Wau, Sudan

Cultural Matter

The anthropological and cultural heritage of a people greatly influences its approach to social and economic institutions, consumption, savings, entrepreneurship, individual determination and achievements that ultimately determine the nature and degree of economic development.

Samuel Huntington begins his edited collection of essays, titled Culture Matters (2000: xiii-xv), by briefly presenting the cases of Ghana and South Korea. He points out how in the early 1960s the two countries had very similar economies. “Thirty years later,” Huntington (2000: xiii) observes, “South Korea had become an industrial giant […] on its way to the consolidation of democratic institutions.” Moreover, he argues that “[u]ndoubtedly, many factors played a role, but it seemed … that culture had to be a large part of the explanation.”

Culture and its relevance in economic development have been a topic of scholarly debate for the last few decades. After a decline, in the 1960s and 1970s, interest in culture as an explanatory variable began to revive in the 1980s. In this revival, one major contribution was made by Lawrence Harrison, former USAID official, who in 1985 published Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case.

In the scholarly world, a discussion has been emerging between (i) those who see culture as a major – although not the only – influence on social, political, and economic actions; and (ii) those who adhere to universal explanations, such as material self-interest among the economists, or supporters of rational choice among political scientists.

From the camp of those who do not recognize a significant role to culture in explaining economic growth is Jeffrey Sachs. He points out, in Notes on a New Sociology of Economic Development (in Harrison and Huntington 2000: 30-31), how in neoclassical economics “development is really not much of a challenge. Market institutions are a given. […] Neoclassical economics … has an ingrained optimism about the prospects for economic convergence … [such an optimism] is sustained by the view that flawed economic institutions will be swept away by institutional competition or through public choice.” In this light, Sachs (2000: 42-43) contends that the cultural explanation of economic performances may be helpful in some instances, but “such explanation should also be tested against a framework that allows for other dimensions of society (geography, politics, economics) to play their role.” The argument expressed here is that controlling for such variables could sharply reduce “the scope for an important independent role of culture” (Sachs 2000: 43).

The debate among scholars engaged in the importance that culture has in development can accurately be summarized by the following questions: “To what extent do cultural factors shape economic and political development? If they do, how can cultural obstacles to economic and political development be removed or changed so as to facilitate progress?” (Harris and Huntington 2000: xiv). The underlining assumption – especially of the latter question – is an understanding of culture as a hindrance to a de-contextualized and a-historical development process, which should unfold itself universally over time.

One other possible way to view culture is as an element of long-term sustainability of economic development. In this light, a given economic order is not to be defined as an “abstract social mechanism,” but as an expression of a “concrete historical community” (Ricoeur 1991: 326). If there are indeed features of the homo economicus inherent in general human dynamics these are enriched by different cultural aspects. The larger scope of my research aims at demonstrating that culture is a sine qua non conditio to the long-term sustainability of economic development.

Moreover, making culture a legitimate dimension in development shifts the focus of the debate from economic growth to economic development. The close link between economic growth and economic development has been described by Amartya Sen (1999: 12) as being at the same time “a matter of importance as well as a source of considerable confusion.” Since an expansion of wealth will make a contribution to the standard of living of the people in question, “[i]t was [thus] entirely natural that the early writings in development economics … concentrated to a great extent on ways of achieving economic growth,” Sen (1999: 12) continues . The process of economic development cannot abstract from expanding the supply of food, clothing, housing, medical services, educational facilities, and from transforming the productive structure of the economy. These changes are matters of economic growth.

The importance of growth depends on the nature of the chosen variable – i.e. GDP or other related indicators – whose expansion is considered as growth. The crucial issue then becomes, as Sen (1999: 13) points out, not the “time-dimensional focus of growth, but the salience and reach of GNP … on which usual measures of growth concentrate.” In drawing a distinction between development and growth, several are the points of difference between the two domains.
First, insofar as economic development is concerned with GDP per capita, it leaves out the question of the distribution of wealth. Noting this type of possibility does not question the relevance of income considerations as such, but argues against taking only an aggregated view of incomes.

Second, another source of difference between growth and development relates to the question of externalities and non-marketability. The GDP captures only those means of well-being that are transacted in the market. This leaves out benefits and costs that are not marketable. The importance of what is left out has become increasingly recognized in terms, for instance, of natural environment, natural resources, and social environment (Dasgupta and Heal 1979; Dasgupta 1982; Hirschman 1958, 1971).

