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Culture and tradition: not an obstacle, but a development factor
03/2003
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Good overview with some gaps
Culture and tradition: not an obstacle, but a development factor
Gerald Faschingeder: Kultur und Entwicklung. Zur Relevanz soziokultureller Faktoren in hundert Jahren Entwicklungstheorie. (Culture and development. On the relevance of socio-cultural factors in 100 years of development theory.) Frankfurt am Main, Vienna, Brandes & Apsel, Südwind 2001, 158 pp., € 12.80, ISBN 3-86099-214-7
To come to the point straightaway, this is a good and down-to-earth book. Even if the subtitle suggests dry theory, the author manages in clear language to portray understandably, even for the uninitiated, and explain the relevance of the socio-cultural dimension in 100 years of development theory.
It is remarkable how Faschingeder elaborates the Eurocentrism and above all the cultural blindness of all great theories. Even the representatives of an autocentric development of the South discuss culture as primarily an instrument of power or an arena in which the battles over the construction of identities are fought out. Most dependency theorists also hindered the "socialist vista", as Faschingeder calls it, by seeing in culture and tradition more than only an obstacle to development towards a classless society. In that they resemble in a striking way the modernisation theorists they oppose, first and foremost Samuel Huntington, who back in the 1970s not only analysed culture's impeding influence on development but also propagated an authoritarian style of government for developing societies. Even after the dissolving of the borders between the camps, a number of authors remain captive to the Eurocentric view of the world, as the keynote title of Dieter Senghaas' book "Learn from Europe", of 1982, shows.
According to Faschingeder, the objective of a new development paradigm could be to drop a one-dimensional development goal in favour of a culturally sensitive approaching of reality. The North must learn to understand the cult of "development" as an aspect of the culture of the West, and the partners of the South should bring their experiences into the discourse more strongly. But what could this dialogue of the cultures look like in practice, and how could the integration of socio-cultural reflections in developmental theories that Faschingeder calls for succeed?
This is where the author's erudition ends and the criticism of this book begins. Faschingeder emphasises the alien in others. But he does not use the knowledge of the alterity (otherness) debate in the social sciences and cultural studies, in which among other things there was a warning against the danger of "othering", the overemphasising of the foreign – a danger to which Faschingeder himself succumbs. And although they have published books with almost the same title ("Culture and Development"), Faschingeder does not mention a word about the protagonists in the extremely heated debate in the BMZ in the 1980s on socio-cultural factors (such as Frank Bliss, Hans-Peter Müller and Uwe Simson). It is also incomprehensible that while in fact he upholds the anthropological concept of culture throughout the book, he scarcely deals with anthropological literature. Not least, E+Z published between 1995 und 1999 a number of articles on new approaches in development theory which would have broadened Faschingeder's outlook considerably.
Summing up, Faschingeder provides a good overview, and his book is suitable for getting into the subject of development theories and for the debate on culture and development. But whoever wishes to learn more must look for reading that goes into it further.
Michael Schönhuth
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