unprecedented social havoc: ‘It is no accident’,
says Sachs in an astonishing aperçu,‘that geno-
cide took place in Rwanda’ (2000: 15)! Central
African ethnic bloodletting, produced by a lethal
combination of organic nationalism and fascist
politics (HRC, 1999), is here read as the product
of ‘geographical disadvantage’. Running through
the ‘new economic geography of development’ is
a gesture to Elsworth Huntingdon, a cavalier rati-
fication of economics and economic growth as the
sine qua nonof development, and an unquestioned
hymnal to the Olympian powers of the market and
‘modern science and technology’.
If geography has a new cachet in economics,
political science cannot of course be far behind.
Princeton political scientist Jeffrey Herbst (2000:
156–69), for example, sees in the weakness of
African postcolonial states more or less ‘favor-
able geography’. It is the size and shape of inheri-
ted national territories, coupled with population
density, that determine the ‘broadcasting’ of
political authority as a precondition for political
stability. In its ‘national designs,’ he argues,
Africa has much to be desired.
All of this work, which strikes the contempo-
rary geographer as a very bad case of Victorian
recidivism, does pose sharply the question of
what a critical geography, and for our purposes a
critical cultural geography, of development
might look like. That is to say, a geography capa-
ble of understanding actual development practices
(institutions, knowledges, professions, accumu-
lation of wealth, forms of state intervention and
so on) in cultural (semiotic, representational, dis-
cursive) and spatial (regional, territorial, global)
terms. In one sense, culture, understood broadly
as practices which produce meanings constitu-
tive of what Raymond Williams (1961) called ‘a
whole way of life’, has alwaysbeen present in
much of what passes as post-war development
theory, and indeed in colonial development.
Colonial bureaucrats were obsessed with the
place of ‘tradition’ in relation to imperial power
and colonial stability. In the case of British
indirect rule, African ‘custom’ was deliberately
retained (but of course necessarily transformed)
in the creation of what Mamdani (1995) calls
‘decentralized despotism’. Ethnicity, whether
construed in terms of the tribe or the indigene,
was frequently the modality of colonial gover-
nance, though the ‘tribals’ in India or ‘minorities
in Nigeria were partly colonial inventions.
Colonial governmentality, then, was cultural in
disposition: indeed, it worked through local
culture to gradually construct, or attempt to con-
struct, a new sort of (colonial) subject (Scott,
1995). The destruction of the local cultural
community by an unfettered colonial capitalismwas, in this sense, radically destabilizing for
the colonial state, and politically threatening to
metropolitan authority. Culture – embodied in
the Gambian lineage or Rhodesian chieftainship –
was to be the mechanism for stable, self-
reproducing colonialism, to help manufacture
docile colonial subjects (‘happy natives’). At the
same time, tradition was an obstacle to the
Schumpeterian energies and technological inno-
vation boiling in the incubus of colonial capital-
ism (Cooper and Stoler, 1995).
The same might be said of 1950s growth
theory or the import-substitution industrializa-
tion of the 1960s. They were variants of cultural
theory too, peddling certain sorts of cultural arte-
facts and regimes of consumption in the name of
an acultural theory of modernity; as Taylor
(2001) says, this sort of theory is culture-neutral
because anytraditional culture could experience
the benefits of reason. The economists who
invoked the backward-sloping supply curve
rested their claim on purported peasant economic
‘irrationality’ or a cultureof poverty: in short, a
cultural disposition to produce more as prices
collapsed because of risk aversion, least effort or
a lack of need achievement. Cultural beliefs and
ideologies were oppositional to capitalist ethics
and to the idea of Homo economicus. Moderni-
zation theories in fact could never see beyond
culture – what they saw as the dead weight of tra-
dition – and specifically beyond the panoply of
culture forms antithetical to self-sustaining capi-
talist growth. It was excess of social ascription
(caste) in India, or a radical lack of ‘need
achievement’ (‘n-ach’) in Ghana, or the absence
of indices of modernity (postboxes, telephones,
cars) in Burma, that signaled economic under-
development – never mind that such indices
and proxies reached their historical zenith in
Nazi Germany. Modernization theorists, of
course, conspicuously read culture outof their
own theory of the modern!
The cultural content of development theory
understood in this non-reflexive way – culture is
what others have – has never really gone away.
The weight afforded to values in the newly
industrializing ‘miracles’ of North East Asia –
Taiwanese familialism or South Korean Confu-
cianism (Hefner, 1998) – is one example of such
cultural developmentalism. The purportedly
parasitic tendencies of the African moral economy
(Hyden, 1980) – the ‘captured’ state becomes, as
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1988) put it,
‘one big crummy family’ – is another. But such
analyses do little more than identify the ways
in which cultural difference makes a difference
for growth: how it facilitates, or more typically
how it hinders, capitalist accumulation at the434 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 434