UNEQUAL DEVELOPMENT

Christ Hann and Keith Hart

Preclude to the reading

Prior to this reading, we have come across accounts of ways in which the economy of the society
has gradually evolved into what it is today- from primitive to a modern society. We are very well
aware of the fact that we live in a market driven economy today, which starkly contrasts with the
primitive economy of hunters and gatherers and purely agricultural societies. Moreover, this
development of the market driven society from a market less society has been a consequence of a
number of events occurring over time in history, such as industrial revolutions, colonization,
capitalism, development of the modern medicine, wars, de-colonization, modernization,
westernization and so on…

One of the major consequences of these events was that of globalization, where the nation states
of the world began transact each other at an unprecedented rate and pattern. This reading goes
into establishing the alliance between globalization and the notion of development. The author
further argues that the development of the modern world, initially motivated by the concern of
the developed world to advance the non-developed word, ultimately lead to the creation of a
world which remains to be unequally developed. This will be illustrated further I n reading.

We shall begin with the reading now!

SEC I

Modern anthropology which began to acknowledge the rapid changes of the world found the
world society to be racially hierarchized. The main concern of 19th century anthropology, hence,
was the “evolution” of the society- which can be approached by studying history of the society as
a whole. The development of the society has required anthropologists to engage with social
change in an inclusive level. And in this way the development of the formal colonial world came
to occupy the central position of anthropology. Hence, in the following section we will be paying
heed to the changes that occurred within the colonized world after their struggle for acquiring
independence from western imperial world.

The ultimate goal of the drive for “under-development” in the post war and post colonial decades
was a world in which the rich countries seek to join poor countries to improve the economic
prospects of the latter.

Therefore, the following passages problematizes the notion of “development” and what it means
in order to approach the unequal world.

We further understand anthropology’s place in development studies and development industry.

The later sections we look at the anthropology of development in Africa and discuss the concept
of “informal economy”.

DEVELOPMENT IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD.

During the 1800’s:

 The world’s population was around 1 billion

 The population of the towns and cities was only 40.
 Most of the people extracted their livelihood from their land.
 Animals and plants were used for all energy that was produced and consumed.

After two decades:

 The world’s population reached 6 billion

 Half of which lived in towns and cities.
 Machines accounted for the majority of the production and consumption
 People live longer, worked less and consumed than they did before.

However, the distribution of surplus resources in the course of such development, has been
grossly unequal.

Following such changes, we can comprehend the meaning development through approaches such
as:
 i. “Development” in reference to the fervent chase of humanity from village economy to
city economy.
ii. “Development” as understanding capitalist growth and its effects.
iii. “Development” as an idea that government are best placed to engineer sustained
economic growth with redistribution.
iv. “Development” as a commitment of the rich to help the poor countries- this is the most
common usage of the term “development”. We will be mostly referring to this meaning
of development throughout this essay!

The altruistic notion of development in point iv, motivated by the anti-colonial revolution during
1950’s and 1960’s, eventually faded away by 1970’s.

From 1980’s onwards ‘development’ has more often meant freeing up global markets and
plastering wounds of the global south, which were inflicted by exploitation. Development, in
this sense has been a label for political relations between the rich and poor countries.

After the anti-colonial revolution many Asian countries installed successful capitalist economies.
However, regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and much of Latin America, have stagnated or
declined since 1970’s.

BY 1980’s development was no longer considered a serious agenda. Instead, there was a drive to
to open up world economies capital flow. Debt interest payments became a way to huge drain
from poor countries.

Centuries of political struggle and economic development of the poor countries have left the
world in a condition of inequality.

For instance,

 the latest wave of the machine revolution has granted a single man (capitalists) a net
worth of $40 billion, while billions of people live in poverty and have no access to basic
resources.
 Access to adequate food, clean water and basic education for world’s poorest people
requires less capital in comparison to what the west spends annually on ice-cream, make-
up and pet food.
  The rich pollute the word fifty times more than the poor; but the poor are more likely to
die from pollution.
 The world consumption has increased sixfold in previous two decades, however, the
richest 20 percent accounted for 86 percent of private expenditure.

