knowledge and underdevelopment (long)

--============_-1291254421==_ma============

Dear Rachelle

I would like to add my own observations about the role of knowledge in
developent, albeit not from a world systems perspective, so I cannot help
you with references.  I was prompted to reply to your mail by Richard Lee's
thoughtful response which confirmed my dissatisfaction with world systems
theory.

I am from Surinam, a small former Dutch colony north-east of Brazil, and my
work is in a couple of related fields: i.e. the role of culture and
psychology in development, the role of knowledge and epistemology in
development, the need to develop higher levels of reasoning/cognition (sort
of a developmental psychology for adults in the developing world).  In 1991
I wrote a book "Underdevelopment is a choice" where I tried to articulate a
theory that addressed the importance of internal causes of development.  It
was my first attemtp to think about the concept of agency in a postcolonial
society, and this concept is at the heart of a theory of freedom and
development that I am developing.

World Systems Theory has been very valuable for me to understand macro
processes, especially political and economic, but as Richard rightly points
out,there is almost no attention to the role of culture in all this.
Knowledge is part of "culture".  I think your problematique "knowledge as a
factor of production" is fascinating and very important, but you might want
to consider stepping out of the world systems paradigm to fruitfully
address this issue.  And secondly I think it's important to focus on a
particular field of knowledge, because the way you stated your question is
too broad.  You will also have to define what you mean by knowledge and get
some insights from fields that problematize knowledge such as the social
and cultural studies of science and technology.  If you're interested I can
send you a bibliography.  When you talk about knowledge you talk about
consciousness, so a theory of the historical relationship between
consciousness(knowledges/modes of cognition) and social formations is
important.  This will take you into the realm of theories of cultural
evolution, and thank God these days we have non-racist ones.  The work of
Ken Wilber is especially important in this regard.

This is my take on this issue. I study economists and economic knowledge
production in the Caribbean (I intend to expand this to other developing
areas) and how the transplantation of economic knowledge from the core to
the periphery contributes to underdevelopment.  I approach science and
knowledge as cultural products and, from a postcolonial standpoint, a
potential source of cognitive domination.   In a recent paper I wrote the
following:

______________________________________________________________________________
(Excerpt from a bookchapter "The Politics of Consciousness", forthcoming in
"The Complete Guide to Ken Wilber," Boston: Shambhala 1999).


One of the issues I discuss in "Underdevelopment is a Choice" is the role
of Caribbean  intellectuals in the reproduction of cognitive domination.
This is the result of an uncritical acceptance of the metaphysics and
epistemology of received European knowledge.  This intellectual dependency
prevents Caribbean social scientists from transforming themselves from
sophisticated consumers of monocultural (Euro-American) knowledge into
creative and innovative producers of transcultural knowledge.  I further
argue that the survival of the Caribbean in the twenty-first century will
depend primarily on a new and empowering understanding of our own history,
our psychology, and the world, an understanding that must reflect a
creative integration of the different cultural world-constructions present
in the Caribbean.   This new knowledge will enable us to transcend the
prevailing reductionist, eurocentric and materialistic definition of
development.  The new conceptualization of development and liberation will
also recognize that development is a multidimensional process including
material, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects, as analyzed in Wilber's
model of the compound individual.   In addition, this multidimensional and
integral understanding of development must be embedded in a deep ecological
awareness.

My work is about providing the metaphysical, epistemological, theoretical
and methodological tools for the realization of this project from a
transcultural perspective.  To do this successfully I have to integrate
knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines such as cultural psychology,
cultural anthropology, the Santiago theory of cognition, radical
constructivism, history of mentalities, African philosophy, social and
cultural studies of science and technology, political sociology, political
economy, economic anthropology, development theory, critical theory and
theories of self-organization.  Wilber's work provides part of the
organizing framework for this transdisciplinary integration.  Within the
scope of one paper, I cannot examine in detail the many dimensions of this
project.  Because of their significance for my work I will focus on two
aspects of Wilber's approach that form the starting point for the successor
paradigm in development theory that I am suggesting: the "all-level,
all-quadrant" mode of analysis and the stages of consciousness development.
First, I will briefly discuss the relevance of the all-level, all-quadrant
approach for Caribbean development theory.  Secondly, I will argue for the
incorporation of Wilber's model of stages of consciousness development into
Caribbean analyses of social transformation.  This aspect of both Wilber's
and my work is controversial in these postmodern times, so I will also
address the issue of ranking worldviews and why I see this approach as the
only way out of the messy legacies of colonial domination.  After all,
there is politics in consciousness.

