ABSTRACT
The knowledge of ethical issues in development that this volume deals with is the world of development interventions. In this world, international donor agencies play a determinant role, sometimes in ‘partnership’ with states and local groups. But there is an unease with such an interventionist conceptualisation and realisation of development in this volume which leads one of the contributors, Alan Rew, to speak of this world as a black box. This unease becomes quite vocal in the contribution of Albert Alejo. Alejo is not wedded to an interventionist model of development and presents us with glimpses of a socio-cultural movement fighting against development as an interventionist project. Thus, understanding the contingent nature of this volume as it deals with ethical issues emerging primarily from interventionist development projects calls for broadening our efforts to take part in and study varieties of socio-cultural movements in the field of development – movements which resist the violence of interventionist development projects from the experiential perspective of the violated and the displaced, and movements which aspire for self-development and social transformation in an autonomous manner without the trappings of the interventionist mode. In order to submit this volume as a stepping stone for a truly global conversation on development as a multi-local and multi-sited global responsibility (where responsibility means not only individual and collective responsibility but co-responsibility (cf. Apel 1993; Strydom 1999)), the task for us is to understand the ethical issues of development not only from within the interventionist world but also as they emerge from movements of resistance as well as movements of new aspirations and beginnings. It is probably for this reason that John Clammer writes:
discourses of ‘development’ in anthropology … still reflect a distinctive and self-limiting frame within which ‘development’ issues are posed and a distinctive language constituted of an old amalgam of the terminology of development economics, the reportese of development agencies and the currently politically correct. … Yet if development is about social transformation, then indigenous social movements are where it is happening, if at all, in ways outside of the economistic paradigm, critiques that it is surely the responsibility of anthropologists, and anthropologists of development in particular, to pursue.
