Area of inquiry (group 3): development practice questions.

Ferguson studied the Thaba-Tseka project, a livestock and agriculture programme run in the Lesotho highlands between 1975 and 1984. It reached almost none of its production targets, yet it built roads and installed a permanent government presence in a district that had had little of one. In his 1990 analysis, this outcome is best described as

• an implementation failure that closer supervision by the funding agency would have been able to prevent
• evidence that households in the district had rejected the aims of the project from the outset
• a side effect in which state administration expanded while poverty was recast as a technical problem
• proof that the sums committed were too small for a programme of this ambition to succeed

Answer: a side effect in which state administration expanded while poverty was recast as a technical problem

Ferguson's argument is not that the project simply failed: its unintended effect was to extend bureaucratic power and to present a regional economy shaped by migrant labour in South Africa as a local technical deficit. Reading the case as poor planning misses the political work that the failure performed.

Escobar's 1995 study traced how, from the late 1940s onwards, international institutions began to describe whole regions as 'underdeveloped', to rank them by income per head and to assign their improvement to planners and economists. His central claim about that vocabulary is that

• it produced the very object it claimed merely to describe, along with the expertise entitled to treat it
• it was broadly accurate at the time but has since been overtaken by better statistical measures of well-being
• it was invented by the governments of the poorer countries themselves in order to attract foreign investment
• it mattered little, since outcomes are shaped by the sums transferred rather than by the words used

Answer: it produced the very object it claimed merely to describe, along with the expertise entitled to treat it

Post-development analysis treats 'underdevelopment' as a discourse: a way of naming and measuring that makes certain interventions obvious and certain expertise indispensable. The common misreading is to take Escobar as saying only that aid does not work, which leaves the categories themselves unexamined.

Ong carried out fieldwork around 1979 and 1980 among young Malay women recruited from villages into Japanese-owned electronics plants in a Malaysian free trade zone, part of an export-led industrialisation drive promoted by the state as development. Episodes of spirit possession broke out on the shop floor and halted production, and management responded by calling in both ritual specialists and company doctors. Her analysis reads these episodes as

• a sign that factory employment was medically unsuitable for workers of rural origin
• an idiom available to the women in which the discipline of the shop floor could be contested
• a survival of village belief that industrial work had not yet had the time to erase
• an individual disorder best explained by the length of the shifts and by the noise of the plant

Answer: an idiom available to the women in which the discipline of the shop floor could be contested

Ong treats possession as meaningful protest expressed in an available cultural idiom rather than as a symptom of maladjustment, and the response of management, which addressed both the ritual specialist and the clinic, shows that the plant itself took that idiom seriously. Explaining the episodes as backwardness reverses her argument.

Scott lived in the Kedah rice village he called Sedaka in the late 1970s, after double-cropping and combine harvesters arrived under a state-backed programme. Better-off households gained, while poorer households lost harvesting work and responded with gossip about stinginess, quiet pilfering and slow work rather than organised protest. Scott's term for this pattern is

• false consciousness, since those who lost work had adopted the values of the households above them
• a moral economy of subsistence that the mechanisation of the harvest had left substantially intact
• class formation, since the village had split into two openly opposed political camps
• everyday forms of resistance, that is low-profile refusal that stops short of open confrontation

Answer: everyday forms of resistance, that is low-profile refusal that stops short of open confrontation

Scott's point is that where open confrontation is too costly, resistance takes low-profile forms that rarely enter official records yet constrain what elites can actually do. Calling the same behaviour false consciousness assumes the villagers did not perceive their loss, which his material contradicts.

A planning document argues that a region remains poor because its households save little, hold to custom and have not yet adopted the attitudes found in wealthier economies, and that outside investment will move them along the path those economies took. Which objection to this reasoning follows from the political economy approach in anthropology?

• It underestimates how quickly attitudes change once new technologies have been made available
• It locates the cause inside the region and treats one historical path as the route every economy takes
• It relies on income data, whereas anthropologists measure poverty through health and schooling indicators
• It fails to specify how much investment would be needed for the change that it predicts

Answer: It locates the cause inside the region and treats one historical path as the route every economy takes

Political economy places the cause in the relations that tie the region to labour migration, debt and commodity prices, whereas the document places it in the households themselves and assumes a single ladder. The objection concerns where the cause is located, not which indicators are used.

Li examined interventions in the uplands of Sulawesi and described a step that any programme must take before it can act: the situation has to be presented as a problem with a boundary, a cause and a remedy that the programme is equipped to supply. She calls this rendering technical. What follows from it, on her account, is that

• programmes designed in this way achieve their stated targets more often than those that are not
• the framing excludes the relations of land and labour that produced the problem, since these are not things the programme can fix
• the technical framing is imposed by the recipients rather than by the agencies designing the intervention, who insist that their difficulties be put in terms an agency can act on
• any problem can be addressed once sufficient expertise has been assembled to describe it accurately

Answer: the framing excludes the relations of land and labour that produced the problem, since these are not things the programme can fix

The exclusion is not a failure of intelligence: an agency that cannot redistribute land will not define landlessness as the problem. That is why the same diagnoses reappear across projects, and why the political question is displaced rather than answered.