Third, even when markets do exist the valuation of commodities in the gross national product will reflect the biases that the markets may have and so causing problems in dealing with different relative prices in different parts of the world. Finally, Sen (1999: 15) posits that GDP, in fact, represents “a measure of the amount of the means of well-being that people have, and it does not tell us what the people involved are succeeding in getting out of these means, given their ends.”

A Continuing Crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The war that raged in the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly in the east of the country, between 1998 and 2003, claimed millions of lives and sucked in plundering armies from Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia. The scale of the misery caused by that conflict—and the importance of Congo's massive mineral wealth—explains the anxiety among ordinary Congolese, diplomats, aid workers and others, following the advance this week of a Tutsi rebel army towards the town of Goma in eastern Congo. If Congo falls apart again, the humanitarian cost would be enormous (from The Economist, October 31st, 2008).

Traditions and the Lifeworld

In his description of the tension of the experience of life where we meditate "between the efficacity of the past…and the reception of the past that we bring about," Ricoeur (1988: 220) uses the term "trans-mission" as a way of expressing this dialectic. Through "trans-mission," tradition springs forth from an "horizon of expectation and experience." From our traditions we are imbued with a point of view or perspective which illuminates a vast, but limited horizon for life's experiences. Traditions and their historical associations hold a tension between the horizon of the past and present. Ricoeur expands upon this notion when he says that "[t]he past is revealed to us through the projection of a historical horizon that is both detached from the horizon of the present and taken up in and fused with it" (Ricoeur 1988: 221). Thus the temporal horizon is "projected and separate…[and] brings about the dialectizing of the idea of traditionality."

Tradition is a powerful force on our lifeworld. Ricoeur (1988: 221) reminds us that tradition signifies a temporal distance that separates us from the past which is not viewed as a "dead interval" but is rather a "transmission that is generative in meaning." Tradition allows us to make sense "dialectically through the exchange between the interpreted past and the interpreting present."

Gadamer's (1998: 375) notion of a "fusion of horizons" is another elaboration on tradition's place in the hermeneutics of historical consciousness. During dialogic conversation with another person, where prejudgments are tested and our historical horizon is superseded, a "fusion of horizons" is made possible and our orientation to our life experiences is expanded. In this process we overcome the tension between the horizon of the past and present and see the present in a new light. Our present horizon of understanding is permanently altered. Gadamer (1998: 307) explains that our historical consciousness constituted by our traditions overcomes "the self-alienation of a past consciousness" and is "overtaken by our present horizon of understanding." A true fusion of horizons occurs when we are able to hold both the projection of our historical horizon and the superseding present horizon, overcoming our "historically effected consciousness."


Through the critique of our social narratives we are capable of surmounting the temporal power of historical memory and the limitations of tradition, bringing forth the possibility of new and imagined future worlds. We become able to overcome our historical ideologies and create the space for the excess meaning that is housed in our social spheres. As social beings we offer a space to occupy this immortal destiny.

Development as Trasformation

But what is development? There are as many answers as there have been times the question had been asked. Joseph Stiglitz proposes a comprehensible answer that forms a conceptual quintet. “Development,” according to Stiglitz (2002:252) “is about transforming societies, improving the lives of the poor, enabling everyone to have a chance at success and access to health care and education.” It is not about helping enrich the handful elite of a country. Neither is it about “creating a handful of pointless protected industries that only benefit the country’s elite” (Stiglitz 2002:252). Eyal Press (2002) observes that development for Stiglitz is “not just the accumulation of capital—it is about a transformation of society, a change in ways of thinking.” In short, to transform a society, the poor must have a chance at success which can happen only if they have the means to stay healthy and receive appropriate education. But only with a leap of the imagination can a way of thinking change such that Stiglitz’s conceptual quintet would find traction. At this juncture, it would seem that the novelist Sionil Jose anticipated Stiglitz the Nobel prize-winning economist. It is in this conjunction where perhaps development and imagination can come into fertile and productive intercourse.

