An ethnography of NGO practice in India: Utopias of development

By Stewart Allen

Through an ethnographic study of the ‘Barefoot College’, an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526127556

Stewart Allen

Stewart Allen was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Book preview

Figures

1 The entrance to the College

2 The ‘old campus’

3 The solar workshop

4 Solar lanterns in process

5 Progressive changes to the solar lantern

6 The digital media library of the Barefoot College

7 Solar training at the workshop

8 The solar maintenance manual

9 Trainees learning how to install the solar PV panels

10 Testing the circuits

11 The solar team in Himachal Pradesh

12 Solar PV panels provided by the Barefoot College atop a village house in the Gambia

(All images are author's own)

Acknowledgements

At every stage of planning, fieldwork and writing up, this thesis would not have been possible without the help of a great many people.

The ethnographic research on which this book is based was conducted in India between December 2008 and April 2010, including a short stint in the Gambia in January of 2010 while I was studying for my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

I am greatly indebted to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Tweedie Exploration Fund for providing the generous funding and support that made the research for this book possible. I was further supported through a Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Sutasoma award during my writing-up period. I am hugely indebted to my supervisors Francesca Bray and Jamie Cross for their unending patience, support, advice and good humour. Francesca proved a steadying constant throughout the course of my PhD and after, furnishing me with a wealth of knowledge, guidance, experience and wisdom, without which this study would never have come to fruition. As a colleague and friend, thank you. Jamie came on board as my second supervisor midway through my writing-up period and instantly invigorated my approach, providing incisive feedback and insight. This book would not have been possible without their thoughtful contributions and encouragement, thank you both.

I would like to acknowledge the contributions made by Neil Thin, whose supervision helped shape the project and saw me through my work in the field. Many thanks go to Sandy Robertson who was always willing to thrash a few ideas around and provide a welcome dash of good humour when things got a bit too much. Thanks for being a pal. Further thanks to Jennifer Curtis and the graduate students of the anthropology ‘writing-up’ group for providing so much valuable feedback on various drafts. Special mention goes to my parents and family for all their patience and support over the years. I got there in the end. I would like to thank Ali for his hospitality and friendship during my time in the Gambia. The writing of this thesis was also made infinitely more enjoyable by the companionship of colleagues and friends in Edinburgh. Many thanks and best wishes go to: Ting Ting, Joe, Lisa, Paul, Kim, Beginda, Supurna and Máire.

I held a postdoctoral fellowship with Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, immediately after the completion of my PhD, during which I was able to set aside time to re-draft my PhD research as a book monograph. I am grateful for the financial support and freedom provided by the department and Dagmar Schäfer in particular for her encouragement and belief in me. I am grateful for the warmth and companionship of Michael, Nina, Nuria, Gina, Shi-Pei and Kaijun during my time there.

Most obviously, however, thanks are due to all those at the Barefoot College who extended to me so much kindness and hospitality over my fifteen-month stay in their residence. Particular thanks go to Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy for allowing me to conduct research in the first place. Furthermore, I wish to thank Shreya and Bil for their warm friendship and camaraderie during my time at the College. I am indebted to Bhagwat Nandan, Ramkaran, Laxman, Kelash, Ramnuvas and Pasquale for their patience and friendship. Thank you all.

Series editor's foreword

When the New Ethnographies series was launched in 2011, its aim was to publish the best new ethnographic monographs that promoted interdisciplinary debate and methodological innovation in the qualitative social sciences. Manchester University Press was the logical home for such a series, given the historical role it played in securing the ethnographic legacy of the famous ‘Manchester School’ of anthropological and interdisciplinary ethnographic research, pioneered by Max Gluckman in the years following the Second World War.

