Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development

Chapter Four. Contested Landscapes: Development, Ecological Upheaval, and Resistance

Chapter FoUr Contested Landscapes Development, Ecological Upheaval, and Resistance At one level, all resistance to DFDr constitutes one side of an environmental conflict. Resistance is a rejection of an attempt by certain interests to transform an environment in some way that requires the displacement of people. As such, environmental conflict is at the center of grassroots and nGo resistance to DFDr. Both the state and private interests, in undertaking large-scale infrastructural development and conservation projects, base their decisions on culturally particular constructions of the environment. Because of the conflicts that such images of nature and the environment produce in their applications in such projects, a brief discussion of their basic tenets is in order. Constructions of Nature and Society The dominant Western constructions—also frequently adopted by postcolonial states and elites—of the relationship between human beings and nature have over time fluctuated between opposition and harmony. For most of the twentieth century, nature and society were seen as being in opposition to each other, a perspective that can be traced to classical Greece and Rome. Although many integrative or conservationist attitudes have also been part of Western culture over time, a more utilitarian view of the natural world became dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Redmond, 1999, p. 21). Scientific and philosophical discourses of that period began to see humans as ontologically distinct from nature. Indeed, nature provided a contrasting category against which human identity could be defined as cultural rather than natural in the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. This new ideological construction focused on the opposition of nature and society and 10 Defying Displacement ultimately on the domination and control of nature by society. It is important to note here that emerging with these ideas on nature was a perspective derived from recent European experience with the non-European world. Some of the newly encountered people generated speculation among Europeans about human life “in a state of nature.” Deployed philosophically to explore the origins of society and the state, the concept of humans in a state of nature variously fueled imageries of humans as innately good but corrupted by society (J. J. Rousseau, 2002) or innately evil and generating continual conflict and brutality (Hobbes, 1998). The shadows of such images still inflect many of the constructions of modern societies in their dealings with people deemed primitive, closer to nature, or underdeveloped, resulting in the tendency of modern societies to romanticize , vilify, or patronize them. Now, as then, certain people get relegated to the “nature” category as the need arises. Those people put in the nature category frequently become the objects of development strategies and projects. Indeed, a frequent subtext of development projects is the acculturation of such people to majority-held culture by obligatory participation, whether through forced displacement and resettlement or some other activity. In effect, the goal of such projects is often to bring these people into the national cultural fold through the process of acculturation. The attitude that such a process is akin to civilizing savages is far from uncommon. Indeed, such a process is often glossed as a benefit since the affected people will supposedly become consumers of state services, regardless of the sociocultural, psychological, and material problems caused (Schkilnyk, 1985). In the West, nature has been largely constructed as a fund of resources into which human beings, regardless of social context, have not only a right to tap but a right to alter and otherwise dominate in any way they deem fit. Along with the detachment of nature and society achieved by eighteenthcentury philosophy and political economy, the fortunes of humanity were specifically linked to a set of material practices largely structured by private property market exchange. The market became constructed as the principal vehicle for individual self-realization and societal welfare. Thus, individuals were now not only free to but were virtually obliged to better themselves with the means that God had provided, namely the natural world. With, on the one hand, the reduction of nature to the status of means to the goal of human welfare and, on the other, the rapid expansion of market exchange driven by a productionist ethic, both the ideological justification and the institutional means were available for a relatively unfettered mastery over and unrestrained exploitation of the natural world. Furthermore, the mutually reinforcing pairing of ideology and science (economics) produced a set of institutionalized Contested Landscapes 10 material practices through...