It is without doubt economics has a hand in the outcome of the social and political fortunes of humanity. Any discourse on development and poverty cannot avoid intruding into economic territory. But economics operates with terse mathematical models which by necessity simplify the reality modeled. In short, economic models cannot fully represent mathematically life as lived by real people. Nor can a formula or equation predict with certainty the outcome of human actions whether performed out of hope or despair. There is richness in the social text—the complex web of traditions, customs, norms, history, beliefs, and relationships—whose essence cannot be gathered as symbols of a calculus. “Simplification,” Mankiw (2002:11) contends “is a necessary part of building a useful model.” Yet models, according to Mankiw (2002:11) “assume away features…that are crucial to the issue at hand.” This assuming away of crucial features, he claims “lead to incorrect conclusions.” But this fact remains: whether for ill or good, economic conclusions, prognoses, or forecasts derived from, or reached through the manipulation of abstract models always affect the lives of flesh-and-blood people decisively.


A certain sense of disappointment stains the reputation of the present concept of development and progress that has been described as linear and infinite. It would seem this smudge was dabbed by the soiled brush of this abstract concept’s unfulfilled promise, the promise of material abundance and limitless progress. Then there is also the looming specter of the absent correlation between democracy and economic development. The promise of the utilitarian view of society remains unfulfilled because individual maximizations did not result in a sustainable process of democratization. The liberal view holds that the task of programming the government in the interest of the society at large results from the democratic process. In this view, government is portrayed as public administration apparatus, and society is conceived as a network of interacting private individuals structured by market forces. It also presumes that in the democratic process, compromises between competing interests are formed in the spirit of fairness and equality.

But economic development is “a very delicate topic,” says Mary Douglas (2004:109). “It is as difficult to talk about the causes of poverty without putting blame on the poor.”

Amartya Sen (1999:35) points to “a distinction between two general attitudes to the process of development” discernible in both “professional economic analysis and in public discussions and debates.” Sen (1999:35) describes the first view in which development is seen as a “fierce” process that “demands calculated neglect of various concerns that are seen as ‘soft-headed’.” These soft-headed concerns include "social safety nets that protect the very poor, providing social services for the population at large, departing from rugged institutional guidelines in response to identified hardship, and favoring…political and civil rights
and the 'luxury' of democracy" (Sen 1999:35).

This austere attitude places these soft-headed concerns in storage to be brought out for airing “when the development process has borne enough fruit” because “what is needed here and now is ‘toughness and discipline’” (Sen 1999:35). In contrast to this hard-as-nails attitude is “an alternative outlook that sees development as essentially a ‘friendly’ process…exemplified by…mutually beneficial exchanges…or by the working of social safety nets, or political liberties, or of social development—or some combination or other of these supporting activities” (Sen 1999:35-6). In harmony with Stiglitz’s understanding of development aimed toward uplifting those who live in poverty, Sen espouses the idea of “development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” because the expansion of freedom is no less than “the primary end and the principal means of development” (Sen 1999:36).

Thus, development “is the process of expanding human freedoms, and the assessment of development has to be informed by this consideration.” It can be surmised that Sen’s concept of development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy rose over the notion of development as a fierce process on the wings of creative imagination.

El Obeid, Sudan

Explanation and Understanding: Text in Positivism and Critical Hermeneutics

Without any pretense of being exhaustive, one could synthesize the main features of the positivistic tradition as follows: science is the highest form of knowledge; there is one scientific method common to all the sciences; and metaphysical claims are pseudo-scientific. The common denominator of all the different schools within the positivist tradition is the search for an “a priori universal” scientific method as well as the identification of fundamental structures (and the relations among them) applicable to all domains of the natural world including human behavior. Levi-Strauss describes it as the “quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences” (1978: 8).

Such an approach has been adopted also in the study of language and text. To study language from this perspective, analysts must describe a linguistic system, which consists of structures not content. For structuralism, the crucial point is that the object of analysis is not the corpus of utterances identified as “parole,” but the underlying system (“langue”) – that is, a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other and which can be variously combined to form a sentence (Saussure 1983).

The language-speech (langue-parole) distinction is fundamental in order to give linguistics a homogeneous object that is both a-temporal and composed of “units devoid of proper meaning” (Ricoeur 1981: 153). In this light, language and text become systemic objects that can be investigated scientifically under the assumption that in any state of the system there are no absolute terms but only relations of mutual dependence. In other words, structuralism treats the collection of signs as closed and autonomous system of internal dependencies (Ricoeur 1981: 8).

