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The Teacher, the Activist, and the Maulvi: Emancipatory visions and insurgent citizenship among Gujjars in Himachal Pradesh
- RICHARD AXELBY
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- Modern Asian Studies / Volume 54 / Issue 3 / May 2020
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- 10 September 2019, pp. 868-897
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- May 2020
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Exploring the intersection of state, religion, and ethnicity, this article considers the opportunities for individual and collective advancement available to Muslim Gujjars in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the lives of three prominent members of the community—a teacher, a political activist, and a maulvi—it considers their respective orientations to the state and their relationships with their fellow Gujjars, to illustrate the different ways in which Gujjars have sought to transcend their marginal and subordinated position as an ethnic and religious minority. With state-promoted schemes of affirmative action and reservation offering only limited opportunities for social and economic advancement, we see how Gujjars have responded to their continued marginalization, first through political mobilization as an ethnic group and, more recently, through the establishment of Islamic educational institutions and association with Tablighi Jama'at. This leads to an evaluation of the emancipatory potentials and contradictions of insurgent citizenship when mobilized around specific aspects of ethnic and religious identity. Against a backdrop of economic liberalization and accompanying shifts in civil society, I show how the distribution of rewards that derive from strategies of assimilation, engagement, and withdrawal are structured in particular ways, including by class and gender.
6 - Hierarchies of knowledge
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 05 November 2012
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- 18 October 2012, pp 131-156
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Summary
The creation and application of new ideas and technologies entail complex and open-ended processes. Anthropologists probe how the production, use and evaluation of technology are socially situated. This means critically examining the cultural meanings that attach to varied knowledge forms, the social systems within which they are embedded and the impacts that new technologies have upon constellations of social relations. In short, since technology is never value-free or neutral, it is highly likely to have significant political and economic consequences shaped by varied local settings.
Key points covered by this chapter
Within the many cultures that exist within the development industry value judgements are made about knowledge and technology.
We consider: What is technology? What is the relationship between technology and society? How does culture influence technological innovation? And how does technological development influence culture? What role does technology play in development?
In contrast to the technological determinism of mainstream science, anthropology recognises all forms of knowledge and technology as being embedded in social systems.
As a challenge to the ethnocentrism of many orthodox approaches, anthropological perspectives see knowledge as being contested, recognise and respect its many different forms and promote hybridity.
Some anthropologists working in development aim to assess local needs and resources and ensure that externally originating technology responds to each context. Others critique the way that political processes are seen as knowledge deficit problems requiring technical solutions.
In Development World we find that science, and its applications through technology, have been treated as being the bedrock of progress. If low levels of development are identified by the presence of poverty, hunger or disease, then certain forms of scientific knowledge and advanced technology can symbolically represent a higher level of development. They are also a large part of the means by which it may be achieved; science has been seen as synonymous with, or at least required for, technological advancement and human progress. In some contexts and agencies development is even understood as the appliance to human society and government of the scientific principles of rationality, empiricism and enlightenment. And central to the development project of modernisation is the practical application of scientific knowledge in the form of technology.
Notes
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 234-237
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4 - The elusive poor
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 05 November 2012
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- 18 October 2012, pp 88-106
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Summary
The reduction of poverty has come to be understood as the key object of the development enterprise. It is one of the taken-for-granted, ‘silent traditions’ (Bourdieu 1977: 167) of development professionals that the goal of international aid and development is to free the poor from poverty. But who are the poor? What defines them? And who gets to decide?
Key points covered by this chapter
Predominant perspectives in development bureaucracies characterise poverty as absolute (rather than relative), such as living on less than $1.25 per day.
Populist accounts advocate that poor people should be listened to, their knowledge should be respected and their participation encouraged. However, these accounts can be naive when it comes to the subject of power hierarchies.
Both Marxist and feminist theories move beyond blaming the poor for their exploitation. The structural power relations explain poverty and need to be reversed.
Anthropologists have been influenced by all three of these traditions, but add their own dimension. They have a relational, historical perspective that sees poverty as embedded in culture, ideology and politics.
These various perspectives are underpinned by different ideas about the characteristics of poverty but also ‘the poor’. Such ideas about poor people fit within broader classifications of people, and the representation of their interests, that often deserve to be questioned.
Development professionals have invested hugely in describing the characteristics of poverty and determining how it can be measured. In this chapter we will explain these various attempts at identifying the elusive poor and how anthropologists have critiqued them. The idea of development depends on the existence of groups of people in need of assistance. In this sense ‘the poor’ are an imaginary group fashioned out of the needs and practices of those who hope to develop them.
