In the literature on South Asian popular music, topics such as the Indian film industry, nationalism, and modernism tend to loom large. Writings often centre around binary oppositions, such as modernity edging out tradition, nationalism competing with regionalism, India's culture dominating over its neighbours, and Western culture replacing South Asian culture. While I agree with a number of the insights that follow from such binary models, I would suggest that these oppositions do not always draw out the full complexity and multiplicity of relations among local and translocal processes, traditions, identities and genres in Nepal. For even the most patently nationalistic Nepali music may contain within itself the seeds of a subsequent cultural movement that celebrates the West or India. Likewise, self-consciously Western-influenced expressions can become vehicles of Nepali national pride. To model the eclecticism and creativity that Nepali musicians and listeners exercise through their popular music calls for more subtle and sophisticated analytic tools.

In this chapter I combine ethnographic data with a social and musical history in an account of popular music in Nepal, 1950–2006, organised around a theme of cosmopolitanism. By invoking cosmopolitanism, I am not proposing that popular songs are treatises on the global community of human beings, or on cultural diversity. What I am proposing is that as Nepali popular songs draw together Nepali and non-Nepali musical elements and symbols, they inspire, among other things, various ways of thinking and feeling about and beyond the local.

Introduction

The idea that Evangelical Protestantism – including in its Pentecostal variants – can generate resources for promoting economic and political development is nothing new. In 1958, Edward Banfield argued in his classic study, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, that the underdevelopment he observed in a southern Italian village resulted primarily from an ethos of ‘amoral familism’ – an exclusive concern for one's sib over and against the common good (Banfield 1958). This ethos consisted of an extreme distrust of individuals and groups outside of one's family and virtually guaranteed that those in its grip would refuse to undertake joint activities or form wider associations to better themselves.

Banfield concluded his book by reflecting on how this ‘amoral familism’ might be overcome. One possibility lay in the region's religious and spiritual transformation. ‘The change in outlook that is needed’, Banfield surmised, ‘might conceivably come as the by-product of Protestant missionary activity’ (Banfield 1958: 162). As a basis for this suggestion, he cited a 1955 article by anthropologist Emílio Willems, ‘Protestantism as a Factor of Culture Change in Brazil’. According to Banfield's summary, Willems found that ‘[i]n Brazil Protestantism is reported to have created among its adherents an unprecedented participation in group affairs and to have reduced illiteracy, dishonesty, and gambling’ (Banfield 1958: 162 n. 8). The type of Protestantism largely responsible for these profound transformations, Willems, observed in more than a decade of field work in the 1950s and 1960s, was fervent Evangelicalism, especially Pentecostalism.

At first blush, the media in Sri Lanka is diverse and multilingual with distribution and consumption of traditional media (e.g. TV, radio, print) spread over the island. Further examination reveals serious and growing challenges to impartial, accurate and responsible journalism. Journalists themselves rarely adhere to professional standards and ethics, or are often violently coerced into supine, submissive agents of government propaganda. There is not a single newspaper in Sri Lanka that is in Sinhala and Tamil. Journalists themselves tend to be monolingual. Lack of access to the embattled North and East and the stereotypes of the other result in biased, unprofessional reporting that fuels war (Deshapriya and Hattotuwa 2003 and 2005). The overarching problems of a state riven by violent conflict, corruption, nepotism and the significant breakdown of democratic governance and human rights, especially in recent years, deeply inform the timbre of traditional media. It is a vicious symbiosis – traditional media is both shaped by and shapes a violent public imagination. The potential of web 2.0 and new media in general and citizen journalism, mobile phones and USG in particular (e.g. You Tube videos, blogs, SMS and mobile sites) suggests that content that critiques the status quo, authored by civil society, can play a constructive and increasingly significant role in peacebuilding and stronger democratic governance in Sri Lanka. Through the example of Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first citizen journalism website, this chapter will interrogate the potentials and pitfalls of web and Internet activism in a country where political violence is an everyday reality.

Introduction

One of the most startling empirical puzzles in modern political economy is the lack of convergence between the rich and poor countries in terms of per capita income over time. The East Asian countries grew rapidly in recent decades, but Africa stagnated. Why would development not follow, especially when countries in the so-called third world have received both financial and technical assistance from the rich countries of the West? The ‘great divergence’ does not easily fit into the intellectual framework that economists developed after WWII to explain economic growth and development.