Two major implications of the positivistic approach are the treatment of the text as a “worldless and authorless object” – that is, to be explained in terms of its internal relations (Ricoeur 1981: 152). Each unit of the text-system is defined only in terms of its difference from all of the others.
Consequently, structural analysis divests the role of the plot in the narrative and subordinates it to the underlying logical structures. Plot is relegated to the surface level of manifestation as opposed to the level of “deep grammar,” that consists of structures and their transformations (Ricoeur 1981: 280).


The duality between explanation and understanding, outlined in Dilthey’s work (1976), constitutes an alternative wherein one term is mutually exclusive to the other: “either you ‘explain’ in the manner of the natural scientist, or you ‘interpret’ in the manner of the historian” (Ricoeur 1981: 150). After Dilthey the decisive step was the questioning of the fundamental postulate that saw the differences between the “hard” sciences and the “human” sciences as an epistemological matter. In other words, the legitimization of the human sciences was dependent on the development of an appropriate methodology of their own. Such presupposition implies that hermeneutics is merely a subsection of the theory of knowledge and that “the debate between explanation and understanding can be contained within the limits of the…methodological dispute” (Ricoeur 1981: 53).

Both Heidegger and Gadamer, the fathers of the critical hermeneutics approach, put into question such an assumption – that is, the presupposition that hermeneutics is construed as epistemology. This movement beyond the epistemological enterprise uncovers the ontological conditions of hermeneutics. Ricoeur defines it as “a movement from regional to general hermeneutics” as well as a “radicalization of hermeneutics” where the question to be asked is “what is the mode of that being who exists only in understanding?” (Ricoeur 1981: 54). From now on, the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – that is, its efforts to achieve scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupation, “whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of relating to beings and to being” (Ricoeur 1981:44).

This ontological turn informs the approach to the written text as a fixed discourse. Ricoeur (1981) worked out a systematic theory of interpretation based on a distinctive notion of the text. A text, according to Ricoeur is an instance of written discourse. Thus, it involves four forms of distanciation which differentiate it from the conditions of speech. First, in spoken discourse there is an interplay between the event of saying (the utterance) and the meaning of what is said: it is the meaning which is inscribed in the text. Second, whereas in spoken discourse there is an overlap between the intention of the speaking subject and the meaning of what is said, in the case of written discourse these two dimensions of meaning drift apart: the meaning of the text does not coincide with what the author meant. The written text becomes an independent entity from its author. Third, whereas spoken discourse is addressed to a specific recipient, written discourse is addressed to an unknown audience and potentially to anyone who can read. Fourth, whereas the shared circumstances of the speech situation provide some degree of referential specificity for spoken discourse, in the case of written discourse these circumstances no longer exist. To think of language as a structure or a tool limits the interpreter’s creativity and confines it to a designated set of actions outside its being and apart from its own history.

These various characteristics of the text provide the basis upon which Ricoeur elaborates his theory of interpretation. He argues that the process of interpretation can be facilitated and enriched by the use of explanatory methods of analysis. Since the text is a structured totality of meaning which has been distanced from its conditions of production, it can be analyzed fruitfully and legitimately by means of structuralist methods. But this type of analysis can never be an end in itself. It can only be a step along the path of interpretation – that is, a partial contribution to the broader hermeneutical task of unfolding the “world” of the text and the significance it has for its readers. While Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation is formulated with regard to texts, he argues that it can be extended to non-textual phenomena like action (1981, 1986). Ricoeur’s argument is that action involves the four forms of distanciation characteristic of written discourse; and hence, for the purposes of analysis, action can be treated as a text. One advantage of this approach is that it enables Ricoeur to propose a novel solution to the problem of the relation between explanation and interpretation in the social sciences. Just as interpretation of texts can be facilitated by the structuralist analysis of their contents, so too the understanding of action can be enriched by an explanatory account. Hence explanation and understanding are not necessarily in opposition. Rather, the explanation of action can be treated as an integral part of a process of understanding.