List of acronyms
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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9 - Imagining the future
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 05 November 2012
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- 18 October 2012, pp 213-228
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Summary
This book is a collection of anthropological perspectives on development. Having introduced the multiple agencies and actors that inhabit Development World, we described some of the most significant and influential aspects of their thinking. The world of development is full of layers, tensions and even contradictions. ‘Development’ is, at different times, used as a synonym for ‘poverty reduction’, ‘rights’, ‘science and technology’, ‘growth’ and ‘freedom’. Planned development takes place within a context of development in a broader sense – change brought about capitalistic expansion and globalisation. We need to explain why development can be so many things to so many people and how thinking is shaped by institutional practices. In this final chapter we will look at how the promoters of development create and make sense of the future and finally what anthropologists can contribute to our understanding of development.
The spaces between
Someone once described music as the space between notes. Astronomers often see the universe in the pull of total control on the one side and total chaos on the other; economists look to the space between supply and demand to determine value and price. Should we not do the same?
(Severs 2001: 103)Space is assumed to be unimportant and empty. But it can contain much of significance that is ignored; it is often the unexplained and unexplored between two points in time or place, between concepts or between layers of experience, within which social life is experienced. At the same time, the points or poles are not only culturally constructed, along with the space within and between them, but contested and continually so. This book has shown how anthropologists can uncover the relevance of ‘the spaces between’. A fuller understanding of Development World is revealed when attention turns to the overlooked and unconsidered within and between gaps, layers and contradictions.
2 - Anthropologists engaged
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 27-45
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The origins of anthropology pre-date those of development as we know it. Charting the history of engagement, this chapter outlines the opportunities and dilemmas that face anthropologists as they seek to apply their distinctive approach and specialist knowledge to the world of development.
Key points covered by this chapter
This chapter charts anthropology’s evolving relationship with applied work from the nineteenth century to the present.
A historical review of the changing relationship between anthropology and development allows us to understand concerns over engagement and point to some of the ethical challenges manifest in applied work.
Opportunities for the application of anthropological expertise to development work are outlined: anthropologists have provided important contextual knowledge, assessed social impacts of development schemes and advocated for indigenous rights. The limitations of these approaches are also described.
Central to this review is a consideration of the ethical, political and moral considerations that arise when anthropology is applied to development.
In recognising the disciplinary and political compromises that arise from engagement, we consider how such pitfalls might be navigated.
From the discipline’s establishment in the late nineteenth century, anthropology was disinclined to deal with the idea of ‘development’. In part this reluctance stems from the implication that societies can be ordered hierarchically along a line of evolutionary progress. But no man (or culture) is an island and anthropologists have been forced to contemplate the complex processes by which communities are incorporated into wider political and economic systems. The notion that anthropologists should engage in applied work has an equally troubled history. For some, engagement involves an implicit acceptance of particular regimes of change. Other anthropologists have promoted the notion that their understandings could be turned to practical purposes. Over the second half of the twentieth century opportunities for applied work expanded as development grew into a global project. Engaging in development, anthropologists have established a role for themselves as social development advisors capable of injecting a degree of cultural appropriateness into external interventions. Having accepted these positions, anthropologists were left well placed to turn their attention to the institutions, projects and programmes of the development industry itself. Whether writing from inside or outside the development industry, anthropologists have been highly vocal in their critiques of the bureaucratic practices and cultural assumptions through which the world is reshaped.
Anthropology and Development
- Culture, Morality and Politics in a Globalised World
- Emma Crewe, Richard Axelby
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In recent decades international development has grown into a world-shaping industry. But how do aid agencies work and what do they achieve? How does aid appear to the adults and children who receive it? And why has there been so little improvement in the position of the poor? Viewing aid and development from anthropological perspectives gives illuminating answers to questions such as these. This essential textbook reveals anthropologists' often surprising findings and details ethnographic case studies on the cultures of development. The authors use a fertile literature to examine the socio-political organisation of aid communities, agencies and networks, as well as the judgements they make about each other. The everyday practice of development work is about negotiating power and culture, but in vastly different ways in different contexts and for different social groups. Exploring the spaces between policy and practice, success and failure, the future and the past, this book provides a rounded understanding of development work that suggests new moral and political possibilities for an increasingly globalised world.
Index
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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5 - Human rights and cultural fantasies
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 107-130
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Key points covered by this chapter
Universal Human Rights have become an influential organising principle for government, development and aid.
Within development agencies certain aspects of identity are accorded priority. These aspects of identity are recognised in certain ways and take on particular forms within a framework of human rights.
Anthropologists have problematised the idea of universal rights through listening to the diversity of perspectives, and dynamism of life experiences, of various rights-holders.
Through an examination of child rights theory and practice, we show how assumptions underlying rights can ignore context, specificity and dissent.
Child protection projects provide a case study of the limits to rights frameworks, including their bias towards individuals rather than groups.