The four quadrants and development theory
The dominant discourse in the political economy of the Caribbean focuses
almost exclusively on external economic and political causes of
underdevelopment, such as colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism,
neoliberalism and globalization.   This discourse is an example of analysis
in the "lower right-hand quadrant" of Wilber's model of levels and modes of
analysis in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.   Wilber says that this quadrant
"represents all the exterior forms of social systems, forms that also can
be seen, forms that are empirical and behavioral."   In Caribbean social
analysis there is consequently almost no attention paid to the
psychological and cultural aspects of underdevelopment (the other three
quadrants in Wilber's model).   I want to bring these dimensions into the
discourse on Caribbean development because I believe that a neglect of the
psycho-cultural aspects of Caribbean underdevelopment and how these relate
to its peculiar economic and political institutions has contributed to a
very limited and one-sided understanding of the reasons for the persistence
of poverty in the region.

Wilber's all-level, all-quadrant approach is a schema of simultaneous
evolution in four domains: exterior individual (behavioral), interior
individual (intentionality), exterior social or communal (social systems),
interior social or communal (culture, worldviews).  The exterior approaches
to social phenomena emphasize the study of observable behavior, using
empirical-analytic methods and positivist epistemologies.  They use what he
calls "it" language: objectivist, monological, observable, empirical,
behavioral variables.  The interior approaches, on the other hand, study
phenomena that cannot be seen; they must be interpreted.  Their language is
"I-" and "we-" language.  The division between these two approaches to
social phenomena has created a deep schism in social theory, with
detrimental effects for the study of underdevelopment.  Wilber says:

Almost from its inception, and down to today, social theory has divided
into two often sharply disagreeing camps: hermeneutics and
structural-functionalism.  Hermeneutics (the art and science of
interpretation) attempted to reconstruct and empathetically enter the
shared cultural worldspace of human beings, and thus bring forth an
understanding of the values contained therein.  Structural-functionalism,
on the other hand, dispensed with meaning (in any participatory sense) and
looked instead at the external social structures and social systems that
governed the behavior of the action system.

This schism is exacerbated in Caribbean development theory because of its
heavy reliance on economics.  Economics is an extreme example of a
monological, positivistic approach to human behavior and social systems.
This is so because as Charles Clark explains:

Much of the history of economic theory is an attempt to explain economic
phenomena as natural phenomena, as determined by natural causes.  This
aspiration is uniform, from the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, and Adam
Smith, up to and including modern equilibrium theory, the hard core of
neoclassical economics.  The conception of what nature is changes; even
more importantly, so does the method of how knowledge of nature is
acquired.  Yet the belief, implicit or explicit, that economics has some
affinity with natural science, is somehow grounded in nature, and is
regulated by natural laws towards a natural order, is a constant.  We find
that in the final analysis, the appeal to nature as the source of economic
phenomena is an appeal to authority.

In economics, society is treated as a natural system; that is why
mathematics plays such an important role in the discipline and its politics
of publishing attests to this.   The hegemony of neoliberalism, supported
by the World Bank and the IMF, has only strengthened this ideology, and is
a good example of the bad news of Enlightenment universalism.  The solution
for underdevelopment is conceptualized as a universally valid  recipe for
economic growth and happiness as prescribed by neoclassical economics.
Governments in developing countries are advised to correct the
institutional and structural obstacles to the free flow of capital and
goods, which include the privatization of property, the virtual elimination
of government regulation of the economy, the introduction of free-trade
policies, the control of inflation and the money supply, and no controls on
prices.  The implementations of these policies have resulted worldwide in
more misery for more people.   Caribbean criticisms of the ideology of
neoliberalism have thus far been primarily directed against the negative
social effects of its policy recommendations, because Caribbean social
scientists for the most part subscribe to a monological objectivist
approach to underdevelopment.  There is therefore almost no attention paid
to the political-epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of
neoliberalism.

Wilber's four-quadrant model offers a way out of the quagmire of the
natural law outlook of neoclassical economics and the ideology of
neoliberalism, and can provide Caribbean social sciences with a viable
approach to understanding the Caribbean predicament, an approach that takes
culture and psychology seriously in analyses of economic behavior.  Our
history of colonialism, which was not only a system of economic
exploitation, but also profoundly a system of psychological and cultural
domination, cannot be ignored in favor of a model of economic development
that is based on the myth of a white, middle-class, individualistic, profit
maximizing, rational economic man as the principal economic actor.