New Ethnographies has now established an enviable critical and commercial reputation. We have published titles on a wide variety of ethnographic subjects, including English football fans, Scottish Conservatives, Chagos islanders, international seafarers, African migrants in Ireland, post-civil war Sri Lanka, Iraqi women in Denmark and the British in rural France, among others. Our list of forthcoming titles, which continues to grow, reflects some of the best scholarship based on fresh ethnographic research carried out all around the world. Our authors are both established and emerging scholars, including some of the most exciting and innovative up-and-coming ethnographers of the next generation. New Ethnographies continues to provide a platform for social scientists and others engaging with ethnographic methods in new and imaginative ways. We also publish the work of those grappling with the ‘new’ ethnographic objects to which globalisation, geopolitical instability, transnational migration and the growth of neoliberal markets have given rise in the twenty-first century. We will continue to promote interdisciplinary debate about ethnographic methods as the series grows. Most importantly, we will continue to champion ethnography as a valuable tool for apprehending a world in flux.

Alexander Thomas T. Smith

Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Introduction: selling the Barefoot College

The following is part of a transcript taken from a conference address by the founder of the Barefoot College, Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, during the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Global Conference hosted in Edinburgh in July 2011. TED is a global set of conferences run by a private non-profit organisation under the slogan ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. Focusing on technology and design, cultural, scientific and academic topics, TED speakers are given a maximum of eighteen minutes to present their ideas in the most engaging and original way possible. In the following address, Bunker presents to an audience of several hundred people on a podium in front of a large screen. Although not giving justice to his delivery, the following excerpt gives some indication of his method.

I'd like to take you to another world, and I'd like to share a forty-five-year-old love story with the poor living on less than one dollar a day. I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor – all laid out. … And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work, and just see what a village is like. …

I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which is never brought into the mainstream – which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College – college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the College. …

So, we started the Barefoot College and we redefined professionalism. … Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone-setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. …

So the College works following the lifestyle and work style of Mahatma Gandhi. You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. … And no one can get more than one hundred dollars a month. … It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. …

So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. It was built by twelve Barefoot architects who can't read or write, built on one dollar fifty per square foot. … They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. I said, ‘Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the College.’ We are the only ones who actually returned the award for fifty thousand dollars because they didn't believe us…

It's the only college which is fully solar electrified. All the power comes from the sun. … But the beauty is, that it was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who has only done eight years of primary schooling, never been to school, never been to college. He knows more about solar than anyone I know, anywhere in the world, guaranteed. (Roy 2011)

Bunker proceeds to highlight many of the programmes and achievements of the College, including the training of illiterate grandmothers as ‘Barefoot solar engineers’ and ‘Barefoot dentists’. At one point, he brings out a puppet – constructed, he adds (to laughter and cheering), from recycled World Bank reports – to demonstrate to the audience how social messages are delivered the traditional way. His speech elicits a standing ovation.

I chose the above speech to introduce this book not only because it highlights the approach and concerns of the Barefoot College but also because it underlines the often-overlooked importance of narrative construction, spectacle and mobilisation to modern-day development organisations. Indeed, Bunker's rich and arresting speech may serve as an allegory for the themes of this book.

Bunker, as the reader can tell even from this decontextualised piece, is a master at capturing the imagination of his audience. In the above, he begins with a recognisable ethnographic trope – by parting his audience from the world he has arrived from – by laying emphasis on how dissimilar his audience is from the world in which he lives and works. He stresses his own elitist background and educational achievements before rejecting them and emphasising how much he has sacrificed and renounced to be where he is today. He at once identifies himself with much of his audience while seemingly rejecting them and emphasising his kinship with the poor.

Renunciation and self-sacrifice, as the above clip demonstrates, form a pervasive place in Bunker's conference and media addresses. Stress is laid on the gilded life he was born into and the treasures that awaited him as a diplomat or doctor. He threw all these opportunities away, however, to live and work among the rural poor in the village and to build them a place of learning that rejected the worldly letters of educated men and women. Through such sacrifices, Bunker puts forth a certain ideal of authenticity to his audience, as an individual who is at one with the everyday rural realities of the people whom he serves. Aware of his predominantly Western audience, he uses this ‘halo’ of legitimacy to draw upon familiar images of the orientalist Other – the water diviner, the traditional bone-setter – to re-cast them as modern-day professionals and, in effect, challenge the social hierarchies prevalent in rural India.

