REREADING THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

Abstract

This paper employs a proposed alterity discourse analysis (ADA) framework to argue that The Passing of Traditional Society – the bible of the modernization paradigm of development communication research – exemplifies far less a discourse on the relationship between empathy and development, as it does on the political/ideological imperatives governing the construction of the Other (i.e. the Middle East) by the Self (i.e. the US). To substantiate this claim, the paper debunks the book's claim to social scientific objectivity by pinpointing the methodological shortcomings of the empathy model and of the Middle East project from which the model was derived, and highlights the paradigm's dogma by revealing the religious metaphors with which the book's narrative is infused.

Keywords:

• Daniel Lerner
• development communication
• discourse analysis
• identity
• Other
• The Passing of Traditional Society

Notes

1. In The Growth of the Media in the Third World, for example, Hachten (1993) disagrees that the modernization paradigm has no value, claiming that its criticism has much more to do with the intellectual shortcomings of its critics than validity of the paradigm itself:

… Much value can be found in the dominant paradigm. I believe this research tradition has been unfairly criticized by academic critics, who are much less rigorous in their own research and fail to base their conclusions on hard evidence, as have the scholars they criticized. (p. 105)

2. Available at: http://dictionary.reference.com (accessed 7 May 2006).

3. Forty-eight by this author's count.

4. His dissertation and first book, Sykewar: Psychological Warfare against Germany (1949) were based on his experience as a World War II propagandist.

5. Critical studies scholar Dallas Smythe claims that when he obtained in 1979 his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered that Schramm was an informer to the FBI and an advisor and consultant to the ‘intelligence agencies of the US military, the OSS, and the CIA over the period from 1942 on’ (Lent 1995, p. 32).

6. The foreign media listed in the questionnaire are Egypt, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Pakistan, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey, the US and the USSR.

7. The nine ‘role-playing’ questions were:

1. If you were editor of a newspaper, what kind of a paper would you run?

2. What do you think you miss by not knowing what the newspapers have to say?

3. How do you think people who go to the movies differ from those who don't?

4. If you were put in charge of a radio station, what kinds of programs would you like to put on?

5. If for some reason you could not live in our country, what other country would you choose to live in?

6. Suppose that I could tell you anything you wanted to know about (this country): What two questions would you be most interested in asking?

7. What is the biggest problem that people in the same circumstances as yourself face in life?

8. What do you think people in the same circumstances as yourself can do to help solve this problem?

9. Suppose that you were made head of the government. What are some of the things you would do?