The worldview in the Caribbean is not that of Homo economicus and, as
Wilber has shown in Up from Eden and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, worldviews
are intimately correlated with social and economic institutions and the
technological base of a society.  I maintain, therefore, that an
understanding of Caribbean underdevelopment mandates a deep appreciation
for the cognitive confusion created by a hybrid of magical, mythical and
pseudo-rational elements from vastly different cultures that have not yet
been successfully integrated into a coherent whole to allow an
understanding of ourselves and the world and to effectively act upon that
world.

This hybrid worldview is expressed in mercantile economic institutions and
a democracy that is still characterized by the commandism and paternalism
of the colonial plantation.  The complex interaction of culture,
psychology, economics and politics is what reproduces underdevelopment.  By
combining Wilber's four-quadrant model with his stages of consciousness
development, Caribbean social sciences can finally begin to envision
"development" from a standpoint that is not dictated by the global
capitalist elite.  However, before I discuss the ways in which Wilber's
model of consciousness development can assist in redefining the object and
goal of development, I want to address the reluctance of many progressive
people to take cultural evolution seriously.

_________________________________________________________________

Going back to your questions, I think you will have to look in other
disciplines.  For the role of science look in the postcolonial studies of
science (see for example: Sandra Harding (1988), Is Science Multicultural?
Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).  For the role of information technologies see the Manuel
Castells, 1996, The Rise of the Network Society, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell
Publishers.  For science as a cultural product see: Andrew Pickering (ed),
1992, Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.

Your last question about an annotated bibliography on "knowledge, science,
and world systems combined" has already been answered by Richard Lee.  I
think that we should begin to accept that any paradigm only gives a partial
picture of the world, and that we have to integrate knowledge from
different disciplines and methodologies to understand the complexities of
social phenomena.  You might want to look at Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology,
Spirituality," (1996, Shambhala) that is the best discussion of and
solution to the problem of disciplinary myopia I have ever seen.

Good luck,

Maureen

***************************************************************************

			"With Love, even the rocks will open."

						 Hazrat Inayat Khan

***************************************************************************
--============_-1291254421==_ma============

Dear Rachelle 


I would like to add my own observations about the role of knowledge in
developent, albeit not from a world systems perspective, so I cannot
help you with references.  I was prompted to reply to your mail by
Richard Lee's thoughtful response which confirmed my dissatisfaction
with world systems theory.


I am from Surinam, a small former Dutch colony north-east of Brazil,
and my work is in a couple of related fields: i.e. the role of culture
and psychology in development, the role of knowledge and epistemology
in development, the need to develop higher levels of
reasoning/cognition (sort of a developmental psychology for adults in
the developing world).  In 1991 I wrote a book "Underdevelopment is a
choice" where I tried to articulate a theory that addressed the
importance of internal causes of development.  It was my first attemtp
to think about the concept of agency in a postcolonial society, and
this concept is at the heart of a theory of freedom and development
that I am developing.


World Systems Theory has been very valuable for me to understand macro
processes, especially political and economic, but as Richard rightly
points out,there is almost no attention to the role of culture in all
this.  Knowledge is part of "culture".  I think your problematique
"knowledge as a factor of production" is fascinating and very
important, but you might want to consider stepping out of the world
systems paradigm to fruitfully address this issue.  And secondly I
think it's important to focus on a particular field of knowledge,
because the way you stated your question is too broad.  You will also
have to define what you mean by knowledge and get some insights from
fields that problematize knowledge such as the social and cultural
studies of science and technology.  If you're interested I can send you
a bibliography.  When you talk about knowledge you talk about
consciousness, so a theory of the historical relationship between
consciousness(knowledges/modes of cognition) and social formations is
important.  This will take you into the realm of theories of cultural
evolution, and thank God these days we have non-racist ones.  The work
of Ken Wilber is especially important in this regard.    


This is my take on this issue. I study economists and economic
knowledge production in the Caribbean (I intend to expand this to other
developing areas) and how the transplantation of economic knowledge
from the core to the periphery contributes to underdevelopment.  I
approach science and knowledge as cultural products and, from a
postcolonial standpoint, a potential source of cognitive domination.  
In a recent paper I wrote the following: 


______________________________________________________________________________

(Excerpt from a bookchapter "The Politics of Consciousness",
forthcoming in "The Complete Guide to Ken Wilber," Boston: Shambhala
1999).



