Book Review - Economic Development and Cultural Change

VIJAYENDRA RAO AND MICHAEL WALTON, EDS. Culture and Public Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, and Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004. Pp. 442. $62.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

     The failure of economists to consider cultural phenomena has long been bemoaned. Interdisciplinary discussions of culture can get off to a rocky start as different disciplines use different conceptual frameworks; if people can move past this first stage, a long parsing of various definitions of "culture" can commence. It is unlikely that the participants in such a conversation will have the stamina to progress much further. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton's book, with considerable intellectual energy and refreshing pragmatism, manages to lay the groundwork for, and to proceed substantially with, a meaningful conversation on culture and development. They do this with the help of accomplished economists and anthropologists (Amartya Sen, Arjun Appadurai, Lourdes Arizpe, Mary Douglas); the quality of the contributions is unusually high in general.

     Editors Rao and Walton, in a helpful introductory chapter, provisionally define culture as being "about relationality"; though many authors herein attempt more belabored definitions, they are all arguably talking about relationality. Rao and Walton then ask how a consideration of social relationality changes our ideas about poverty-reduction strategies: they conclude, provocatively, that such a consciousness invites us to change the policy maker's objective from one based on equality of opportunity to one based on equality of agency. This is subtle: effective agency, especially for poor people, relies on forms of collective action, surely, but also on the "terms of recognition" (a concept of philosopher Charles Taylor, fruitfully employed by Appadurai in his chapter) that link subordinated groups to the society as a whole, terms that are all about relationality.

     The book draws upon four strands of literature at the intersection of culture and development. The oldest is the notion that in some settings culture might be an obstacle to economic development. Douglas decries all such arguments as limited because they are two-dimensional. She proposes a four-dimensional grid, and whatever its particular value, the more general point is that cultures evolve in a way that dichotomous conceptions (such as Douglass North's sophisticated institutional analysis of the diverging development paths of North and South America) have trouble admitting. A couple of empirical illustrations of her argument would be appreciated. Timur Kuran argues that people falsify their preferences to survey takers and to each other, a point he has explored at far greater length elsewhere in his work: here, Kuran points out that people might lie about their true attachment to "productivity-reducing custom" (120). Having established the logical possibility that people might not be as attached to folkloric or picturesque cultures as they say they are ("inauthentic cultural resistance" [120]), he swings rather too quickly to the assertion that people are lying about such things as a matter of empirical fact. Moreover, while Kuran argues eloquently that "some members of society will feel pressured to feign sympathy toward the agenda that appears more popular" (121), a process he associates particularly with elites, he fails to acknowledge that the kind of market-oriented, globally integrated development he favors is for many an example of an elite-favored agenda. (Indeed, in this connection, Simon Harragin in his chapter calls for greater anthropological attention to the culture of the aid agencies themselves, a call that could be extended to the community of discourse that generates current development policy prescriptions.) Elsewhere, the book explores the possibility that political action can undermine or weaken cultural practices related to gender discrimination (in the chapter by Monica Das Gupta et al.) or inequality (in the chapter by Fernando Calderón and Alicia Szmukler).

     A second conversational strand is more recent analysis of anthropological phenomena such as institutions that function (not necessarily explicitly) as risk-sharing arrangements. While a first wave of such research might have contented itself with uncovering the underlying economic rationality of such mechanisms, Anita Abraham and Jean-Philippe Platteau, in their chapter, point out the dangers of idealizing such social formations. Donor-promoted participatory decision making, for example, might founder on the profoundly antidemocratic nature of premarket tribal societies, or capture by elites in socially differentiated peasant societies. Harragin's analysis of the donor response to the 1998 famine in southern Sudan echoes this concern, demonstrating that targeted food aid designed without reference to local norms of sharing and desert failed to stave off crisis.

     A third set of arguments connects the importance of culturally appropriate development policy to the notion of culture as a fundamental component of economic development, as exemplified by the United Nations Development Programme's 2004 Human Development Report (Cultural Liberty in Today's Diverse World) or by the institutional history sketched by Arizpe in her chapter. Sen, in this vein, insists on the importance of learning from each other, within and across societies, through deliberation. Sabina Alkire's chapter poses a stark and useful question: would the World Bank's activity be different if it were guided by the principles of Sen's work on capabilities? Her answer is straightforward (quite different) and offers some genuinely useful guidelines (e.g., the Bank might systematically make available information on a project's likely probability of success based on past experience with similar projects). Jenkins discusses understanding of cultures of sexuality and intravenous drug use as being necessary to successful HIV/AIDS policy. She is persuasive in arguing that much policy making is ignorant of the (sub)cultures, though it nevertheless appears that a lack of success in HIV/AIDS policy making is at least as much due to hostility toward these subcultures as it is to lack of knowledge about them.

     A fourth variant, relatively underdeveloped in this book, is the economic analysis of cultural activity including forms of artistic creation (culture-as-concerti rather than culture-as-common-practice). Arjo Klamer's chapter is a valiant attempt to rally his cocontributors to his cause. Indeed, many contributors insist that the cornerstone of more culturally informed development policy making is the creation of what Calderón and Szmukler call "deliberative politics" in their chapter, mechanisms for debate about the values and aims of society. Their examples have to do with the rules of local government, but such deliberation takes place in many forums, and the production and consumption of artistic and creative goods is an especially fertile site for negotiating competing views of the good life. And these pursuits are not everywhere limited to the few: Douglas reminds us that in quite poor societies, broad swathes of the population devote time to "art, music, recitation, dance, song, riddling, ritual prayer, adjudication, philosophy—occupations which elsewhere are the privilege of the leisured classes" (90). Furthermore, Das Gupta et al. demonstrate the importance of mass media (purveyors of cultural goods and services) to changing social views about women's roles, for example.

     These are heterogeneous strands with which to weave a unified whole. There are, indeed, some tensions that merit further exploration. Some writers feel that some cultural practices might be inimical to development; others, that "development" can be defined only in terms of an objective function of each society's choosing. Some insist on deliberative democracy; others note that some social structures are not essentially democratic. Perhaps the hardest question left unanswered has to do with what might be called culture's "incommensurability." How is the value of cultural goods different from that of other goods? How do societies evaluate trade-offs between material capabilities and sociocultural capabilities? It is to this book's credit that it has posed these questions and provided readers with critical resources that might help them formulate answers.