Therefore, there are 2 pressing features of our world:

i. The expansion of markets since the world war

ii. Massive economic inequality between the rich and the poor.

The world is becoming closer (globalization) and more unequal at the same time: which is
an “explosive combination”.

The apartheid evidence of separating rich and poor spatially is found everywhere in local system
of discriminations. For instance, white immigrants from Europe and Chinese and Indian
immigrants in America, were kept distinct by the wages they received. Whites were paid on
average 9 shillings a day where Asians received 1 shilling a day. Read page 105, 1st para.

ANTHROPOLOGIST AND DEVELOPMENT

The dominant approach of Development Studies during the 1950’s and 60’s was modernization-
the idea that poor people should become more like the rich. This encouraged the replacement of
‘traditional’ institutions with ‘modern’ ones- adopting a ‘bourgeois package’ consisting of cities,
capitals, science and technology, democracy, rule of law and education for all.

The inequalities which consequence from such notion of development, was acceptable with the
belief that that benefits of progress would eventually trickle down to elevate the living conditions
of the poor.

Around 1970, it became evident that such an approach clearly failed, and it is during this time
that Marxist theories became more widely accepted. Marxist theories perceived that
underdevelopment and dependency were caused by poor countries participating in the world
system controlled by and for rich capitalist countries.

From 1980’s, with the rise of neoliberalism, the focus of development theory moved away from
state’s role in maneuvering national capitalism- bureaucratically attempting to control markets,
money and accumulation. The focus now shifted to making markets work and getting prices
right.

Around 1960’s economists, pointed out that development costs money and is supposed to yield
returns.

From 1970’s, anthropologist and other ‘soft’ social scientists were recruited to monitor ‘the
human factor’. Anthropologist brought with them a method of long-term immersion in
fieldwork, and ideology of joining the people where they lived, concepts drawn from
ethnographies around the world. They filled in the human dimension of development as a
complement to the dominant work of economists and engineers.

However, anthropologist found that they were in a middle of class war between bureaucracy and
the people. They realized that they only take one of the following positions:

i. Inform the people about the benefit of the bureaucracy.

ii. Take people’s side and be their advocates.
iii. Become mediators- offering interpretations of people to the bureaucracy and of the
bureaucracy to the people.

The option which was chosen to be the most compatible with the anthropologist was the last
option.

Apart from this, anthropologist ethnographic paradigm contradicted with development process
itself. Anthropologist became critical about the notion of development and what good it served to
the people they were studying. Traditional ethnographers could not engage with development
problems, and critical anthropologist were often too suspicious of the development industry to
consider joining it.
However, from 1980’s anthropologists with experience of doing field work in exotic places were
seen as suitable personnel for administration of development worldwide and a new specialization
called the ‘anthropology of development’ arose seeking to formalize the involvement of
anthropologist in development bureaucracy.
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA

The development project of Africa initiated in the late colonial period around the time of WW II.

Independence from colonial rule brought new prospects for the economic development of Africa.

In 1960’s Ghana had a bigger economy than Indonesia and South Korea. But economic failure in
the following decades lead to Africa becoming an epitome of poverty.

West Africa provides us with a significant example of indigenous capitalism in modern

economic history. During the 1880’s Africa was involved in mass production and consumption
of commodities, where European owned mines, such as gold and copper, and plantation, such as
tea, rubber, oil, palm employed a mixture of local and bonded labor.

However, Ghana’s coco industry rose without the help or knowledge of the colonial regime, and
Ghana supplied half of the world market at the time of independence. Despite this, very little was
known of the indigenous producers. They were perceived to be African “peasants” earning a
little surplus through adding coco cultivation to their subsistence farming.