<fontfamily><param>Times_New_Roman</param><bigger>One of the issues I
discuss in "Underdevelopment is a Choice" is the role of Caribbean 
intellectuals in the reproduction of cognitive domination.  This is the
result of an uncritical acceptance of the metaphysics and epistemology
of received European knowledge.  This intellectual dependency prevents
Caribbean social scientists from transforming themselves from
sophisticated consumers of monocultural (Euro-American) knowledge into
creative and innovative <italic>producers</italic> of
<italic>transcultural</italic> knowledge.  I further argue that the
survival of the Caribbean in the twenty-first century will depend
primarily on a new and empowering understanding of our own history, our
psychology, and the world, an understanding that must reflect a
creative integration of the different cultural world-constructions
present in the Caribbean.   This new knowledge will enable us to
transcend the prevailing reductionist, eurocentric and materialistic
definition of development.  The new conceptualization of development
and liberation will also recognize that development is a
multidimensional process including material, emotional, mental and
spiritual aspects, as analyzed in Wilber's model of the compound
individual.   In addition, this multidimensional and integral
understanding of development must be embedded in a deep ecological
awareness.


My work is about providing the metaphysical, epistemological,
theoretical and methodological tools for the realization of this
project from a transcultural perspective.  To do this successfully I
have to integrate knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines such as
cultural psychology, cultural anthropology, the Santiago theory of
cognition, radical constructivism, history of mentalities, African
philosophy, social and cultural studies of science and technology,
political sociology, political economy, economic anthropology,
development theory, critical theory and theories of self-organization. 
Wilber's work provides part of the organizing framework for this
transdisciplinary integration.  Within the scope of one paper, I cannot
examine in detail the many dimensions of this project.  Because of
their significance for my work I will focus on two aspects of Wilber's
approach that form the starting point for the successor paradigm in
development theory that I am suggesting: the "all-level, all-quadrant"
mode of analysis and the stages of consciousness development.  First, I
will briefly discuss the relevance of the all-level, all-quadrant
approach for Caribbean development theory.  Secondly, I will argue for
the incorporation of Wilber's model of stages of consciousness
development into Caribbean analyses of social transformation.  This
aspect of both Wilber's and my work is controversial in these
postmodern times, so I will also address the issue of ranking
worldviews and why I see this approach as the only way out of the messy
legacies of colonial domination.  After all, there <italic>is</italic>
politics in consciousness<italic>. 


<bold>The four quadrants and development theory

</bold></italic>The dominant discourse in the political economy of the
Caribbean focuses almost exclusively on external economic and political
causes of underdevelopment, such as colonialism, neocolonialism,
imperialism, neoliberalism and globalization.   This discourse is an
example of analysis in the "lower right-hand quadrant" of Wilber's
model of levels and modes of analysis in <italic>Sex, Ecology,
Spirituality</italic>.   Wilber says that this quadrant "represents all
the exterior forms of social systems, forms that also can be seen,
forms that are empirical and behavioral."   In Caribbean social
analysis there is consequently almost no attention paid to the
psychological and cultural aspects of underdevelopment (the other three
quadrants in Wilber's model).   I want to bring these dimensions into
the discourse on Caribbean development because I believe that a neglect
of the psycho-cultural aspects of Caribbean underdevelopment and how
these relate to its peculiar economic and political institutions has
contributed to a very limited and one-sided understanding of the
reasons for the persistence of poverty in the region. 


Wilber's all-level, all-quadrant approach is a schema of simultaneous
evolution in four domains: exterior individual (behavioral), interior
individual (intentionality), exterior social or communal (social
systems), interior social or communal (culture, worldviews).  The
exterior approaches to social phenomena emphasize the study of
observable behavior, using empirical-analytic methods and positivist
epistemologies.  They use what he calls <italic>"it" language</italic>:
objectivist, monological, observable, empirical, behavioral variables. 
The interior approaches, on the other hand, study phenomena that cannot
be seen; they must be interpreted.  Their language is
<italic>"I-"</italic> and <italic>"we-" language</italic>.  The
division between these two approaches to social phenomena has created a
deep schism in social theory, with detrimental effects for the study of
underdevelopment.  Wilber says:


<paraindent><param>right,right,left,left</param>Almost from its
inception, and down to today, social theory has divided into two often
sharply disagreeing camps: hermeneutics and structural-functionalism. 
Hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation) attempted to
reconstruct and empathetically enter the shared cultural worldspace of
human beings, and thus bring forth an understanding of the values
contained therein.  Structural-functionalism, on the other hand,
dispensed with meaning (in any participatory sense) and looked instead
at the external social structures and social systems that governed the
behavior of the action system.  

