Serious stuff

Sometime the other week, the temps dropped. The single digits are back and it's time to get the woolens out. Tonight we are reverting back to GMT, meaning days will start and end earlier. And here I am, holed up in my room on a weekend, reading.

Wanted to share this excerpt from one of my readings for class (emphases mine). Wiko, if you're reading this, I'd like to know your reaction.

Peasants - that ‘specific group of people’ which is in reality the majority of the Third World - are seen in purely economic terms, not as trying to make viable a whole way of life. That their ‘rate of transfer into more rewarding pursuits’ had to be accelerated, on the other hand, assumes that their lives are not satisfying - after all, they live in ‘traditional isolation’, even if surrounded by their communities and those they love. The approach also regards peasants as suitable for moving around like cattle or commodities. Since their labour has to be ‘mobilized’, they must surely have just been sitting about idly (subsistence farming does not involve ‘labour’ in this view), or perhaps having too many babies. All of these rhetorical devices that reflect the ‘normal’ perceptions of the planner contribute to obscure the fact that it is precisely the peasants’ increasing integration into the modern economy that is at the root of many of their problems. Even more fundamentally, these statements, which become translated into reality through planning, reproduce the world as the developers know it - a world composed of production and markets, of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ or developed and underdeveloped sectors, of the need for aid and investment by multinationals, of capitalism versus communism, of material progress as happiness, and so forth. Here we have a prime example of the link between representation and power, and of the violence of seemingly neutral modes of representation.

[...]In its rural development discourse, the World Bank represents the lives of peasants in such a way that awareness of the mediation and history inevitably implicated in this construction is excluded from the consciousness of its economists and from that of many important actors - planners, Western readers, Third World elites, scientists, etc. This particular narrative of planning and development, deeply grounded in the post-World War II global political economy and cultural order, becomes essential to those actors. It actually becomes an important element in their insular construction as a developed, modern, civilized ‘we’, the ‘we’ of Western man. In this narrative, too, peasants, and Third World people generally, appear as the half-human, half-cultured benchmark against which the Euro-American world measures its own achievements.

Escobar, A. (1996). 'Planning'. In W. Sachs (ed) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed. pp 146-157.

Finally, this quote forms the basis of my unexpressed response to the Erap pardon: "forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation" (Renan 1882)

[Update 10/28/07] Fr. Bernas' analysis of the pardon sheds some light on the matter. Read it here.