Countering Development: Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination

Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia, is home to the largest indigenous population in the country, and it is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province, where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities. Having begun ethnographic fieldwork in Cauca in 1995 and returned there annually through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity.He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Beyond the Developmental Gaze 1 1. More Than an Engaged Fieldnote: Collaboration, Dialogue, and Difference 21 2. Disaster and Diaspora: Discourses of Development and Opportunity 59 3. Development Planning: Slaves of Modernity or Agents of Change? 96 4. Local Knowledge, Different Dreams: Planning for the Next Generation 134 5. The Nasa of the North and the Tensions of Modernity 171 6. Beyond Development: The Continuing Struggle for Peace, Justice, and Inclusion 202 Conclusion. Countering Development: Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination 240 Notes 261 Bibliography 273 Index 295

About the Author :
David D. Gow is the Edgar R. Baker Professor of International Affairs and Anthropology and Director of the International Development Studies Program in The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Formerly a consultant to the World Bank and a senior associate with the World Resources Institute, he is a coeditor of Implementing Rural Development Projects: Lessons from AID and World Bank Experiences.

Review :
"Amid abundant critiques of development, salutary and incisive as they may be, two countervailing patterns are disconcertingly persistent: dominant institutions continue to implement development programs according to their own top-down plans, and many subordinated peoples continue to 'desire' development even while harboring deep skepticism of top-down solutions. David D. Gow's study moves us beyond this impasse, showing how indigenous struggles have subverted dominant plans, not by rejecting development wholesale, but rather through pragmatic, militant struggle from within. His findings are sober yet profoundly hopeful for the transformative potential of grassroots indigenous politics and, equally important, for a rejuvenated anthropology that learns from these struggles by simultaneously taking part in them."--Charles R. Hale, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin