James Ferguson, commonplace book

Back in ye old days, people had commonplace books where they wrote down quotations and things they liked, to remember them.  Thomas Jefferson probably stole a lot of his enlightenment rhetoric from his commonplace book during that all-nighter when he wrote the declaration of independence, and that turned out pretty fair (he didn’t actually write it in a night, but I like the image, so I’m going to use it anyway). So I’m going to give it a try, in blog form. Here’s something from James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho:

“…in a country like Lesotho, literally everything is treated as an ‘aspect’ of development [which] avoids the formulation of any issue, problem, or program for action based on entities other than the state, effectively excluding from the field of view both conflicts within the state and forces which transcend it…‘What should Lesotho do?’ [is] always the question in ‘development’ talk, but consider the range of different questions which lie unexplored beneath: ‘What should the elite clique that runs Lesotho do?’, or ‘What should the mineworkers do?’, or What should the political opposition do?’, or “What should the aid agencies do?”, or ‘What should the unemployed do?”…One sees the same sort of thing in the United States and elsewhere, with talk of ‘the nations problems,’ what is ‘good for the economy,’ and so on, of course. But in Lesotho there is hardly any other basis for official discourse than this nation-fetishized ‘development’ talk…Lesotho, as a ‘Less Developed Country,’ is therefore taken to constitute a natural economic unit, responsive to national economic planning, and entering into relations with South Africa only as one economy with another…thus poverty in an LDC is a matter of some combination of geography and ‘lack of development,’ and in Lesotho geography has been inexplicably unkind”

He spends a great deal of time in the book illustrating how little sense it makes to talk about Lesotho as if it were a nation, or had a national economy separate from South Africa: not only is it completely surrounded on all sides by South Africa but it has no particular resources and very little in the way of agricultural potential (as the failures of development projects illustrate). 70% of the nation’s GNP, I believe, was at that time derived from migrant labor in SA, so to talk about the country as if it isn‘t already part of the South African economy (and a tiny, marginalized part) is absurd. He continues:

“Geography may seem a strange way to go about explaining why one group of people is poor while another is rich. After all, we would not seek to explain why the people in the South Bronx are poor by noting that the South Bronx lacks natural resources and contains more people than its land base can support. The South Bronx is a slum, and that is a social fact, not a geographical one. But for ‘development,’ an LDC must be looked as a national economy, and Lesotho is thus not an impoverished labor reserve, but a ‘dependant’ national economy. This generates some peculiar sorts of explanations.”

(p.62)

Read more here if you’re interested.