The last twenty years have seen a vibrant debate emerge among economists and political economists concerning this issue. At a conference at Princeton honoring P. T. Bauer in 2004, Amartya Sen was asked what the biggest difference was between the state of the art in development economics in 1964 and in 2004. He replied that the most obvious difference is that in 1964, the market was viewed as a source of exploitation while in 2004 the market was seen as the arena of mutually beneficial exchange and as a source of liberation. From Hernando de Soto to C K Prahalad it is now common-place to hear intellectuals extol the virtues of the small scale trading and beginnings of capital accumulation that P T Bauer emphasized in his work, as opposed to foreign assistance programs. Two books by William Easterly have documented this divergence between the West and the rest and the failed efforts by the West to aid the rest.

In the mid-1990s, the World Bank evolved a new assistance strategy for India.

When I first arrived in Albania, I lived in Tirana with the family of my Albanian teacher, Rajmonda. During socialism, she and her husband, Qani, had been part of what in other contexts would have been called the middle-class. Rajmonda had been working as a language instructor at the Agricultural University and Qani was a pharmacist with the military. Surely, their background as educated and relatively well-to-do city dwellers colored the anecdote that Qani told me one evening when we were talking about the life of rural people under the socialist regime.

Years ago, Qani explained, he had been stationed in a remote village near Puka in northern Albania. There, he had heard about a cooperative family who committed an audacious act of insubordination. It was rumored that the family had secretly raised a piglet. Roasted, the little pig was meant to be the highlight of their Christmas celebration. In the early 1980s, this information was already scandalous and dangerous for those involved. Not only was the family obliged to hand over all offspring of their one sow to the cooperative, but celebrating Christmas was illegal because the government had outlawed all religious practices.

There was even more to the story. According to Qani, the family was running a great risk because at times the cooperative leadership sent inspectors to check for the illegal possession of livestock. Those convicted of such acts faced imprisonment in one of the notorious forced labor camps, and their families were “de-classed” (deklasuar).

Recent studies have revived an ancient debate and pointed to some form of correlation between the religious base of a society's culture and the state of its progress towards wealth. Some accounts have been highly controversial, and in particular those in the ‘clash of civilizations’ debate led by Huntington1. Others have been more literally ‘measured’, as for instance the work of the World Values Survey led by Inglehart, studies of ‘social axioms’ by Bond and Leung and the earlier chapter in this book by Harrison on the roots of progress. Others such as Sen have argued forcefully against the stereotyping that hides inside it an unstated assumption that religion per se is a direct cause of a society's main features. All accounts remain in the shadow of the sophisticated and extensive treatment of the question by Weber, often represented too simply by later scholars.

In this concluding paper I wish to explore an aspect of the issue that seems rarely addressed in discussions of economic progress, and that is the way in which societies vary in the degree of religious penetration of the societal fabric. My intent is to shift the focus of attention away from the content of religion, and to place it instead on the amount of societal ‘space’ a religion occupies. My working assumption is that if a society contains free space in which individuals are required to, and are at liberty to, invent order themselves if they want conduct regularized, then along with other factors, that context is conducive to the emergence of an institutional fabric appropriate to economic progress.

Jump Cuts and Unusual Angles

In looking across histories, national borders, urban and rural regions, social classes, genders, ethnicities, cultural practices and political traditions in the South Asian region to give a sense of the contexts in which media producers and audiences make meaning and texts are formed and used, the contributors in this volume have not taken a uniform approach. Herein lies the richness of this collection, but also the difficulty in drawing conclusions that are in agreement with all chapters' findings and orientations. I do not, therefore, intend to restate the complex findings of individual chapters but simply to draw out common theoretical strands, questions and absences.

Reading through the collection, it becomes apparent that the South Asian audience, singular, does not exist. Nor does the Indian or the Sri Lankan audience. Nor does the child audience or the rural audience, per se. There is also no overarching, publicly funded, government-controlled national media framework in any of the countries that has not, by 2009, been compelled to interact with and cede much of its market to local and international commercial media interests. Nevertheless, all the variety of media interests in each of the countries included in this collection clearly operate within and against the backdrop of the existing cultural ideologies of various civil society actors and national, regional or state political regimes. There can be no doubt, therefore, about the very political nature of the processes surrounding and inflecting all production and consumption of media across the subcontinent.