Jinja, Uganda

Conakry, Guinea

Thoughts on Dasein, Technology, Culture and Development

Both Heidegger (1972) and Ricoeur (1992) understand the self, or Dasein, as essentially embodied. The self is both made possible and constituted by its material and cultural situation which presents it with a dynamic weltanschauung. But, on the other hand, Dasein is always capable of initiative, of inaugurating something novel.

Dasein is authentic when it ceases to take the world for granted as some objective entity “present-at-hand,” recognizing it, instead, as an open horizon of possibilities “ready-to-hand.” Being is indeed revealed authentically through the temporal horizon of Dasein (Heidegger 1972) in a creative process of becoming.

Acting in as well as understanding the world, becomes therefore a way of being – that is, Dasein is transformed every time it engages in the world.

If one accepts this ontological orientation, that is housed in language, one is to deem the world of work as a premier locus where such an expressive and transformative event can occur both personally and communally.

Accordingly, one can hold that technology (elementary or sophisticated as it may be) and other techniques of production are no longer mere means. They become a way of revealing. With Heidegger (1977: 12-13), one could argue that every “bringing-forth,” that is, the use of technology in the workplace, is indeed a way of revealing as it is the possibility of all productive activities.


Most of the early attempts to capture social phenomena and, through an accurate description, to reach some form of knowledge about the subjects in question as well as the relations among them don’t seem to be thorough if one is to seek for a more dynamic and open-to-the-future understanding of the human condition.

In the light of the ontological turn (Heidegger 1972), culture becomes a mode of being, something so intimate and inherent to human nature that cannot be detached, not even for analytical purposes, from the lived historical essence of being. According to Heidegger (1972), humans’ essence lies in existence. Human existence thus becomes an activity of endless transcendence. Such act is similar to the distanciation between the reader and the text, personal, social or written as the case may be. Being situated, thrown in an historical context and simultaneously having the ability to transcend, imagine and initiate new possibilities are specific features of human being, of Dasein in Heideggerian lingo.

This human faculty, which calls for the exercise of critique, does not take place in a vacuum.

In this light, a radically new working concept of culture emerges: culture becomes Dasein’s lived experience played in a to-and-from movement between throwness and imagination. Accordingly, the understanding of the nature of development changes.

On the one hand, Escobar’s (1985) work traces back and documents every bit of history of development and points out how a certain decision might have had a socio or political consequence up to present. On the other hand, he does not offer any feasible way to escape the historical entrapment, other than by, externally, counterattacking the established status quo. The throwness, in this case, has taken over.

Moreover, such a process ought to be readily available to each and every participant because one is “always already” (Gadamer 1988) part of a historical community. This very historicity becomes the basis for emancipation through narrative identity, that is a kind of identity to which a human being has access via the mediation of the narrative function.

Dakar and Ziguinchor, Senegal

Unambiguous Ambiguity

Heinz W. Arndt, in his Economic Development: The History of An Idea (1987: 6), argues that “economic growth was unambiguous in its meaning. The question was why people thought such growth increasingly desirable for some years and then became doubtful.” The idea of an ever-increasing gross national product and pro capita income was seen as a straightforward and seemingly accurate methodology to measure and practice the linear progression of a nation out of its pre-modern phase into an industrial and modern era. Yet, over time such certainty has become doubtful. The solution to that puzzle had soon emerged, as Arndt (1987: 7) contends, from the very idea of development – as opposed to economic growth: “[d]evelopment, in contrast, has meant almost all things to all men and women. This story has no simple plot. If there is a central theme, it is … one of increasing complexity and divergence.” It is the very complexity of the phenomenon of development that has placed economic growth measurements within a broader discourse and made it one indicator among others, certainly necessary but not sufficient.


An example of this dialectic is represented by the economic analysis I presented in one of my previous works: An Augmented Growth Model Including Cultural Attitudes Toward Work (2005). Such analysis has not led to any conclusive findings in terms of the relevance of cultural aspects in a discourse of economic development.

The findings do not support the macroeconomic theory in its totality. These statistical results seem unable to capture some aspects of socioeconomic development – such as the importance of education and the relevance of culture in economic activities – that are recognized as crucial in other fields of study.

Drawing from hermeneutic theory, one can legitimately consider the economic analysis of growth as an integral component of the social text that, along side with the fixed text of the conversations and the other historical documents, becomes the principle data source for this research.

