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A Reflexive Postdevelopment Critique of Development Knowledge : Exploring Bases for Alliance with Development Professionals

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A Reflexive Postdevelopment Critique of Development Knowledge : Exploring Bases for Alliance with Development Professionals University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2006 A reflexive postdevelopment critique of development knowledge : exploring bases for alliance with development professionals. Peter A. Tamas University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Tamas, Peter A., "A reflexive postdevelopment critique of development knowledge : exploring bases for alliance with development professionals." (2006). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 2414. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/2414 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Massachusetts Amherst Library Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/reflexivepostdevOOtama This is an authorized facsimile, made from the microfilm master cop\ of the original dissertation or master thesis published by UMI. The bibliographic information for this thesis is contained in UMI's Dissertation Abstracts database, the only central source for accessing almost every doctoral dissertation accepted in North America since 1861. T TA/TT Dissertation UIVll Services FromrPro^vuest COMPANY 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346 USA 800.521.0600 734.761.4700 web www.il.proquest.com Printed in 2007 by digital xerographic process on acid-tree paper A REFLEXIVE POSTDEVELOPMENT CRITIQUE OF DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE: EXPLORING BASES FOR ALLIANCE WITH DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONALS A Dissertation Presented by PETER A. TAMAS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION September 2006 School of Education UMI Number: 3245360 Copyright 2006 by Tamas, Peter A. All rights reserved INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted Also if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI ® UMI Microform 3245360 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 © Copyright by Peter A. Tamas 2006 All Rights Reserved A REFLEXIVE POSTDEVELOPMENT CRITIQUE OF DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE: EXPLORING BASES FOR ALLIANCE WITH DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONALS A Dissertation Presented by PETER A. TAMAS Approved as to style and content by: Sangeeta Kamat. Chair Julie Graham. Member Ann Ferguson. Member Joseph Berger. Member Christine B. McCormick. Dean School of Education ' A REFLEXIVE POSTDEVELOPMENT CRITIQUE OF DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE: EXPLORING BASES FOR ALLIANCE WITH DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONALS A Dissertation Presented by PETER A. TAMAS Approved as to style and content by: Sangeeta Kamat, Chair Julie Graham, Member Ann Ferguson, Member Joseph Berger, Member 1 l A/VA-V-v— kr Li Christine B. McCormick, Dean School of Education To Chizu without whose constant encouragement this would never have been done. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I started my doctoral program I did not have the ability to ask the questions that preoccupy me today. I sometimes envy my former state. Asking how one might best use information technologies in the context of distance education programs in Bolivia is a far more manageable question. Today I am troubled by questions that chip at the legitimacy of my attempts to redress inequity. Every way I turn 1 find that the roles held by my former mentors perpetuate the inequities that concern me. How I managed to move from that position to where I find myself today is a longer story than 1 would like to admit and I feel deep gratitude and occasional resentment towards those who disabused me of the clarity of my former conviction. First. 1 owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr. Kamat whose arrival at the Cen- ter for International Education created the terrain from which it was possible to rec- ognize as strange and entirely unpleasant the only path to service I had formerly been able to see. With that recognition began the wrenching process of dis-identifieation. the confusion that necessarily attends any theoretical exercise that bites, firmly, its author, and the as yet incomplete and certainly flailing attempts to piece together a replacement of substance sufficient to authorize action. This process of re-articulation started with postcolonial texts introduced to me by Dr. Kamat. The first substantive courses 1 took that worked from a post- perspective were the senior seminars offered by Drs. Calas and Smircich. These, forever, removed the possibility of my working in the field of development as the naive practitioner my program would make of me. I then took methods courses in Women's studies convinced that their perspective, how ought we to do research that benefits us. tar- better served me than those offered in the Center for International Education, which are concerned with how might we do research which will enable us to help them. In that study I came to rely heavily on the guidance of Dr. Ferguson. Her absolute comfort in her work which explores how individuals might effectively form bridge identities suggested how I might proceed. It is at this point that I encountered the work of the Community Economies Col- lective. These students. Kenan Ercel. Yahya Madra. Ceren Ozselguk. Joe Rebello and Malilia Safri (with the occasional and forceful contribution of Dr. Amargilio) worked in the space created by Dr. Graham. They accept that the dominant nar- rative of capitalism is important, but they refuse to limit their engagement to the terms specified by its rejection. They are interested in the somewhat less depressing task of exploring the myriad of perhaps non-capitalist relations by which people sus- tained themselves. Her work, and the community she has created, have enabled me to explore, with perhaps handicapping uncertainty, how we might think differently about the place of the hegemonic narrative that dominates the formal discourse of international social and economic development. My greatest debt, however, has thus far gone entirely unmentioned. C’hizu has watched the incredible variety of mechanisms I have invoked to defer engaging in this research. Through that process she has consistently and firmly required that I not avoid this task that I find somehow so difficult. It is to her. ultimately, that this dissertation must be dedicated. ABSTRACT A REFLEXIVE POSTDEVELOPMENT CRITIQUE OF DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE: EXPLORING BASES FOR ALLIANCE WITH DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONALS SEPTEMBER 2006 PETER A. TAMAS B.E.S.. UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO M.A.. UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH Ecl.D.. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Sangeeta Karnat This dissertation accepts that the way that international social and economic development is taught, practised and critiqued condemns its practitioners to co-opt those who engage them in alliances into becoming instruments for the extension of western hegemony. It demonstrates that this analysis and its outcome are inevitable conclusions given the Enlightenment approaches used in the theory and practice and the postdevelopment theory deployed in the critique of development. This dissertation argues that the work of Jacques Lacan provides a foundation for training for. the practice of and the critique of development that escapes these limitations. Initial exploration for dissertation was composed within the work of Michel Fou- cault. This perspective made it possible to see the effects of the partial use made of Foucault by postdevelopment critics. The gap between this potential and their use vii justified field research. Research involved an iterative sequence of interviews with de- velopment professionals that engaged both their accounts of the relationship between knowledge and action in development and accounts of their own production and re- production as development professionals. Following the Foucauldian argument that there are a plurality of discourses, the content of these interviews was synthesized into narratives that evinced a variety of relationships between knowledge and action. Actions, however, are necessarily justified on the terms of. and therefore reinforce, the dominant discourse. In addition to discussing the relationship between knowledge and action, subjects were also found to discuss dispositions like naivete and cynicism. These were not anticipated nor are they well accommodated in Enlightenment or Foucauldian frame- works. This surplus was productively engaged through the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's notions of fantasy and the unconscious are found to provide a terrain within which it is possible to suggest how development practitioners can be engaged as allies in a manner that does not result in the extension of western
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