Bunker proceeds to highlight the ingenuity of the poor and the lack of recognition that their own skills and knowledge have been accorded before denying a place for higher education in his organisation. This is highlighted when he later challenges the validity of formal education and expertise with an account of how the College campus was solar electrified by an uneducated Hindu priest. Via a re-definition of what constitutes a professional, Bunker calls attention to his organisation's affinity to a Gandhian existence of austerity. He then demonstrates how this approach to development plays out in practice through a tangible example of the construction of the College campus buildings. His recounting of the tale, however, also alerts us to the fact that all is not as it seems, with an opposing version of events that attempted to challenge his own ‘translation’ of the resourcefulness of twelve ‘Barefoot architects’.¹ This seemingly innocuous incongruity, a mere footnote in an all-encompassing Barefoot success story provides us with a fissure of opportunity to consider how success is generated and sustained in development narratives.

Bunker's address can also be read as alluding to India's own modern-day narrative. In his espousal of a Gandhian way of living, one that rejects certification, professionalism and wealth accumulation, and instead promotes a life of local knowledge production, simple living and rural harmony, Bunker's address serves as an implicit critique of modernity. It also reflects, to some degree, the choices faced by a post-independence India and the discourses that continue to shape it. On the one hand, Gandhi, trenchant critic of modernity and advocate of decentralised politics, rural living and indigenous industry; on the other Nehru, architect of statist modernisation and advocate of industrial expansion and centralised planning (Prakash 1999: 224). Through the mobilisation of historically and culturally embedded concepts and discourses, narratives can thus act to persuade, to enrol and to shape the perception of certain events and circumstances by different audiences.

In modern-day accounts of India, it is easy to retreat into generalisations and simplistic narratives. However, narratives hold power over the imagination, helping to conceal the cracks and splits in everyday realities and providing the necessary force and authority to impose alternative accounts of being. As Downing (2011: 1) notes, a successfully deployed narrative can help resolve ambiguities and uncertainties, enrolling supporters through persuasion and storytelling. Carrithers (2009: 3) similarly draws upon rhetoric as the means by which desired understandings and policy orientations are achieved for different ends through ‘a deflection of minds, hearts and events’. However, as Bunker's opening address demonstrates, narratives are not just limited to words and text, but also encompass ‘spectacles’ of objects, people, buildings and materials. In their re-constitution as spectacles of development, ideals of progress, modernity and social transformation are mobilised and made robust, which in their dynamism helps resolve ambiguities and doubt, enrolling supporters and concealing the cracks and fissures in official accounts.

Through an ethnographic study of the Barefoot College, an internationally renowned non-governmental development organisation (NGO²) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. In this conceptualisation, success is not an output of good development practice, but is rather a socially and materially generated construction sustained via robust interpretations, mobilised meanings and strong networks of support. I pay particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings and discourses that they act to perform. Attending to the different ways in which success is engendered in development, from locally produced assemblages to regional and global deployments of application, remind us that knowledge forms are never fixed; rather, they are contingent upon the materials, locations and persons that conceive and comprise them. How the Barefoot College achieves its success over time and circumstance is the subject of this book.

Accordingly, this book situates itself broadly within the anthropology of knowledge, and the material mechanisms and constraints through which knowledge is produced in the context of development. Attending to what objects and material practices ‘do’ in certain contexts, how they enable or inhibit what can be known, allows us to account for the ways in which assemblages of persons and things interact to produce new spaces of power and control. In most cases, the methods and outcomes of development initiatives are confined to the specific audiences of the development community, enrolling donors and augmenting support. In the case of the Barefoot College, however, the diversity and appeal of its spectacle extends not only to funding bodies and development institutions but also to a broader national and international consciousness.

