Book description
How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses?…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Encountering Development as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.
Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.
What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows…
From Oz's list on why the West keeps getting the world wrong.
This book changed everything I thought I knew about development.
It makes the compelling case that the project of international development creates the condition of ‘underdevelopment’.
Drawing on key thinkers of the time, Edward Said and Michel Foucault, Escobar shows how development as a domain of thought and action produces the ‘third world’ as a site for intervention by former colonial powers, thereby continuing the imperial project.
As someone familiar with local development, I (and others), don’t share his faith in grassroots organisations as a solution, but find his analytical tools critical in interrogating how they work.
And as a…
From Tanya's list on anthropology of development.
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German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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