ABSTRACT
The idea of “development” has been much-touted in the last two decades, universally considered necessary by the industrialized countries who have pushed the idea on to Third World countries who may or may not know what “development” means, why it is necessary and what it may cost in material or social terms. It was in fact an ideology, and very often the official ideology in countries with very different social and economic forms of organization and with different political color. Distilling the main features of development in an essay on “The Cultural Dimension of Development,” J.C.Sanchez Arnau says ideology was
1) based on a mechanistic and linear conception of history which assumes that every society must go through the same stages of “development” until it reaches the stage in which the
economic apparatus continually ensures to the population an income level similar to that of those countries at present considered as “developed”;
2) based on an ethnocentric approach which assumes that the basic goal of any society is to achieve the same values characterizing the “so-called developed” societies: spirit of enterprise, the profitmotive, competition, material security, and especially endeavors to achieve the possession of certain goods and services typical of highly industrialized societies. Therefore, those countries or societies which have not already achieved these goals or which do not share them, are not considered “different” but instead “primitive,” “traditional,” “under-developed” or in the best cases, “developing” countries or societies;
3) “development” is also based on an essentially economic approach, since it considers that the adequate management of the instruments of economic policy is in itself sufficient to maintain any country on the road to achieving these goals, and ultimately reaching them. Thus it globally ignores what we call her “culture,” i.e. the collection of values, aspirations, beliefs, patterns of behavior and inter-personal relations, established or predominating, within a given social group or society….
