Emotional Geographies of Development

Bibliographic Data

ID5773529
AuthorsSarah E Wright (0000-0002-8749-7421), Sarah Wright (0000-0002-8595-4529, University of Newcastle Australia, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume33
Issue6
Pages1113-1127
Publication date2012-05-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThird World Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0143-6597 • E-ISSN: 1360-2241
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01436597.2012.681500
OpenAlexW2091820892
LanguageEN
Citations received53
References cited14

Hope, despair, fear, hate, joy, desire and anger; the social scienceshave increasingly recognised the role of emotions in shaping society, and in defining and transforming people and place. Such concerns have clear implications for the study of development. Emotions help create development subjects and define subjectivities. They are imbricated in the production of exclusions and colonialisms yet they can also empower resistance and progressive change. In short, they are intimately bound up with the way development functions in all its messiness. In this paper I begin to explore the generative role of emotions in the discourses and practices of development. I draw on empirical work with land reform participants in the Philippines to consider the ways emotions are central to participants' experiences. Emotions inform how the land tillers act and react, and how they understand the past, present and future. I find that consideration of emotions, and indeed of all that is beyond-the-rational, is imperative if we are to move beyond development's modernist roots towards more postcolonial understandings. Notes I would like to thank all those involved in this research from Hacienda Bino, pdg, mapisan and masipag, especially Ben Ramos, Elizabeth Cruzada, the Tres Malditas and Diosa Labiste. Many, many thanks to you all for your inspiration, your hospitality and your insights. Thanks also to Lesley Instone for our thought-provoking and fruitful reading sessions. 1 M Wright, 'Geography and gender: feminism and a feeling of justice', Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 2010, p 818. 2 J Krishnamurti, You are the World, Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation, 2001, p 49. 3 A Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; and J Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine: 'Development', Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 4 J Crush, Power of Development, New York: Routledge, 1995; Escobar, Encountering Development; Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine; and N Shrestha, 'Becoming a development category', in J Crush (ed), Power of Development, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp 266-277. 5 C Alvares, Science, Development and Violence: The Twilight of Modernity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; and W Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, 1992. See also J French, 'Understanding the politics of Latin America's plural lefts (Chavez/Lula)', Third World Quarterly, 30(2), 2009, pp 349-370. 6 S Hall, 'The West and the rest: discourse and power', in S Hall & B Gieben (eds), Formations of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, pp 257-331; N Hoad, 'Arrested development or the queerness of savages: resisting evolutionary narratives of difference', Postcolonial Studies, 3(2), pp 133-158; E Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978; and G Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. This dichotomy has also been critiqued by feminists. See, for example, J Sharp, 'Geography and gender: what belongs to feminist geography?', Progress in Human Geography, 33(1), 2009, pp 74-80. 7 K Anderson & S Smith, 'Editorial: emotional geographies', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26, 2001, pp 7-10; Sharp, 'Geography and gender', pp 74-80; and S Pile, 'Emotions and affect in recent human geography', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 2010, pp 5-20. 8 S Ahmed, 'Collective feelings: or, the impressions left by others', Theory, Culture and Society, 21(2), 2004, p 26. 9 S Borras, C Kay & A Akram-Lodhi, 'Agrarian reform and rural development: historical overview and current issues', in A Akram-Lodhi, S Borras & C Kay (ed), Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globilisation, London: Routledge, pp 1-40; R Sobhan, Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation, London: Zed Books, 1993; and D Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 10 See L Bachmann, B Cruzada & S Wright, Food Security and Farmer Empowerment, Los Baños, Philippines/Aachen: masipag/misereor, 2009; and G Diprose & A McGregor, 'Dissolving the sugar fields: land reform and resistance identities in the Philippines', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 30, 2009, pp 52-69. 11 B Anderson, 'Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect', Environment and Planning D, 24, 2006, pp 733-752. 12 Sharp, 'Geography and gender', p 75. 