Overview

India has been the World Bank's single largest borrower since the institution's inception over six decades ago. As of mid-2009, India's cumulative borrowing stood at around US$74 billion (Press Trust of India 2009) in combined assistance from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, chartered at Bretton Woods in 1944) and the concessionary International Development Association (IDA, established in 1960 for the world's poorest countries).

No other country comes close to this level of cumulative borrowing from the World Bank (informally, “the Bank,” and comprising both IBRD and IDA). More populous China has borrowed more than India in some fiscal years, but it began borrowing from the Bank only in 1981. China passed the per capita income cutoff for access to IDA aid a full decade ago – “graduating,” in Bankspeak, to IBRD-only status. Altogether, it has borrowed about two-thirds as much from the Bank as India has.

In October 2004 I traveled from the village of Dardha, where I was halfway through fieldwork, to the village of Bagëtia, where I wanted to conduct a final round of interviews. It was a good day and the journey of 100 kilometers took “only” seven hours. Traveling together with my friend and field assistant, Klodian Rama, I left Dardha when it was still dark at 5 o'clock in the morning on the only bus going to Korça, the central town in southeastern Albania.

Although it was barely fall, the mornings at the foot of the Mal i Thatë mountains were already bitter cold. As the bus bumped over the gravel road, Klodian and I sunk deep into our jackets. Once it was light, I wiped the steamy bus window to see the dry, karstic landscape unfolding in front of us. It was plowing season and people were already out in the fields. Some, it seemed, were waiting for hired tractors, while others had taken advantage of the crisp morning air and started plowing with teams of horses or donkeys. To me, it was still striking to see that most people in the fields were women or pensioners. Young men did not work in agriculture anymore.

After two hours of a bone-rattling ride, we rolled into Korça where we hurried to catch the next minibus (furgon) to Pogradec. The minibus took us on the national asphalt road and, compared to the regular bus this morning, traveled quickly.

Since the collapse of socialism, land use has changed dramatically in Albania. When I first visited the country in 2003, one of the more obvious changes jumped out at me before I had even set a foot on Albanian soil. As the plane descended upon Rinas Airport outside of Tirana, I was struck by the mosaic of agricultural plots that came into sight. This vast area of cropland in its mix of warm colors, stood out among the settlements and wooded hills. As we descended further, I could identify individual houses, cars and even haystacks. It was then that I realized how tiny these plots were. Some, I figured, did not measure more than maybe 100 square meters. This observation was even more striking because, in preparation for my visit, I had read Örjan Sjöberg's (1991) essential book on socialist rural Albania, in which he describes the functioning of mechanized, industrial agriculture on large cooperative parcels.

The fragmentation of the collective plot structure that so struck me, however, was just one of many land use changes that occurred after the collapse of socialism. In this chapter, I provide a basic description of these changes and classify them into four distinct patterns: fragmentation of land use, inter-village intensification and extensification, intra-village intensification and extensification, and forest degradation. The following four chapters will examine each pattern, and the forces driving each pattern, in detail.

Weathering the Latest Storm

Paul Wolfowitz picked the wrong fight. The former US Deputy Secretary of Defense, a key figure behind the George W. Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, was always going to be a controversial tenth president of the World Bank Group when he succeeded James Wolfensohn in June 2005. Like his predecessor, Wolfowitz resolved that fighting corruption would be a top priority for the Bank under his leadership. This would set him up for charges of rank hypocrisy when, just two years later, he was forced to resign amid a personal ethics scandal1 and widespread opposition from Bank managers (DeYoung and Kamen 2007).

But well before his presidency ended on that sour note, Wolfowitz committed a key tactical error by provoking an unnecessary crisis in the Bank's relationship with India. In 2005, Wolfowitz unilaterally suspended a loan for a major health project in India – US$850 million for the second phase of an ongoing Reproductive and Child Health (RCH-II) project – in response to allegations of fraud and corruption in the procurement process (Padmanabhan 2006). Summing up the significance and the boldness of the move, Sebastian Mallaby wrote in The Washington Post, “This is a vast sum, and India is one of the bank's most formidable clients: It borrows a lot, has a good economic record and tells development organizations to get lost if they behave condescendingly.