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People's self-development: Perspectives on participatory action research: A journey through experience
Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 461-468, 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd. Prinled in Great Britain
Pergamon
Book Reviews throughout the book. The fall of the Berlin wall makes some of his material outdated (although chapters do have limited postscripts), particularly the use of Soviet examples. Chapter 2 is a somewhat dry orthodox socialist monologue.
People's Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research: A Journey through Experience, Anisur Rahman, 234 pp., 1993, Zed Books, London, New Jersey, University Press Limited, Dhaka, £12.95 pbk, £32.95 hbk
What is more interesting is Chapter 3 which describes the Bhoomi Sena movement in Maharastra, India, now a well known example of spontaneous and creative collective exercise of people's power. In this and many other examples of participation throughout the book, Rahman draws out lessons, dilemmas, successes, traps, insights and paradoxa, without falling prey to 'romantic notions'.
People's Self Development is a collection of writings by Anisur Rahman from 1974 until 1991, mostly from the late 1980s. Rahman is well known in the field of people-led development, and this is a collection of papers that have been published previously. In that respect there is nothing new here. But what is valuable is that it allows the reader to see how Rahman's thinking developed over time, from his rejection of his own chosen career in top-down planning in 1974, his experience in the field at the micro level, to his thoughts returning to the macro implications of an alternative development paradigm.
Rahman tackles issues such as the role of outsiders, and the tension between organisation and spontaneity, tackling but not always resolving them. The oppression he sees is not limited to physical material oppression but psychological oppression of the mind: 'power has been appropriated by (those) who have possessed monopoly over development knowledge and experitse, Direct producers . . . have submitted to this class out of a sense of intellectual inferiority'.
However, the book does fall into the trap wide open to anyone publishing a collection of papers by the same author and that is repetition, almost, in a few places, to the point of self-plagiarisation. Better editings would have avoided this.
But his attack on those who have monopolised knowledge is not just aimed to the right. Rahman also rejects the orthodox socialist model of development for the 'I_,eninist concept of a vanguard party of intellectuals possessing 'advanced consciousness" vis-a-vis the working people'.
While on this topic, at least one of the papers has already been republished recently. Chapter 8 "Glimpses of the Other Africa', originally published in 1988, was republished in 1991, in Fals-Borda and Rahman: Action and
Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research which is widely available.
Instead Rahman goes back to Marx who saw workers as creative producers and extends this concept from the physical to the intellectual, seeing it as the fundamental human urge.
This book is an interesting series of observations and deep reflections on those observations. Rahman's approach is strongly inductive; he practices what he preaches by learning from the people, taking as his mentors the oppressed of South Asia and, in Chapter 8, Africa.
The generation of popular knowledge is addressed in Chapters 6 and 9 which discuss the methodology or praxis of participatory development and scientific validity of participatory action research. Again Rahman uses his skills as an observer and collator to synthesise practical experience and thinking in this field.
1 . . . know that the rural poor are developing from their organised struggles experience from which we all have to learn continuously if we wish to keep pace with life. The Introduction is Rahman's own summary of the context and nature of his journey, acknowledging the influences upon him from Freire, in whose tradition he follows, to Fals-Borda. In fact, Rahman may be considered the Freire of Asia.
The penultimate chapters of the book were published in 1989, a critical year for socialist thinkers, and his thinking appears to crystallize and consolidate. Rahman returns to his vision of 'creativist development', going back to the fundamental questions of development in order to go forward. The depth of thinking and personal conviction is sobering in a field that is often consumed by jargon and glib answers.
Chapter 1 marks Rahman's departure from the prescriptive planning process, the radical shift from deductive to inductive thinking and concludes with a plea to listen to the people. Some naive idealism is seen in the earlier chapters as Rahman grapples with concepts such as mobilisation and self-reliance, perhaps simplistically at first but he succeeds in analysing the fundamental assumptions and requirements of all three paradigms of development, revealing stark contrasts.
In 1974 he wrote 'Development is the liberation of the creative energy of man'. In 1991, 17 years later he wrote 'The development problem is , . . facilitating the maximum scope for the people's creativity, enabling them to create their self-chosen bundle of goods including cultural and intellectual pursuits according Io their own wishes."