Paul Ricoeur (1981: 152) points out the two possibilities that are engendered by “the eclipse of the surrounding world by the quasi-world of text.” On the one hand, the reader can “remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object” (Ricoeur 1981: 152). In this case, one can only explain the text in terms of its internal relations and its structure, and perhaps its statistical correlations. On the other hand, one “can lift the suspense and fulfill the text … restoring it to living communication.” In this case, as Ricoeur (1981: 152) argues, “we interpret the text.”

Within the realm of social sciences, and specifically when researching social and economic development, the idea of exerting one’s ability to interpret may seem elusive and inconclusive. That is from a positivistic conceptual framework. The theory of interpretation, developed by Paul Ricoeur (1981: 158), suggests a “more complementary and reciprocal relation between explanation and interpretation.” John Thompson (in Ricoeur 1981: 16) points out that Ricoeur contends that human action, no less than literary texts, “displays a sense as well as a reference; it possesses an internal structure as well as projecting a possible world,” that is to say, “a potential mode of human existence which can be unfolded through a process of interpretation.”

It is precisely such “potential mode of human existence [italics mine]” that the economist Heinz W. Arndt (1987: 7) was acknowledging when noting that development “has meant almost all things to all men and women.” It is such a mode of human existence that Martin Heidegger (1972: 31) was laying the foundation of when declaring that “all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has … remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and … its fundamental task.” It is the individual and communal historicity of a person and his or her own community that shapes the hopes for an improved future and solicits actions in the present, the only lived time at one’s disposal. Richard Kearney (2001: 1-2) elaborates on Heidegger’s intuition by challenging the classical “metaphysical tendency to subordinate the possible to the actual as the insufficient to the sufficient,” and by “refusing to impose a kingdom [that is, a universally established development standard], or to declare it already accomplished from the beginning … [in so doing, each] person carries within him/herself the capacity to be transfigured … and to transfigure … [a given historical situation] by making … possibility ever more incarnate and alive.”

The Cartesian "Doubt"

The field of socio-economic development work is simultaneously complex and ambiguous. Within this vexed compound of complexity and ambiguity resides hope for the amelioration of the human condition.

The Cartesian legacy, housed in Positivism, has dominated the historical and social sciences, the end goal being to reach the truth through data analysis in everyday practice. An objectivist or realist claim is based on the conviction that there is, or should be, some permanent, a-historical matrix or framework, to which one can ultimately appeal for understanding society.

Development efforts in the past half century primarily have been influenced by the positivist outlook in both philosophy and methodology. Modernization – through industrialization, technological transfer and other indicators of economic growth – was deemed essential toward the anticipated emancipation of the third world from colonial rule. For the third world to become modern, the alleviation of poverty, or more generally, the attainment of material progress was an imperative. Following this line of reasoning, science and technology on the one hand, and on the other, attitudes and behaviors, were seen as necessary components for economic growth. To replicate features that characterized the so-called advanced societies of the time, capital, science, and technology became the main progenitors that would create the conditions for development to succeed. Since the success of such an effort heavily depended on the accuracy of the research methodologies, along with the predictive ability of the concomitant models, an extraordinary emphasis was placed on the scientific formality of carrying out development work.


Notwithstanding the quest for scientific simplicity and predictability, the development plot remains complex and heterogeneous. Marked by Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions, there has been an increasing acknowledgment of a paradigm shift. This new paradigm, emerging now for over three decades, is one in which cultural analysis is not locked away from its proper object, namely, the informal logic of actual everyday life – the centerpiece of development.

One of the most interesting fields where such a paradigmatic transition has taken place is anthropology. Anthropology today is no longer beholden to structuralism, and has shifted stance toward the interpretive. This interpretive anthropology takes on practical quality by enlarging space for human discourse. By inscribing social discourse into text that holds the meaning of social interaction, the ethnographer transforms social discourse from a passing event, into an interpretable account that exists over time.

