Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development

Chapter Six. The Lake of Memory: Cultural Discourses of Resistance

Chapter six The Lake of Memory Cultural Discourses of Resistance Memories are harder to erase than houses, people, countries. They are there, like a flowing plasma or a deep subterranean lake. We row around on this lake. Search for its shores, chart our own positions. UrsUla reUter Christiansen, 1986, From the Book oF her Film The exeCuTioneR (1971), as CiteD in uRC hC, (2001) There is a barely hidden cultural politics in many development projects that seeks to further a general expansion of the control of the state over local territories and people (J. Scott, 1998). In extending its physical control over territory, the state also strives to impose a process of standardization and simplification over inhabitants, including common measurement, language, codification , and mapping. In reducing local cultural, social, and economic complexity to a format dictated by the state, control and rationalization of local systems in accordance with state priorities can be achieved. Nation-building involves the creation of a comprehensible unity out of an incomprehensible diversity (Anderson, 1983). The outcome of this process has become known as legibility (J. Scott, 1998). In many nations the not so covert goal of development is precisely that of reducing diversity and the imposition of uniform standards, not only of measurement and practice but of language and culture as well. The frequently covert secondary goal of these nations’ large infrastructural development projects is the assimilation and absorption, if not the outright eradication, of tribal peoples or peasantries, constituted of local identities, into a mainstream of agricultural bourgeoisie and workers of national identities (C. Smith, 1996). Indeed, completely eliding the entire issue of choice or rights, we can recall from Chapter 3 Vidyut Joshi’s query as to why anyone should oppose when a culture based on a lower level of technology and quality of life gives way 1 Defying Displacement to a culture with a superior technology and higher quality of life. He called this development (1991, p. 68, as cited in W. F. Fisher, 1995, p. 33). It’s also what we call social Darwinism, that ideological relic of nineteenth-century imperialism. While the reasons people resist DFDr are often assumed to be economic in nature, the concerns that people express in resistance movements are generally more complex, embracing economic, social, and, particularly, cultural issues. Indeed, project planners frequently err in supposing that people have only economic motives in mind when they undertake resistance to DFDr. While violation of economic rights has proven to be a powerful driver of resistance, a great deal of the moral content of resistance discourse derives its power from explicitly cultural issues pertaining to the rights to persist as cultural entities, to identity, to spiritual links to land and the environment, to loyalty to the dead, to both mythological and historical ancestors. On the other hand, in their campaigns to raise funds and resist certain forms of development, many nGos have tended to romanticize the bonds to the land held by many indigenous and peasant groups facing DFDr, when the actual concerns of the affected groups may be focused more on just compensation (Aryal, 1995). It is reductionist to attribute resistance solely to economics A temple in the Narmada Valley in Western India awaits inundation from the reservoir created by the Sardar Sarovar Dam. (photograph by Dana Clark) The Lake of Memory 1 or for that matter, to purely cultural concerns. Human motivations in general are complex, and positions and actions in resistance to DFDr are adopted out of many interwoven concerns, challenges, and changing conditions rather than one overriding issue. That notwithstanding, cultural issues play major roles in the constructing of discourses of resistance to DFDr. Actually, development projects provide contexts in which cultural issues become highlighted and especially significant in resistance. There is a great deal at stake socioculturally and sociopsychologically in resettlement. What does it mean from a sociocultural standpoint to be dislocated and resettled? How do we develop a language to speak of what is experienced socioculturally and sociopsychologically in DFDr? What is the impact on individual and cultural identity and integrity? Why has separation from a place so frequently resulted in cultural disintegration? Place Attachment There are two core concepts in resistance to DFDr. One is power and the other is place. One expression of political power is the ability to move people and things about the landscape in any way you see fit. The loss of a home territory...