Rahman considers himself a socialist and this is apparent 461
462
Book Reviews
Rahman also tackles the difficult issue of the relevance of local level participation for macro level change, one of the weakest areas in alternative development theory. He acknowledges 'it cannot be said that such (participatory) work and initiatives have come anywhere near influencing the overall (macro) direction of society in any country'. One has to ask, what use is participation if it makes no impact on the inequalities that exist at national and international level? Rahman's rather unsatisfactory answer is that conscientisation is a necessary prerequisite for a socialist revolution, not just to bring about the revolution, but so the oppressed have the skills necessary to 'have the principal role in constructing the new social o r d e r . . . Revolutionary social change liberates creative f o r c e s . . . But in order to be liberated, a force must be already active'. However, the skills Rahman describes are not just skills for participating in socialist society but equally skills for participating fully in democratic society. Rahman does not see this directly, but acknowledges 'an essential indicator of social development must be progress towards genuine popular democracy' ' . . . not the democracy merely of periodic elections and the freedom to express words on what should be done, but the freedom and opportunity of the people to take the initiative to do it themselves'. Rahman has a vision of socialism as creative. Others might have the same vision of democracy. Participation and democracy are in fact two sides of the same coin but are seldom, if ever, written about as such. Academic thinking in this area is vital if participation is not to lose the force of its argument. In contrast, the argument for sustainable development, which is threatening to subsume participation, does bridge the gap between the micro and macro levels of the development debate. The two qualities that stand out about this book are Rahman's inductive methodology (there is no contradiction between his words and his actions) and his belief in the oppressed and their capacity for creativity; two fundamental characteristics of a new development paradigm. This book will be invaluable to both academics and students of development thinking. In discussing the role of the middle class and the nature of intervention, this book will also be useful to NGOs or SPOs (Self-reliancepromoting organisations) and development practitioners, although it is not a manual. The style of writing is both clear and easy to read, and penetrating. Changing our thinking requires changing our actions, from answering to asking, from speaking to listening, from teaching to learning. This is what Rahman has done and what his book does. Reference Fals-Borda, O. and Rahman, Md.A. (eds) (1991) Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. Intermediate Technology Publications, London. SUSAN M A I A V A Institute of Development Studies Massey University
The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics, Paul B. Thompson, 196 pp, 1995, Routledge: London and New York, £10.99 pbk. £35 hbk
Paul Thompson writes, as it were, from within the belly of the beast. A philosopher whose own views challenge productivism - - the notion that production is the sole norm for the ethical evaluation of agriculture - - he teaches within the U.S. university land grant system whose outlook on agriculture is typically assumed to be the very embodiment of productivist thinking. He is also the Director of the Center for Biotechnology, Policy and Ethics, and a Professor of Agricultural Economics at Texas A & M University, all of which is to say that Thompson's concern with ethics, mortality and philosophy are firmly grounded in the rough and tumble of modern agricultural research and practice in a state, it needs to be said, in which there is a strong tradition of agrarian populism and critical thinking about agribusiness and the role of Big Science. Thompson's basic assumption is that agriculture needs an ethic of the environment, from which he makes two important claims. The first is that the environmental movement has for the most part ignored the question of agrarian production - except insofar as there has been a general hostility toward farmers and farming in general. Thompson does not explore why a farm-based environmentalism has failed to materialize in the U.S. but reviews the environmental critics of agriculture to establish the need for a production-based environmental ethic. Second, the need for such an ethic must pull upon philosophical resources of a wide and eclectic sort to offer 'positive suggestions' for a creative and imaginative agricultural environmentalism. Most of The Spirit of the Soil is a solidly written and well-researched romp through a number of well-furrowed philosophical and green literatures, and an attempt at some sort of synthesis. Even so, Thompson is compelled to neglect some large and compelling questions - - in my view some of the most intractable - - which gives the book, for all of its strengths, a sort of profound incompleteness. There is little in the way of a serious discussion over scale and the ethics of the family farm, almost nothing on feminism, and the massive literature on risk, animal/plant rights, and the ethical considerations of trade and hunger is omitted. Thompson is fully aware of these absences and has instead attempted, in a more circumscribed fashion, to 'reconstruct and recover the spirit of the soil' knowing full well that on the one hand few of us have or will ever produce our own subsistence and on the other that modernist invocations of the mythic powers of the soil and of agrarian traditions have on occasion had nightmarish consequences (agro-fascism, lebensraum and the German National Socialists for example). Thompson structures his book around three broad narratives. The first reviews the environmentalist critiques of agriculture, the second outlines four differing worldviews which tackles agricultural ethics according to distinctive philosophic priorities (productionism. stewardship, ecological economics and holism), and the third explores the potential within the rhetoric of sustainability as a way of recapturing the spirit of the soil. His discussion of the environmental literature briefly summarizes the conventional utilitarian critiques of big science (including the Green Revolution and the land grant system), the pesticide treadmill and biotechnology but properly con-
Pergamon
Book Reviews throughout the book. The fall of the Berlin wall makes some of his material outdated (although chapters do have limited postscripts), particularly the use of Soviet examples. Chapter 2 is a somewhat dry orthodox socialist monologue.
