Abstract
In the course of the last decade, and in particular since the beginning of the credit crunch, an expanding body of publications has enriched academic debate in social sciences by pointing out the fundamental role played by culture in shaping the contemporary forms of the world’s economy. This debate openly challenges the results of the neoliberal doctrine on a local and international level. It counters the dehumanized conception of economy that is expressed by the recent financialization of the economy by focusing on the role the individual’s experience and agency in shaping goods production and exchange. While the human economy theory, proposed by Keith Hart et al. (2010), has offered a first theorization of this humanistic approach, the volume by John Clammer is a further contribution in this debate.
Clammer focuses his reflection on development, a field of economic and social intervention that, more than others, has experienced the employment of dehumanized economic models as tools for framing and tackling issues, such as poverty, illness and hunger. Clammer sees in the scarce results of the past and current development projects evidence of the crisis of development theory; a crisis generated ‘largely…because [development theory] has trapped itself in a self-contained discourse that has become separated from both the concrete experiences of human suffering and the suffering of nature’ (p. 5). Thus, while the problems of development arise from the dehumanization of the very ways in which human life is understood, the book ‘argues for some fresh approaches to development theory while keeping the notion of culture…central’ (p. 6).
Clammer’s approach involves five theoretical moves: first, turning to a philosophical investigation of the nature, causes and dimension of human suffering; second, conceptualizing ‘development’ as a philosophical and ethical as well as a political and economic enterprise; third, attending centrally to cultural politics; fourth, deploying a distinctive methodology of listening to investigate cultural politics; and fifth, by connecting development theory with debates and advances in a wider range of social science theory, such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, globalization theory, and feminist theory (pp. 6–8).
According to the author, ‘culture is a complex negotiation of identity now irretrievably embedded in globalization and linked intimately with consumption as the dominating form of so-called late capitalist societies’ (p. 38). However, Clammer’s reflection is aimed at re-embedding culture in development theory thereby fostering a multidisciplinary theoretical and practical approach to ‘huge issues of poverty; ethnic, social and gender inequality; abuses of human rights, massive environmental degradation and global warming; unsustainable resource depletion; illiteracy and lack of access to education; woefully inadequate health care; and conflict and wars’ (pp. 3–4).
In the first part of the book, ‘On Culture and Development’, the author defines the concept of culture, explaining its relevance for framing and rethinking key issues, such as aid and indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the volume, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Development Discourse: Two Illustrations’, Clammer explores ‘alternatives to current forms of globalized capitalism, more ecologically responsible modes of being in the world, and forms of sociality that overcome the fragmentation and alienation of much contemporary life’ (pp. 115–16). He does so in two ways: by presenting the fundamental contribution offered by economic anthropology in evidencing different ways of understanding and making the economy; and by discussing climate change as a fundamental and an impellent imperative for reshaping the world’s economic and political practice on the basis of an ideal of environmental justice. In the third and final part of the volume, ‘Development, Culture and Human Existence’, Clammer delves into the discussion of culture as a way of reframing development practices, moving from biomedicine to ‘problems that arise from many “development” initiatives—civil wars, oil spills, blood diamonds, forced migration and displacement, plantation agriculture and ecological devastation and even civilizations’ collapse’ (p. 199). In this discussion of the major problems affecting development theory, he points out that previous studies give little attention to the sensual dimensions of social life, and that a widespread approach to social movements overlooks their roles as ‘generators of new forms of knowledge’ (p. 249).
The book offers an example of the sort of effective dialogue that is possible between the social sciences through its clear contribution to rethinking development starting from human, everyday and mundane experiences. In Clammer’s words:
what the social sciences can do…is to move in the direction of the fuller incorporation of the existential conditions of human life into their models, to recognize that they are not ‘explanations’ of human social life standing outside of that life, but are part of the reflexivity that constitutes the constant dialectic of living/understanding that marks our being-in-the-world, and to honour those spaces in which new knowledges are produced and new freedoms and possibilities explored, and those collective experiments in which humans are eternally engaged to make their lives conform closer to the ideals that they have for it and the integrity with which it may be lived. (p. 261)
In this attempt, social thinking opens itself to a ‘radical openness’ and fully embraces a bottom-up approach that has been advocated so many times.