</paraindent>

This schism is exacerbated in Caribbean development theory because of
its heavy reliance on economics.  Economics is an extreme example of a
monological, positivistic approach to human behavior and social
systems.  This is so because as Charles Clark explains:


<paraindent><param>right,right,left,left</param>Much of the history of
economic theory is an attempt to explain economic phenomena as natural
phenomena, as determined by natural causes.  This aspiration is
uniform, from the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, and Adam Smith, up to
and including modern equilibrium theory, the hard core of neoclassical
economics.  The conception of what nature is changes; even more
importantly, so does the method of how knowledge of nature is acquired.
 Yet the belief, implicit or explicit, that economics has some affinity
with natural science, is somehow grounded in nature, and is regulated
by natural laws towards a natural order, is a constant.  <italic>We
find that in the final analysis, the appeal to nature as the source of
economic phenomena is an appeal to authority</italic>. 

</paraindent>

In economics, society is treated as a natural system; that is why
mathematics plays such an important role in the discipline and its
politics of publishing attests to this.   The hegemony of
neoliberalism, supported by the World Bank and the IMF, has only
strengthened this ideology, and is a good example of the bad news of
Enlightenment universalism.  The solution for underdevelopment is
conceptualized as a universally valid  recipe for economic growth and
happiness as prescribed by neoclassical economics.  Governments in
developing countries are advised to correct the institutional and
structural obstacles to the free flow of capital and goods, which
include the privatization of property, the virtual elimination of
government regulation of the economy, the introduction of free-trade
policies, the control of inflation and the money supply, and no
controls on prices.  The implementations of these policies have
resulted worldwide in more misery for more people.   Caribbean
criticisms of the ideology of neoliberalism have thus far been
primarily directed against the negative social effects of its policy
recommendations, because Caribbean social scientists for the most part
subscribe to a monological objectivist approach to underdevelopment. 
There is therefore almost no attention paid to the
political-epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of
neoliberalism.


Wilber's four-quadrant model offers a way out of the quagmire of the
natural law outlook of neoclassical economics and the ideology of
neoliberalism, and can provide Caribbean social sciences with a viable
approach to understanding the Caribbean predicament, an approach that
takes culture and psychology seriously in analyses of economic
behavior.  Our history of colonialism, which was not only a system of
economic exploitation, but also profoundly a system of psychological
and cultural domination, cannot be ignored in favor of a model of
economic development that is based on the myth of a white,
middle-class, individualistic, profit maximizing, rational economic man
as the principal economic actor. 

  

The worldview in the Caribbean is not that of <italic>Homo
economicus</italic> and, as Wilber has shown in <italic>Up from
Eden</italic> and <italic>Sex, Ecology, Spirituality</italic>,
worldviews are intimately correlated with social and economic
institutions and the technological base of a society.  I maintain,
therefore, that an understanding of Caribbean underdevelopment mandates
a deep appreciation for the cognitive confusion created by a hybrid of
magical, mythical and pseudo-rational elements from vastly different
cultures that have not yet been successfully integrated into a coherent
whole to allow an understanding of ourselves and the world and to
effectively act upon that world.  


This hybrid worldview is expressed in mercantile economic institutions
and a democracy that is still characterized by the commandism and
paternalism of the colonial plantation.  The complex interaction of
culture, psychology, economics and politics is what reproduces
underdevelopment.  By combining Wilber's four-quadrant model with his
stages of consciousness development, Caribbean social sciences can
finally begin to envision "development" from a standpoint that is not
dictated by the global capitalist elite.  However, before I discuss the
ways in which Wilber's model of consciousness development can assist in
redefining the object and goal of development, I want to address the
reluctance of many progressive people to take cultural evolution
seriously. 


_________________________________________________________________


</bigger></fontfamily>Going back to your questions, I think you will
have to look in other disciplines.  For the role of science look in the
postcolonial studies of science (see for example: Sandra Harding
(1988), <underline>Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms,
Feminisms, and Epistemologies</underline>, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).  For the role of information technologies see the
Manuel Castells, 1996, <underline>The Rise of the Network
Society</underline>, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.  For science
as a cultural product see: Andrew Pickering (ed), 1992,
<underline>Science as Practice and Culture</underline>, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press. 


Your last question about an annotated bibliography on "knowledge,
science, and world systems combined" has already been answered by
Richard Lee.  I think that we should begin to accept that any paradigm
only gives a partial picture of the world, and that we have to
integrate knowledge from different disciplines and methodologies to
understand the complexities of social phenomena.  You might want to
look at Ken Wilber's <underline>"Sex, Ecology,
Spirituality,"</underline> (1996, Shambhala) that is the best
discussion of and solution to the problem of disciplinary myopia I have
ever seen.


Good luck,


Maureen



***************************************************************************


			"With Love, even the rocks will open."

						

						 Hazrat Inayat Khan


***************************************************************************

--============_-1291254421==_ma============--