Cultural Imagination of Human Development? Framing Questions in a Preliminary Quest

Abstract

Could there be development without culture? A question, answered in negative by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), leads further to ask another probing question: could there be human development without cultural imagination? An obvious answer will be in negation, once again. However, it is pertinent to ask as to what notion of cultural imagination of human development stems from the dominant perspectives prevalent in the development discourses. The objective is to unveil and unsettle the notion of cultural imagination of human development in the light of a few critical instances. This paper seeks for a preliminary debate, contextualized in the local scenario vis-à-vis the state of Bihar in India, to analytically frame the question a little more and reveal the challenges involved in the development initiatives. The methodological manner is of a wandering ethnographer in quest of critical narratives, discursive threads, and debatable issues rather than mere statistics and policy resolutions. The microscopic empirical context, human development in Bihar, connects with the broader questions relevant at macroscopic level.

Keywords:

• cultural imagination
• human development
• local participation
• primary health
• primary education

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous referees for the valuable critical comments. They were immensely useful. The shortcomings in the paper, if any, are entirely mine.

Notes on Contributor

Dr. Dev Pathak teaches sociology and social anthropology at South Asian University (a university of SAARC nations), in New Delhi (India). He obtained doctorate in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (India). His research areas include folklore, performance culture, politics of development, education, and culture, popular art and aesthetics, cinema and music, and South Asian Studies. He has published in the journals such as Contemporary Sociology, Journal of South Asian Studies, Sociological Bulletin, SAARC Culture. He is reviews editor with Society and Culture in South Asia, a journal of South Asian University published by Sage (India).

Notes

¹Names hereafter are changed on request for anonymity.

²The mid-day meal program, which serves food to the regular students on the days when classes are held, is very popular with students and their parents in the villages in India.

³The para-teachers are recruited on contract as teacher without permanent employment and without the facilities of the permanent teachers. More on this appears in the later part of the paper.

⁴Panchayat is a local body of governance at village level, with constitutional rights and duties vested in its elected members.

⁵More elaborate discussion on this aspect, pertaining to the critical perspectives on planned development, is in the penultimate part of the paper, in order to explain the limitation of the dominant development discourses as well as to show a possible way forward.

⁶The report of the Government of India (GOI) informs that Bihar has a shortage of 1210 health sub-centers, 13 Primary Health Centers (PHCs), and 389 Community Health Centers. Besides, out of the 38 districts, only 24 districts hospitals are currently functional.

⁷This is a common response from most of the health workers in various parts of Bihar. Names of the health workers are not revealed on request for anonymity.

⁸UNESCO organized these conferences to firm up the conceptual link between development and culture, emphasize the necessity to include cultural dimension in the development policies, and help the world realize the need to be more holistic in approach. The first intergovernmental conference was on the institutional, administrative and financial aspects of the cultural policies in 1970 in Venice; the second was a world conference on cultural policies in 1982, in Mexico.

⁹By development rationalism, I mean to suggest the instrumental rationality, which follows the agenda of political liberalism and glosses over the cultural discontents. Any recognition of the cultural component, guided by this rationality, lacks in the totality of context and inherent complexity. In short, the development rationalism, in tune with modularity of development, does not acknowledge the intricacies of processes, of dialogue between insider and outsider.

¹⁰This quotation is from the UNESCO webpage, www.unesco.org/most/bpindi.htm. The author makes some texts in italics for emphasis, to highlight the crucial phrases of critical concerns in this paper.

¹¹See “Best Practices on Indigenous Knowledge.” www.unesco.org/most/bpindi.htm.

¹²In this undated essay, Sanyal critically evaluates the role of non-governmental organizations in the developmental initiatives: notwithstanding, the civil society intervention is a welcome departure from the conventional models, there are issues of unaccountability and unreflective confidence of the NGOs activists.

¹³In a different context, this aspect is deliberated to underline the importance of mass participation and life long learning, to make the development initiatives meaningfully successful. See Biao (2011).