The way that communities are constructed, by development agencies but also by communities themselves, reveals that they and their rights are cultural and contestable, rather than natural and beyond dispute.
In the mid 1990s the international donor community realigned their policies to place a new emphasis on the promotion of globalised human rights. No longer were human rights an indicator of a certain level of development; now rights were seen as a device that could be used to actively promote development. The interlinking of human rights with development and poverty reduction aims has now been adopted by multilateral agencies, such as the UNDP (1998), and bilateral agencies, including SIDA (2001) and DFID (2000). USAID includes the advancement of human rights and freedom as the first bullet point in its vision. At the UN 2005 World Summit, member states made a commitment to integrate the promotion and protection of human rights into national policies. Even the World Bank, having initially sheltered behind the ‘non-political’ clause of its articles of agreement, has recently moved to include guarantees of civil and political rights within its poverty reduction strategies. National and local-level non-governmental and civil society organisations have been mobilised to advance claims to particular rights. The practical impact of this new fashion has been a repositioning of goals away from ‘welfare and wellbeing’ and towards ‘rights and responsibilities’. Development is no longer to be seen as a gift to be given; it is a right that must be claimed.
1 - Introduction
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 1-26
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Summary
The emotional geography of development spans the twin poles of hope and despair. Development is a powerfully affective world that touches us all. Despair at failure, corruption and enduring suffering sit alongside hope invested into how we imagine the future, but they are not the only responses. Guilt, anger, cynicism and piety all charge development encounters with emotion and morality.
Key points covered by this chapter
This chapter outlines different theoretical bases by which policy-makers, scholars and practitioners have sought to understand development.
We describe how ways of thinking about development influence practice.
We look at a number of points of similarity between globalised narratives and describe how these common assumptions may limit understanding of the complex reality of change.
We outline the basis of recent anthropological approaches to the study and practice of development.
Finally the main themes and the chapters of the book are introduced.
Viewed from the comfort of social and geographical distance, economically ‘poor countries’ are conjured up as places of unrelenting misery by the US and European media. They are beset by social breakdown and endemic corruption, where state failure results in endless cycles of civil conflict. Grinding poverty and senseless violence, ‘biblical’ famines, disasters and killer diseases are depicted. Poor, Third World or developing countries are populated by the starving, the destitute, the displaced and the marginalised. They live in unsanitary conditions, are unable to access clean water and lack adequate standards of healthcare. To make the subject of development ‘newsworthy’, the mainstream media tend to employ extreme and sensationalist images of suffering and despair. But such portrayals are not restricted to news reports. Fundraising drives and awareness-raising campaigns also rely on the evocation of despair to provoke a reaction. Shocking images are accompanied by passionate pleas for support.
References
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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3 - The social and political organisation of aid and development
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 46-87
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Key points covered by this chapter
This chapter outlines the shape of Development World through the labelling of the people and places within it. We explain what anthropologists find problematic in geographical classification of development.
We introduce the key state and government categories – governments giving aid, states receiving aid and global intergovernmental agencies.
We describe the non-state actors within the categories of the private sector, civil society and constituent groups (beneficiaries, activists and development professionals).
The changing governance and architecture of aid is discussed. States are being displaced by both NGOs and global intergovernmental agencies and aid is being globalised.
Finally institutional global partnerships are explored, particularly between international and national NGOs, through the lens of race and nationality.
How big is the world of aid? A crude measurement of the scale might consider how much money is involved. But such measures raise further questions about what exactly should be classified as aid money, what should be included and what should not. According to the World Bank all aid amounted to $457 billion in 2007, $294 billion in 2008 and $390 billion in 2009. But these figures include debt relief. They also seem rather small when compared to the cost of the Iraq war at $500 billion. Remittances are almost as big as aid; in 2009 $319 billion of remittances were sent to the ‘developing’ world. Although OECD member countries pledged to spend 0.7% on aid, only Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands had achieved this by 2009. The amount of aid received per head ranges from $1 in Brazil to $12,923 in Niue (a small island country in the South Pacific), while the percentage of Gross National Income that is aid spans 50% for Burundi to less than 1% for South Africa. In 2009 the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation gave $2.5 billion to global causes while the Ford Foundation disbursed $490 million. Most foundations, trusts, companies or individuals give far smaller amounts but the vast number of donors means that large sums are raised. The American Red Cross spends over $3,422 million, while Food for the Poor £1,516 million and World Vision $1,206 million. Save the Children’s income was $1,276 million in 2008, 31% of which came from individuals. ActionAid alone has 320,000 supporters in Europe.
