience’, in
Anthropological Theory Today, ed. H. L. Moore, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 114 /50.
Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments , Blackwell, Oxford.
Bauman, Z. (1999) Modernity and the Holocaust , Blackwell, Oxford.
Bourdieu, P. (1979) Outline of a Theory of Practice , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Buechler, S. M. (2000) Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism , Oxford University Press, New
York.
Carmen, R. (1996) Autonomous Development: Humanizing the Landscape , Zed Books, London.
Chen, H-K. (ed.) (1998) Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , Routledge, London and New York.
Clammer, J. (1985) Anthropology and Political Economy, Macmillan, London.
Clammer, J. (1995) Difference and Modernity: Social Theory and Contemporary Japanese Society,
Kegan Paul International, London and New York.
Clammer, J. (1996) Values and Development in Southeast Asia , Pelanduk Publications, Petaling Jaya.
Clammer, J. (2000) ‘Received dreams: consumer capitalism, social process and the management of
the emotions in contemporary Japan’, in Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary
Japan , eds J. S. Eades, T. Gill & H. Befu, Trans Pacific Press, Melbourne, pp. 203 /23.
Clammer, J., Poirier, S. & Schwimmer, E. (eds) (2004) Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in
Intercultural Relations , Toronto University Press, Toronto.
de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life , University of California Press, Berkeley.
Dove, M. R. (ed.) (1988) The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in Development , University of
Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu.
Esteva, G. & Prakash, M. S. (1998) Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures , Zed
Books, London.
Etzioni, A. (1988) The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics , The Free Press, New York.
118 J. Clammer

Featherstone, M. (1997) Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, Sage, London.
Fekete, J. (ed.) (1987) Life after Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture , St. Martin’s Press, New
York.
Fox, R. G. & King, B. J. (eds) (2002) Anthropology Beyond Culture , Berg, Oxford and New York.
Frankel, B. (1987) The Post-Industrial Utopians , University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Friedman, J. (1996) Cultural Identity and Global Process , Sage, London.
Gardner., K. & Lewis, D. (1996) Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge , Pluto
Press, London.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope , Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Howell, S. (ed.) (1997) The Ethnography of Moralities , Routledge, London and New York.
Jaspers, J. M. (1997) The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography and Creativity in Social
Movements , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Jomo, K. S. (ed.) (1993) Islamic Economic Alternatives , Ikraq, Kuala Lumpur.
Kleinman, A., Das, V. & Lock, M. (eds) (1997) Social Suffering , University of California Press,
Berkeley.
Korten, D. S. (1999) The Post-Corporate World , Alken, Singapore; Kumarian Press, New York.
Kusno, A. (2000) Behind the Post-Colonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Culture in
Indonesia , Routledge, London and New York.
Lefebvre, H. (1971) Everyday Life in the Modern World , Allen Lane, London.
Lerner, M. (1996) The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism ,
Addison Wesley, New York.
Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary
Society, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Moore, H. L. (ed.) (1996) Future of Anthropological Knowledge , Routledge, London and New York.
Moore, H. L. (ed.) (1999) Anthropological Theory Today, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Munck, R. & O’Hearn, D. (eds) (1999) Critical Development Theory, Zed Books, London.
Murphy, B. K. (1999) Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World , Zed Books, London.
Nandy, A. (1998) ‘A new cosmopolitanism: toward a dialogue of Asian civilizations’, in Trajectories:
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , ed. H-K. Chen, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 142 /9.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2001) Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions , Sage, London.
Ong, A. (2000) ‘Clash of civilizations or Asian liberalism? An anthropology of the state and
citizenship’, in Anthropological Theory Today, ed. H. L. Moore, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp.
48 /72.
Roland, M. (1991) In Search of Self in India and Japan , Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Sachs, W. (ed.) (1995) The Development Dictionary, Zed Books, London.
Schech, S. & Haggis, J. (2000) Culture and Development: A Critical Introduction , Blackwell, Oxford.
Schuurman, F. J. (ed.) (1996) Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, Zed
Books, London.
Scott, J. (1998) ‘Freedom and freehold: space, people and state simplification in Southeast Asia’, in
Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia , eds D. Kelly & A. Reid,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 37 /64.
Scott, S. & Morgan, D. (eds) (1993) Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body, Falmer Press,
London.
Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom , Knopf, New York.
Sillitoe, P. (1998) ‘The development of indigenous knowledge: a new applied anthropology’, Current
Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 223 /52.
Sillitoe, P., Bicker, A. & Pottier, J. (eds) (2002) Participating in Development: Approaches to
Indigenous Knowledge , Routledge, London and New York.
Smart, B. (1999) Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality, Sage, London.
Smith, M. J. (2000) Culture: Reinventing the Social Sciences , Open University Press, Buckingham.
 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 119

Soja, E. (1996) ‘Margin/alia: social justice and the new cultural politics’, in The Urbanization of
Injustice , eds A. Merrifield & E. Swyngedouw, Lawrence & Wishart, London, pp. 180 /99.
Starr, A. (2000) Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization , Zed Books,
London.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in
Melanesia , University of California Press, Berkeley.
Theobald, R. (1999) We DO Have Future Choices: Strategies for Fundamentally Changing the 21st
Century, Southern Cross University Press, Lismore, NSW.
Thomas, N. (1997) ‘Collectivity and nationality in the anthropology of art’, in Rethinking Visual
Anthropology, eds M. Banks & H. Morphy, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, pp. 256 /
75.
Zeldin, T. (1995) An Intimate History of Humanity, Minerva, London.
Zukin, S. (1996) ‘Cultural strategies of economic development and the hegemony of vision’, in The
Urbanization of Injustice , eds A. Merrifield & E. Swyngedouw, Lawrence & Wishart, London,
pp. 223 /43.