Drawing upon Debord's ([1967] 2002) notion of ‘spectacle’ and Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopia’, I argue that the College, as a prolific producer of various forms of development media, achieves its success through materially mediated ‘heterotopic spectacles’: enacted and imperfect utopias that constitute the desires, imaginings and Otherness of its society serving to reify this theatre of dreams. With a particular focus on its community-managed, solar photovoltaic development programme, one that trains illiterate women from countries across Africa and beyond as Barefoot solar engineers (BSEs), I discuss firstly how heterotopic spectacles are produced, the machinations, strategies, persons and materialities involved in development work (e.g. material props, stage sets, rehearsals and embodied training); and secondly, what makes it successful – what kinds of ideas, visions and discourses these persons and materialities draw upon (and help augment) to account for its growth from small-scale, rural experiment in skills training to celebrated, globalised development model. Each chapter thus explores the different materialities and modalities through which spectacles are produced and sustained.

Spectacle as mobilising metaphor suggests elements of design and stagecraft enacted through combinations of theatre and speech, props and performance to a diversity of audiences. In critical terms, however, spectacle is also a manifestation of advanced capitalism in which critical thought is impeded and social relations are supplanted by images and representations. Through the use and expansion of Debord's ([1967] 2002) concept of spectacle to one that takes account not only of images but also of mediums and materialities, this book attempts to move away from an overly discursive view of development work, one rooted in words and texts, to one that takes account of the materiality of development, and the ways in which ideals and imaginings are translated through the spectacle of objects and people, technologies and skilled practices.

Spectacles, however, by their very nature, also imply acts of concealment and silence, which act to generate spaces of ignorance. Their explanatory power to simplify, illustrate and justify, and to give meaning to various publics is done through exercises in the fragmentation of knowledge which act to secrete and silence conflicting and often rival accounts of being. In the performance and projection of spectacle, a process in which certain knowledge spaces are framed and edged, other (often rival) accounts are ignored and muted in the process of amplification. Thus, this book also considers the silences of development work, how spectacle often induces, and indeed depends upon, the silencing of different narratives and constructions. Just as spectacle relies upon visually striking and extravagant displays to hold the gaze of the viewer and conceal its backstage workings, so too must development work obscure its underpinnings to produce a convincing performance of developmental change.

These spaces of ignorance and fragmentation are not only confined to development work, however, but encompass the breadth of human endeavour. Perhaps the most compelling example in recent times has been the general discrediting of expertise seen across many different domains to be replaced by populism of various kinds. Bunker intimates this above when discussing the re-definition of what it means to be a professional; however, it may equally be discerned in the seismic political changes we have recently witnessed, from the election of President Trump and his debasement of the knowledge and expertise of various governmental departments (including the intelligence agencies), the media and scientists, to Brexit and the wave of populist, anti-intellectualism that its leaders helped incite. All of these changes have been influenced, to some degree, by compelling narratives of a promised land, and fragmentations in knowledge and expertise; in other words – heterotopic spectacles. In the concluding section I reflect upon these wider concerns and the amorphous ways in which the heterotopic spectacle may move (and be studied) beyond an anthropology of development.

Spectacles of development

As a conjurer of the wow factor designed to produce excessive reactions in audiences through their affective displays (Kershaw 2003: 592), spectacles have reflected back to their audiences the concerns and anxieties at play within changing worlds and societies. In modern times, with the advent of media culture and Internet-based forms of mass communication, the spectacle has come to play an increasingly pervasive role in the shaping of public life. The spectacle of developmental change, I suggest, is an important part of modern-day development efforts, helping organisations to enrol supporters and influence policy through the demonstration of the efficacy and efficiency of development programmes to effect change on people and communities.

Guy Debord has perhaps provided the most forceful analysis of spectacle to date through his critical analysis of the development of spectacle as a reflection of a wider capitalist system whereby increasing corporatisation, a pervasive media culture and glossy marketing generate a consumer culture in which our social relations are mediated by the images and things we consume: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images’ ([1967] 2002: section 4).

