To what extent has development theory depended on notions of superiority?

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To what extent has development theory depended on notions of superiority?

‘…and when a superior race, with a superior idea of work and order, advances, its state will be progressive’ Disraeli in Tancred; or the new crusade (1881) in Crang (1998:67)

Superiority is all about power. Undercutting it, using it and reproducing it. This ability to do work can have various contexts, but perhaps the most interesting one (in relation to this essay) concerns knowledge. Relating this use of power to how development theory processes its ideas reveals where these ideas come from, what they have accomplished and what they may produce.

The West’s influence on these ideas has been vast, but to problemitize the argument, the West itself has not always constituted its present areal extent from Europe to North America, Australia and New Zealand. At the turn of the 16th century the West, as Europe alone, discovered ‘itself’ as well as its ‘other’ through mercantilism. It discovered ‘itself’, or more specifically increased its own self-awareness, as ‘identity is fundamental to differentiation’. Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492 and Europe’s response was to try and conceptualise the Americas using any material possible; textual accounts, poetry and artworks (the media of the time). The rhetoric of this material was not subjective as artists were drawing upon their own societies to explain the reasons behind their actions. According to the natives these reasons may have been invasion, theft and domination – even to the conquerors and their sponsors – the reasons may have been the same, but to the general questioning public in Europe, the acts were legitimised by their need to help and civilise lower orders of humanity in the ‘new world’.

This notion of colonies requiring help and their inhabitants being needy was the result of their decline in character. Initially they were viewed as exotic cultural equals. During the enlightenment, trade and commerce began to grow and the trope of the era concerning people of the ‘new world’ depicted them as innocent or noble savages. Later, into the 19th century as capitalist production began to emerge into its prime; the ‘other’ (now involving viewpoints from the USA: part of the West) was sequestered to being seen as an uncivilised savage. Primitive languages were also thought to be a hindrance for the colonised peoples as expressing higher thought processes was an incapability of theirs.. An example of these factors unifying and creating prejudice can be seen with respect to the Australian aboriginals who were described as exotic by Dutch explorers, later thought of as objects of amusement and finally, aided through anthropometrics, regarded as pests which led to their demise e.g. in Tasmania.

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This process of ‘othering’ is a result of the Self, (in the case of the West) projecting its poorer features on to the Other.

According to Said (1994) this process was rooted in power. It was non-innocent and emphasized an act of personal representation. He devised Orientalism as the ‘style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’ or more specifically ‘as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’. It is important to note, once again, the difficulty in reducing these ideas ...

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