Martin Heidegger made this shift possible by taking an ontological turn that began the move away from traditional concerns of subject and object, and headed to analysis of human beings in-the-world who speak to one another. What was traditionally a methodological category concerned with knowledge, understanding becomes, in light of Heidegger’s turn, something integral to human existence, overriding the traditional dichotomy of object and subject. Thus, human understanding is comprehended in terms of an historical process through which the possibilities and potentials of a person are disclosed. And it is precisely in this historical process that traditions and communities are maintained and extended over time in different socio-political and socio-historical contexts. In this light, development study and practice assume a radically new orientation. Concerns over modernization – through industrialization and the transfer of capital, technology, and knowledge – democratization and good governance, education and the promotion of health care are all heterogeneous elements of an unfolding social discourse that can be fixed into a historical narrative.

The application of the “textual” approach to development concedes the emergence of a new paradigm. A paradigm where interpretive anthropology – that is anthropology informed by critical hermeneutics – offers a foundation to the “quark” of social sciences: the inscription of social discourse, composed of numerical data, narratives, traditions, historical events. The result is a social text to be analyzed not as an experimental science in search of a law, rather as an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Economic Data and the Bathtub

Recently, the weekly Magazine published by the New York Times (August 17th) featured a story titled "Dr. Doom." The article, by Stephen Mihm, focuses on the work of one of the most interesting - but until recently obscure - living economists: Nouriel Roubini.

Roubini is credited with foreseeing the, then-upcoming and now-current, economic crisis back in September 2006. The reaction to his inauspicious presentation from an audience of IMF economists was somewhat cold and incredulous. Mihm reports that as Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event gibed, "I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that."

Despite the initial take, Roubini proved to be right in his interpretation of the available economic data.

In 2006, the same data was accessible to the economic and financial community. So what was the more favorable condition or position that allowed Roubini to reach a different understanding and interpretation of the same texts?

It seems that his ability to marry rigorous mathematical models with the interpretation of historical political and economic institutions made indeed the difference. Mihm notices that Roubini's work was distinguished "not only by his conclusions but [in fact] also by his approach." By making extensive use of transnational comparisons and historical analogies, he employs a "subjective, nontechnical" paradigm.

Such paradigms allows him not to be trapped into modern economic theories and econometric models. These models typically rely, Mihm points out, "on the assumption that the near future is likely to be similar to the recent past, and thus it is rare that the models anticipate breaks in the economy."

Roubini compares his approach to that of Alan Greenspan, who once said to "pore over vaset quantities of technical economic data while sitting in the bathtuh, looking to sniffout where the economy was headed."

Interpretive Development Implies A Different Understanding of Language

I start this blog with the intention to share some reflections on the work that I conduct. My occupation and interest revolve around the field of socio-economic development, and specifically in monitoring and evaluation.

The nature, manifestations, and sustainability of change in individuals and communities have always fascinated me.
Most researchers in applied social sciences rely on the survey method using statistical techniques for analysis. In the recent past, there has been emphasis on qualitative research approaches, such as grounded theory, ethnography, case histories, and action research.

However, whether quantitative or qualitative in approach, language has been assumed to be a representational carrier of meaning, a receptacle that holds work in order to represent the world.


This concept of language reflects the basic tenets of logical positivism and derives, for the most part, from logic, the foundations of mathematics, and the paradigm for basic research in the physical sciences. The Cartesian approach is based on the presumed discovery of law-like generalizations that serve as the basis for deductive explanation and predictions.

From within a tradition of critical theory, many social scientists and philosophers over the last several generations have critiqued the positivist framework as a basis for research in social science.

Although few researchers will admit to being positivists, the legacy of logical positivism still pervades contemporary social inquiry today. For positivists, the relation of theory to practice is chiefly technical, because they seek to use general laws and manipulate a desired state of affairs. However, the question of which state of affairs should be produced is not to be resolved scientifically. Scientific inquiry is value-free within this framework, whereby the empirical basis of science is composed of observable objects or events that, in turn, serve as part of the program for a unity of science.

Many writers have critiqued this rationality and have demonstrated problems with using the logical positivist frameworks as the basis for social inquiry. The common element in all these traditions is the recognition that the positivist approach has neglected the meanings that are at the basis of social reality. This tradition opens the way to a more historically situated, non-algorithmic, flexible understanding of human rationality, one which highlights the tacit dimension of human judgment and imagination and is sensitive to the unsuspected contingencies and genuine novelties encountered in particular situations.

The difference between a positivist approach and an interpretive approach, most simply stated, is in how language is viewed – language as a tool representing the world or language as a medium through which we interpret and begin the change our selves and our conditions.