Appendix: challenging questions arising from this book
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- 18 October 2012, pp 229-233
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7 - The moralities of production and exchange
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 157-182
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Summary
This chapter examines the notion that development is promoted through integration into national and international capitalist markets. In these terms development is an economic process of global interconnectedness making trade and trade policy vital tools in attaining development objectives. Over much of the past half century international development policy has been premised on a belief in the freedom to pursue individual economic interests as the solution to the problems of poverty and hunger.
Key points covered by this chapter
Contrasting the agricultural producers of developing economies with the financial powerhouses of global capitalism, this chapter examines the distinct positions and perspectives of varied buyers and sellers, producers and consumers.
Recognising markets as more than simple arenas of economic exchange, anthropology traces the social relationships and cultural norms that underpin the workings of markets.
The globalisation of production and exchange is driven by political relationships as much as economic ones; outcomes are shaped by moral, historical and social contexts.
When differing interests and aims are incorporated into global systems of exchange, inequalities can be deepened. We review the possibilities for achieving more equitable impact.
To many policy-makers, development requires the expansion of trade. The argument runs as follows: greater exposure to global competition lowers prices for consumers, promotes specialisation and raises productivity among producers. Inclusion into the expanding global market furthers the diffusion of new techniques, products, ideas and capital and permits people and nations to trade themselves out of poverty. But the broad narrative of market integration and economic growth may conceal other possibilities. From US$59 billion in 1948, the total volume of good, services and merchandise traded internationally in 2009 was valued at US$12.421 trillion (WTO 2010: 11). The global movement of goods and produce, capital, information, technology and people suggest a world that is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. Yet, over the same time period, Africa’s share of world merchandise exports has fallen from 7.3% to 3.2%. For Central and South America the figures are from 11.3% to 3.8%. Economic globalisation is clearly progressing more quickly in some regions than in others. However, statistics are malleable. The champions of economic globalisation still present the history of global exchange and consumption as an inevitable progression towards greater interdependence and shared prosperity.
8 - The politics of policy and practice
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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- 18 October 2012, pp 183-212
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Key points covered by this chapter
Delving beneath the surface of Development World, this chapter looks at various ways that socio-political relations are created by development ideas, policies, rules and encounters.
The main ordering processes are: the creation of rules and policies; simplification and measurement to tame the unruly; mechanisms of separation and exclusion; and temporal and spatial displacement.
While ordering processes suggest convergence, they are often contradictory, contested and transformed within different sites. Divergence and convergence coexist.
We make the case for going beyond ‘power functionalism’, whereby all action is seen as either a strategy to consolidate or resist power, and stress both the importance of understanding specific social relations but also the moral aspects of politics.
Anthropology often starts with the views of the people involved in a particular world. Applied to the world of aid and development, anthropologists have worked to understand the perspectives of farmers, traders, slum dwellers, nomadic-pastoralists, street children, migrants, the poor, marginalised and excluded. Increasingly, they have also tried to understand the culture of development professionals. But to do so is harder than it sounds for a number of reasons. First of all, these groups, and individuals within them, hold highly divergent views of the world; even individuals express endless contradictions, and ambivalent or ambiguous perspectives. Secondly, people’s articulation of their views cannot be read as a mirror of their reality, because what they say can be spoken through a filter of self-publicity, wishful thinking or politeness. Thirdly, what people say they do or think is usually completely different from what they actually do, as anthropologists find out through observation. So to get beneath the surface appearances of social life, anthropologists have to interpret and make sense of multiple perspectives, often trying to look at the way people organise themselves from a more detached, and sometimes lateral, or analogous angle. In this and the next chapter we take a step further away from (or underneath) the emic perspectives (see Chapter 4) on development ideas and practices and explore them through a different lens.
Contents
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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Preface and acknowledgements
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Anthropology and Development
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Preface and acknowledgements
Welcome to ‘Development World’. The pursuit of development has become a global concern and no one is unaffected. Aspiring to manage change in economic, political, social and cultural arenas, development is a world-shaping project.
The world of development is neither simple nor self-contained. Its cultures, moralities, languages, rituals and symbolic practices relate to what is already there. And, like any political world, it is subject to considerable tensions as differences emerge in the interests and attitudes of its diverse peoples. As geo-political realities shift and understandings of poverty and progress take on new meanings, the old geographical and social divisions – such as developing and developed – can no longer be sustained.
Defining development globally allows us to consider development from a wide range of different perspectives. Moving from the global to the local, from policy makers to farmers, it is a subject well suited to anthropological investigation. This book offers an anthropological guide to Development World. In it we explore anthropology’s varied engagement with and understandings of institutions and social groups. It explains the complex relationships linking donors to government ofi cials and development professionals to project beneficiaries. Anthropological perspectives offer ways of understanding the value judgements, social realities and social practices that make up the world of aid and development.
Frontmatter
- Emma Crewe, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Richard Axelby, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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