People's Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research: A Journey through Experience, Anisur Rahman, 234 pp., 1993, Zed Books, London, New Jersey, University Press Limited, Dhaka, £12.95 pbk, £32.95 hbk
What is more interesting is Chapter 3 which describes the Bhoomi Sena movement in Maharastra, India, now a well known example of spontaneous and creative collective exercise of people's power. In this and many other examples of participation throughout the book, Rahman draws out lessons, dilemmas, successes, traps, insights and paradoxa, without falling prey to 'romantic notions'.
People's Self Development is a collection of writings by Anisur Rahman from 1974 until 1991, mostly from the late 1980s. Rahman is well known in the field of people-led development, and this is a collection of papers that have been published previously. In that respect there is nothing new here. But what is valuable is that it allows the reader to see how Rahman's thinking developed over time, from his rejection of his own chosen career in top-down planning in 1974, his experience in the field at the micro level, to his thoughts returning to the macro implications of an alternative development paradigm.
Rahman tackles issues such as the role of outsiders, and the tension between organisation and spontaneity, tackling but not always resolving them. The oppression he sees is not limited to physical material oppression but psychological oppression of the mind: 'power has been appropriated by (those) who have possessed monopoly over development knowledge and experitse, Direct producers . . . have submitted to this class out of a sense of intellectual inferiority'.
However, the book does fall into the trap wide open to anyone publishing a collection of papers by the same author and that is repetition, almost, in a few places, to the point of self-plagiarisation. Better editings would have avoided this.
But his attack on those who have monopolised knowledge is not just aimed to the right. Rahman also rejects the orthodox socialist model of development for the 'I_,eninist concept of a vanguard party of intellectuals possessing 'advanced consciousness" vis-a-vis the working people'.
While on this topic, at least one of the papers has already been republished recently. Chapter 8 "Glimpses of the Other Africa', originally published in 1988, was republished in 1991, in Fals-Borda and Rahman: Action and
Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research which is widely available.
Instead Rahman goes back to Marx who saw workers as creative producers and extends this concept from the physical to the intellectual, seeing it as the fundamental human urge.
This book is an interesting series of observations and deep reflections on those observations. Rahman's approach is strongly inductive; he practices what he preaches by learning from the people, taking as his mentors the oppressed of South Asia and, in Chapter 8, Africa.
The generation of popular knowledge is addressed in Chapters 6 and 9 which discuss the methodology or praxis of participatory development and scientific validity of participatory action research. Again Rahman uses his skills as an observer and collator to synthesise practical experience and thinking in this field.
1 . . . know that the rural poor are developing from their organised struggles experience from which we all have to learn continuously if we wish to keep pace with life. The Introduction is Rahman's own summary of the context and nature of his journey, acknowledging the influences upon him from Freire, in whose tradition he follows, to Fals-Borda. In fact, Rahman may be considered the Freire of Asia.
The penultimate chapters of the book were published in 1989, a critical year for socialist thinkers, and his thinking appears to crystallize and consolidate. Rahman returns to his vision of 'creativist development', going back to the fundamental questions of development in order to go forward. The depth of thinking and personal conviction is sobering in a field that is often consumed by jargon and glib answers.
Chapter 1 marks Rahman's departure from the prescriptive planning process, the radical shift from deductive to inductive thinking and concludes with a plea to listen to the people. Some naive idealism is seen in the earlier chapters as Rahman grapples with concepts such as mobilisation and self-reliance, perhaps simplistically at first but he succeeds in analysing the fundamental assumptions and requirements of all three paradigms of development, revealing stark contrasts.
In 1974 he wrote 'Development is the liberation of the creative energy of man'. In 1991, 17 years later he wrote 'The development problem is , . . facilitating the maximum scope for the people's creativity, enabling them to create their self-chosen bundle of goods including cultural and intellectual pursuits according Io their own wishes."