However, Polly Hill, in her book Migrant Coco-Farmers of Southern Ghana, showed that these
African coco farmers were indeed modern class, migrant entrepreneurs opening up virgin forest
for cultivation, and capable of hiring Swiss construction firms for developing their infrastructure.

Hill’s study contrasted with the conventional thinking (assumptions) of development economists
and administrations- convictions about Western economic leadership and African backwardness.

Following this, Hart in 1882 argued that it is rather modern states were built on the back of
traditional small-scale agriculture which produced for the world market. Moreover, Paul Richard
took the view that West African farmers had the ability to overcome problems of production by
using their own knowledge systems and experimental methods.

James Ferguson coined the tern “anti-politics machine” to describe how small countries are
represented as remote and isolated, a hopeless place cut off from the rest of the world by
mountains and cultural traditions.

It is politics that makes these countries different which leads to their exclusions. Africa is
portrayed in the western media as a place inflicted with war, famine and death. Yet, the continent
is growing and is experiencing population explosion and urban revolution of unprecedented size
and speed.

THE INFORMAL ECONOMY

Mike Davis (2006) calls ‘the Third World’ as ‘a planet of slums’ – streets are teeming with life,
crowded by hawkers, porters, taxi-drivers, beggars, pimps, pickpockets, hustlers. People
occupied in such economies have no benefits of s ‘real job’. These occupations are usually
termed as ‘underground’, ‘unregulated’, ‘hidden’, ‘black’, and ‘second’ economies.

Clifford Geertz in his book Peddlers and Princes (1963) examined two faces of Indonesian
entrepreneurship: the ‘bazaar-type’ and ‘firm-type’.

i. The ‘firm-type’ economy consisted largely of Western corporations who

benefited from the protection of state law.
ii. The ‘bazaar-type’ is individualistic and competitive, and is denied the
institutional protection of the state bureaucracy.

The dualistic model framed by Lewis in 1978 became very influential at the time. It
conceptualized economy as a pair of ‘formal/informal’, and it grew out of an attempt to
understand what happened to the agricultural labor when they migrated to the cities.

Cities of the ‘Third World Countries’ were growing rapidly, but without significant growth in
jobs. The migrants from the villages who ventured out in the city to find industrial jobs failed to
be absorbed by the companies, thereby leaving them unemployed. However, Hart through his
fieldwork in the slums of Accra wanted to persuade development economists to abandon the
‘unemployment’ model and embrace the idea that there were grassroot employment taking place,
Thereby the term ‘informal sector’ was coined by Labor Office in 1972.

Under a neo-liberal imperative of ‘free-market’, national and world economy were radically
informalized as management of money went offshore corporations outsourced, downsized and
casualization of labor force occurred, privatization.

70 to 90 percent of the African national economies (and other developing countries’ economies)
became informal. Therefore, we can say that the informal economy has been a result of
neoliberal globalization.
BEYOND DEVELOPMENT

The premise of rich countries helping the poor t develop faded with three decades of neoliberal
globalization. When debt repayments drained all income from poor countries, the government’s
ability to secure their citizen’s wellbeing was compromised.

Many now see development as a hypocritical claim of the economically rich countries which
drains resources out from poor countries. Critical anthropologists like Ferguson (1990) and
Escobar (1996) claim that development is just a way of talking without having any real impact.
In the name of development rich countries maintains a status quo in which rich are getting richer
and poor are not getting any less poor.

Marx argued that capitalist markets could not organize machine production for the benefit of the
society as a whole. The main hindrance on developing human economy is the administrative
power of nation-states, which prevents the emergence of new forms of economy more
appropriate for global integration.

The modern political economy justifies granting some people inferior rights. The nation identity
is built on territorial segmentation and regulation of movement across borders. Such form of
nationalism induces racism by justifying unfair treatment of non-citizens and the citizens of
developing poor counties.

Read the CONCLUSION carefully!!!

End