Cultural Geography

periphery of the world system. Is this all there

is, or might be, to a cultural geography of

development?

The answer to this question is, not unexpect-

edly, neither simple nor straightforward, in part

because geographers (and others) have explored

a variety of intellectual avenues – anti-modernist

populism, postcolonial alternatives, hybrid

development to name but a few – in their search

for such a cultural geography. I want to organize

my remarks around three broad arguments. The

first is that critical cultural work on development

deliberately locates development on the larger

landscape of the modern but in doing so marks a

shift from one theory of modernity (acultural) to

another (cultural). That is to say, there is a shift

from a theory in which development describes a

transition from tradition to modernity as ‘a form

of life toward which all cultures converge’ to one

which sees modernity as unfolding within a cul-

tural or civilizational context, always sensitive to

the different starting points of the transition and

its different outcomes (Taylor, 2001). Develop-

ment is, in other words, culture and site specific;

it is irreducibly cultural geographic. That said,

depositing development on a culture-sensitive

landscape confers no unity of purpose or theoreti-

cal coherence. Some see development as failed

or something to be abandoned; others seek to

specify in detail the cultural and historical

grounding of the west’s self-representation.

My second argument examines work that

explores the cultural grounding of development –

of projects, of development institutions and so

on – ethnographically: that is to say, using the

tools of the anthropologist to explore the cultural

content of development processes. There is no

assumption that this work has a common agenda

but it typically offers a sort of institutional

ethnography of development, seeking to under-

stand how particular development categories are

constituted, and attentive to how forms of develop-

mentauthority are produced and represented. For

some, such a project has a reformist purpose – to

reform the World Bank; others want to create a

space for indigenous development (whatever that

may mean). The third argument raises the ques-

tion of alterity: that is to say, what difference

cultural difference makes for the purposes of

imagining and reimagining development, and

specifically for thinking about alternatives. Here

I try and engage with the related ideas of hybrid-

ity and cosmopolitanism.

In stitching these arguments together I want to

suggest that a cultural geography of development

is extremely powerful but that the search for

alternatives is often politically myopic, misreads

the insights to be gained from radical or

unconventional development theory (Marxism

quite specifically), has surprisingly little to say

about economics and economic alternatives, and

in some cases is simply politically reactionary

and crudely anti-modern in ways that do no jus-

tice to the very idea of modernity itself. Indeed,

some of the work on alternative modernities –

that is to say, a postcolonial account of develop-

ment that sees modernity ‘as not one but many’,

as ‘old and familiar’ and ‘as necessarily incom-

plete’ (Gaonkar, 2001: 23) – acknowledges the

uncontested hegemony of capitalist moderniza-

tion. There is no escaping it, says Dipesh

Chakrabarty,anywhere in the world (2001: 123)!

In this sense, I pose the question of whether the

critical cultural geography of development has

adequately come to terms with the overwhelming

powers of capitalist modernity and the old grand

theories of the modern that Marx among others

long ago invoked and that are now all too out of

fashion. Are the claims for hybrid development

and ‘creative adaptation’ simply the desperate

attempts to read some small victories against the

grain of a Whiggish theory of modernization?

MODERNITY

The concept of progress is to be grounded in the Idea of

catastrophe. That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe.

(Walter Benjamin, 1969)

Critical and culturally informed work on devel-

opmentduring the 1980s and thereafter turned in

large measure on seeing the development pro-

ject itself as a form of modernity (Escobar,

1992; Ferguson, 1999; Mills, 1999; Parajuli,

1991; Rofel, 1999; Sachs, 1992). For what has

now become the ‘post-development’ school

(Rahnema,1997), development was moreover a

failedmodernity of catastrophic proportions.^1

Development as an immanent process and as a

set of intentions accordingly became, to return

to Raymond Williams (1973), a keyword in rela-

tion to the modern, its meanings unstable, and

always wrapped up with the problems it was

being used to discuss. These problems are dis-

tinctively western and modern. Development

‘rehearses, in a virtually unchanged form,’ says

Gupta, ‘the chief premises of the self-represen-

tation of modernity’ (1998: 36): progress,

science, reason, universal history. This self-rep-

resentation of modernity by the west via the

other travels in a variety of colonial and post-

colonial modalities, and in so doing becomes ‘an

inescapable feature of everyday life’ (1998: 37)

in the Third World.

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