13 While emotions are generally considered expressible, work on affect emphasises the inexpressible, the visceral and instinctive energies, intensities, senses, smells and all those things and flows that make up our world in ways that cannot be named. See H Lorimer, 'Cultural geography: non-representational conditions and concerns', Progress in Human Geography, 32(4), 2008, pp 551-559. Sometimes used as synonyms, other times as distinct or even diametrical, I follow Wright to treat the difference between emotions and affect as a difference in emphasis. As she states, 'I see no reason to insert cleavage between otherwise friendly terms'. Wright, 'Geography and gender', p 821. 14 R Pain, S Smith & S Graham (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 15 S Wright, 'Practising hope: learning from social movement strategies in the Philippines', in ibid, pp 223-234. 16 Crush, Power of Development; and Escobar, Encountering Development, 1995. 17 S Ahmed, 'Affective economies', Social Text, 22(2), 2004, pp 117-139. 18 R Slocum, 'The embodied politics of pain', ACME, 8, 2009, p 19. 19 F Sultana, 'Suffering for water, suffering from water: emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict', Geoforum, 42(2), 2011, pp 163-172. 20 D Tolia-Kelly, 'Affect-an ethnocentric encounter?', Area, 38(2), 2006, pp 213-217. 21 J Aisbett, 'An emotional geography of hiv/aids development work in PNG', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2011; and E Ho, 'Constituting citizenship through the emotions: Singaporean transmigrants in London', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(4), 2009, pp 788-804. 22 G Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', in Spivak, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, p 294. 23 See the 2009 special issue of Emotion, Space and Society, 2(1), on 'Activism and Emotional Sustainability' edited by Brown and Pickerall. 24 L Pulido, 'The interior life of politics', Ethics, Place and Environment, 6(1), 2003, pp 46-52. 25 Wright, 'Practising hope', p 223. 26 F Bosco, 'Emotions that build networks: geographies of human rights movements in Argentina and beyond', Tijdscrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 98, 2007, pp 545-563. 27 D Thien, 'Death and bingo? The Royal Canadian Legion's unexpected spaces of emotion', in M Smith, J Davidson, L Cameron & L Bondi (ed), Emotion, Place and Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, pp 207-226. 28 L Kouzal, 'The subjective side of development: sources of well-being resources for struggles', in K Bhavnani, J Foran & P Kurian (eds), Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture and Development, London: Zed Books, 2003, p 256. 29 Moore, Suffering for Territory. 30 P Gilroy, After Empire, New York: Routledge, 2004, p 3. 31 K Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 32 Here I refer to the emergence of the contemporary development industry post-World War II. 33 J Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippines Society, Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2001; R Polestico, A Quezon & P Hildeman, Agrarian Reform in the Philippines, Cavite, Philippines/Bonn: iirr/German Agro-Action, 1998; and C Reyes, Impact of Agrarian Reform on Poverty, Makati: Philippine Institute for Development Studies, 2002. 34 Ibid. 35 S Borras, D Carrranza & J Franco, 'Anti-poverty or anti-poor? The World Bank's market-led agrarian reform experiment in the Philippines', Third World Quarterly, 28(8), 2007, pp 1557-1576; and J Putzel, A Captive Land: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines, London: ciir, 1992. 36 K Deninger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, Washington, DC/Oxford: World Bank/Oxford University Press, 2003. 37 C Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America: land reform, industrialisation and development', Third World Quarterly, 23(6), pp 1073-1102; and Sohban, Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation. 38 See, for example, J Amid, 'Land reform in post-revolutionary Iran revisited', Middle East Critique, 18(1), pp 73-87; and P Malope & N Batisani, 'Land reforms that exclude the poor', Development Southern Africa, 25(4), 2008, pp 383-397. 39 Borras et al, 'Anti-poverty or anti-poor?'. 40 More recently, Diprose & McGregor, 'Dissolving the sugar fields', begin to tackle the question of identity and social change, drawing on the responses of peasant communities to land reform in Negros. Moore, Suffering for Territory, also gives a nuanced and detailed account of land rights and the cultural politics of development in Zimbabwe. 41 E Probyn, 'Writing shame', in M Gregg & G Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p 82. 42 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p 340. 43 Ibid, p 343. 44 Ibid, p 349. 45 A Soueif, The Map of Love, London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p 240. 46 Lorimer, 'Cultural geography: non-representational conditions and concerns', p 552

Wright · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access