Rahman considers himself a socialist and this is apparent 461
462
Book Reviews
Rahman also tackles the difficult issue of the relevance of local level participation for macro level change, one of the weakest areas in alternative development theory. He acknowledges 'it cannot be said that such (participatory) work and initiatives have come anywhere near influencing the overall (macro) direction of society in any country'. One has to ask, what use is participation if it makes no impact on the inequalities that exist at national and international level? Rahman's rather unsatisfactory answer is that conscientisation is a necessary prerequisite for a socialist revolution, not just to bring about the revolution, but so the oppressed have the skills necessary to 'have the principal role in constructing the new social o r d e r . . . Revolutionary social change liberates creative f o r c e s . . . But in order to be liberated, a force must be already active'. However, the skills Rahman describes are not just skills for participating in socialist society but equally skills for participating fully in democratic society. Rahman does not see this directly, but acknowledges 'an essential indicator of social development must be progress towards genuine popular democracy' ' . . . not the democracy merely of periodic elections and the freedom to express words on what should be done, but the freedom and opportunity of the people to take the initiative to do it themselves'. Rahman has a vision of socialism as creative. Others might have the same vision of democracy. Participation and democracy are in fact two sides of the same coin but are seldom, if ever, written about as such. Academic thinking in this area is vital if participation is not to lose the force of its argument. In contrast, the argument for sustainable development, which is threatening to subsume participation, does bridge the gap between the micro and macro levels of the development debate. The two qualities that stand out about this book are Rahman's inductive methodology (there is no contradiction between his words and his actions) and his belief in the oppressed and their capacity for creativity; two fundamental characteristics of a new development paradigm. This book will be invaluable to both academics and students of development thinking. In discussing the role of the middle class and the nature of intervention, this book will also be useful to NGOs or SPOs (Self-reliancepromoting organisations) and development practitioners, although it is not a manual. The style of writing is both clear and easy to read, and penetrating. Changing our thinking requires changing our actions, from answering to asking, from speaking to listening, from teaching to learning. This is what Rahman has done and what his book does. Reference Fals-Borda, O. and Rahman, Md.A. (eds) (1991) Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. Intermediate Technology Publications, London. SUSAN M A I A V A Institute of Development Studies Massey University
The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics, Paul B. Thompson, 196 pp, 1995, Routledge: London and New York, £10.99 pbk. £35 hbk
Paul Thompson writes, as it were, from within the belly of the beast. A philosopher whose own views challenge productivism - - the notion that production is the sole norm for the ethical evaluation of agriculture - - he teaches within the U.S. university land grant system whose outlook on agriculture is typically assumed to be the very embodiment of productivist thinking. He is also the Director of the Center for Biotechnology, Policy and Ethics, and a Professor of Agricultural Economics at Texas A & M University, all of which is to say that Thompson's concern with ethics, mortality and philosophy are firmly grounded in the rough and tumble of modern agricultural research and practice in a state, it needs to be said, in which there is a strong tradition of agrarian populism and critical thinking about agribusiness and the role of Big Science. Thompson's basic assumption is that agriculture needs an ethic of the environment, from which he makes two important claims. The first is that the environmental movement has for the most part ignored the question of agrarian production - except insofar as there has been a general hostility toward farmers and farming in general. Thompson does not explore why a farm-based environmentalism has failed to materialize in the U.S. but reviews the environmental critics of agriculture to establish the need for a production-based environmental ethic. Second, the need for such an ethic must pull upon philosophical resources of a wide and eclectic sort to offer 'positive suggestions' for a creative and imaginative agricultural environmentalism. Most of The Spirit of the Soil is a solidly written and well-researched romp through a number of well-furrowed philosophical and green literatures, and an attempt at some sort of synthesis. Even so, Thompson is compelled to neglect some large and compelling questions - - in my view some of the most intractable - - which gives the book, for all of its strengths, a sort of profound incompleteness. There is little in the way of a serious discussion over scale and the ethics of the family farm, almost nothing on feminism, and the massive literature on risk, animal/plant rights, and the ethical considerations of trade and hunger is omitted. Thompson is fully aware of these absences and has instead attempted, in a more circumscribed fashion, to 'reconstruct and recover the spirit of the soil' knowing full well that on the one hand few of us have or will ever produce our own subsistence and on the other that modernist invocations of the mythic powers of the soil and of agrarian traditions have on occasion had nightmarish consequences (agro-fascism, lebensraum and the German National Socialists for example). Thompson structures his book around three broad narratives. The first reviews the environmentalist critiques of agriculture, the second outlines four differing worldviews which tackles agricultural ethics according to distinctive philosophic priorities (productionism. stewardship, ecological economics and holism), and the third explores the potential within the rhetoric of sustainability as a way of recapturing the spirit of the soil. His discussion of the environmental literature briefly summarizes the conventional utilitarian critiques of big science (including the Green Revolution and the land grant system), the pesticide treadmill and biotechnology but properly con-