The Dictionary of Human Geography

The Dictionary of Human Geography by Michael Watts Page A

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Authors: Michael Watts
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others by efficient systems of economic production and exchange, and by capable systems of govern ment. Development presumes an extension of scale in social life. With this comes a surrender of power to experts and more abstract social forces such as the financial system or the state. Anti developmentalists have opposed these notions for several reasons. As early as 1908, Mohandas Gandhi raged against the introduction of manufacturing into India in his essay Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, 1997 [1908]). It was dehumanizing, he said, and removed the possibility of living a virtuous life, which revolved around self provisioning and religious contemplation in a village setting. There are echoes of this complaint in Tolstoy and Ruskin and other parts of the Western pastoral tradition. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modern anti developmentalism continues to draw on Gandhi, but it also draws on more contemporary critiques by Schumacher, Illich, Berry and others. For the Indian public intellectual Ashis Nandy (2003), develop mentalism is a violent set of social practices that denies space to other accounts of being human. The violence that Nandy refers to is an originary violence that resides in the will to power that development must embody. By this yardstick, efforts to promote human develop ment or sustainaBLe deveLopment are oxy moronic. Development is opposed to humanity and to forms of life lived in harmony with other beings, and hence the call for its negation. Other versions of anti development strike a more populist note. Development is condemned less for its intrinsic violence for creating what Esteva and Prakash (1998) call the ?cold calling card mentality of the modern West? than for its self satisfied service on behalf of the global rich. In the words of Gus tavo Esteva, ?If you live in Rio or Mexico City, you need to be very rich or very stupid not to notice that development stinks.' (NEW PARAGRAPH) Critics of anti development believe that it is all but impossible to opt out of some version of development, and/or that some versions of development have empowered poorer people in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Botswana and Taiwan (Kiely, 1999). Life expectancies in India and China increased by more than twenty five years over the period from 1950 to 2000, the so called ?Age of Development'. If there is room for criticism of ?the? development discourse, it needs to be promoted within the framework of post deveLopment, or as a series of (NEW PARAGRAPH) alternatives to mainstream conceptions of development. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nandy (2003); Power (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

anti-globalization
A set of political positions that articulate resistance and alternatives to neo liberal or capitalist gLoBaLization. A range of international initiatives have cohered since the 1970s, such as the international anti corporate boycott of Nestle between 1977 and 1984, the riots against internationaL monet ary fuNd (imf) structural adjustment programmes throughout the global South during the 1980s and the formation of Via Campesina an international farmers? network (Starr, 2005). A key moment was the emer gence in 1994 of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, which has demanded indigenous rights and the democratization of Mexican civil and political society, as well as articulating both a critique of the globally dom inant economic process of neo LiBeraLism, and a vision of an alternative politics (Routledge, 1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emergence of neo liberal globalization as the globally hegemonic economic model has prompted the upscaling of previously local struggles between citizens and governments, international institutions and transnational corporations to the international level, as marginalized groups and sociaL movements have begun to forge global networks of action and solidarity. ?Anti globalization? is a mis nomer, since such groups struggle for inclusive, democratic forms of globalization, using the

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