In an analysis that draws upon Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and alienation, Debord characterises the spectacle as transforming human relations into objectified relations ‘where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality’ ([1967] 2002: section 36). Debord describes modern life as presented through an immense series of spectacles, in which images are detached from everyday life and presented as autonomised aspects of reality. In this ‘separate pseudoworld’ (ibid. section 2) constructed through mass-media technologies and advanced capitalist modes of production, the spectacle becomes a version of reality that re-configures social relations between people, objects and materials.

Debord developed his ideas in tandem with other scholars of the time, most notably those associated with the Frankfurt School, who coined the term ‘culture industry’ to denote the industrialisation of mass-produced culture (music, television, radio, etc.) and its role in the reification of capitalist society. During this stage, subjects of the spectacle were conceived of as passive spectators who watched and consumed rather than actively participated. Today, however, with the proliferation of new forms of user-centred digital communication technologies, subjects are rendered more participative, actively contributing to the spectacle. Thus, I would argue, following Best and Kellner (1999), the spectacle today is not so much characterised by domination of the subject but by transformation and alteration with a partial collapse of the subject/object distinction through a new fusion in cyberspace.

Expanding and updating Debord's use of spectacle to the present day allows us to embrace the multiple and diverse forms of materialities employed in contemporary culture and the deployment of the spectacle in development institutions, such as the Barefoot College. Thus, through a broadened conception of spectacle from one dominated by the image to one that encompasses the materialities of modern-day development – Internet-based communications, videos, reports, people, narratives, the material devices of development work – I argue that the College actively assembles and mobilises marginalised people and things to produce spectacles of developmental change, simultaneously helping to enrol supporters to sustain its success. These material things act as powerful emblems through which ideas of development and social change are presented and performed to viewing audiences. In this instance, development, as the fetishisation of the local and the traditional, and its transformation via progress and modernity, is not a new phenomenon; rather, I wish to suggest that conceiving of it in terms of the consumption of spectacles offers new ways in which to think and theorise about it. Thus, in the harnessing of new communication technologies for the purposes of sustaining convincing policy narratives through spectacle, the commodification of the transformation of the Other has gained new ground in development.

The mobilisation of these discourses into meaningful practices of social transformation produces a carnivalesque spectacle of development, which in its visual force acts as a veritable black box to its viewing audience. As I will show in later chapters, through its opaqueness the spectacle conceals the fragmentary and often contradictory networks that are embedded within. In this way, as Debord has elaborated, the spectacle transforms the ‘real world’ into images that cannot be questioned: ‘It is whatever escapes people's activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue’ ([1967] 2002: section 18). Such mobilised meanings are given weight and significance by ‘interpretive communities’ (Mosse 2005) that act to enrol support and participate in this mediated reality as if it were objective fact. These groups of ‘believers’ (ibid. 172) are the public audiences for the drama of development change within the Barefoot College. The spectacle is thus an example of how development projects manage and sustain success, helping to ‘conceal the contradictions and weak causal connections between project activities and claimed outcomes’ (ibid. 18). Such masquerades are not the result of a cover-up or plot of intrigue, but rather are part of a spectacle so robust, compelling and convincing, one that a development audience needs to believe, that the contradictions occasioned in its course go unquestioned and ignored.

However, the question remains as to why the kinds of spectacles being marketed and sold by the Barefoot College, as discussed above, are appealing; why do they hold such power over the imagination? To answer such questions, I turn to Foucault and his imperfect approximation of a worldly utopia; that is, the ‘heterotopia’. In its manufacture of spectacles of gender, underdevelopment, social transformation and technological empowerment, the College is marketing particular kinds of spectacles to particular audiences. I suggest that the College, as a heterotopic space, acts in a mirror-like fashion, at once a reflector and generator of dreams, imaginings and social anxieties.

Spectacles of Otherness

In medicine, the term ‘heterotopia’ refers to the formation of a tissue, or group of cells, in a part of the body where its presence, although abnormal, is tolerable. Such notions of Otherness and co-existence sparked Foucault's interest, who extended the concept to describe spaces