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queenluaGod this book was such a total delight to read. Like, yes, it's some anthropologist's PhD thesis, and I don't think it's supposed to be laugh-out-loud hilarious. But, well, allow me to retitle some chapters to match what I experienced while reading:
Conceptual apparatus: the constitution of the object of "development"—Lesotho as "less developed country" In which the author takes the 1975 World Bank Country Report on Lesotho, compares it side-by-side with basic literal facts about the country, observes how bonkers-wrong the World Bank report is, and then stares into the camera like The Office dot gif. Oh, also, he reverse-engineers where the report got half of its totally made-up statistics and, damn, this sure is some big Recent Harvard Grad Was Told To Bullshit Some Tables And Graphs And Bullshitted Accordingly energy
The Bovine Mystique: a study of power, property, and livestock in rural Lesotho It turns out cattle serve as 401k retirement plans for dudes who work in mining, once they're too old to work in the mines. That's it, that's the story. It is not that cattle hold some "sacred" "spiritual" place in Basotho culture, but also, it's not like these dudes are idiots acting against their own economic self-interest by not selling the cows the second they're offered a good price, jfc y'all need to learn to do field interviews
The decentralization debacle In which the author interviews various government employees, asks who they report to, and then he draws an org chart based on the results. Finally he goes to some of the upper-level bureaucrats and asks if the org chart is accurate; turns out they disagree; hilarity ensues!
It's a quick enough and engrossing enough book that I'd recommend just reading it yourself if any of that sounds entertaining to you, but, a few of my high-level thoughts:
1) Essentially, Ferguson's project is to try and analyze a specific World Bank + Canadian International Development Agency project in the late 1970s + early 1980s, which had the ostensible goal of improving agricultural production (both livestock and crops) in the Thaba-Tseka district of Lesotho. While obviously Canada, the World Bank, and the government of Lesotho all have their own hopes for what the project will achieve, Ferguson's mostly interested in studying the project itself, assuming that it likely ends up achieving or working toward unexpected or surprising emergent ends (drawing direct inspiration from Foucault's analysis of prisons), as opposed to strictly what those in power are expecting to happen. This is an analytic approach that's always quite pleased me as a Systems Thinker TM; I generally think more about computer systems than human systems, but I like them both a great deal! (tl;dr while the projects basically always fail on their own terms, they do serve to expand/entrench state bureaucracy, which may be the real "success"... thus the ostensibly apolitical project is in fact leveraged for political ends, hence the book title)
2) The author himself doesn't drill into this point too much, but, when the actual residents of the Thaba-Tseka district are polled on what they would like out of a "development" project, their leading asks are: clean water and education. Clean water is only nominally addressed by the project, and education not at all. While obviously there's reason to be skeptical even if the project were trying to address those specific needs, I'm a little surprised how completely they're ignored by the project? Like, is this the kind of thing where North America is weirdly obsessed with this Platonic-ideal Jeffersonian democracy of all these cute little self-sufficient farmers, and thus there's a huge bias toward trying to export that everywhere? (even when North America hasn't even been that for like over a century now, if it ever was?)
3) Okay, I alluded to "cattle as 401k plans" already, but honestly that whole bit was SO fascinating? I think I will talk about it more??
So, the vast majority of young men in Lesotho earn their income by working as migrant laborers in the mines of South Africa, right? They're away for 10 to 11 months at a time, and employment/income opportunities back home are pretty limited, so if they get fired or injured or just plain too old to work in the mines anymore, that's... pretty much the end of the most lucrative years of their lives.
Furthermore, there's a general social structure around money where:
* any cold, hard cash a man brings back from the mines belongs to both the man and his wife equally, and they're both entitled to spend it
* any income from "women's animals" (e.g. chickens) is totally under the woman's control, so, e.g. a woman can sell eggs to buy a nice dress, and the husband has no grounds for complaining about it
* cattle are "men's animals" and the sole property of men
Finally, while cattle aren't really a significant source of income (the grazing isn't good enough for them to produce much milk, etc), cattle are useful for some limited work-type tasks (e.g. ploughing), and for breeding more cattle, and thus neighbors may ask their buddies if they can borrow a cow or two on a short-term basis.
This means that, not only are cattle a convenient "store" for value after your retirement, it's a store of value that your wife can't access, which men obviously find useful for various reasons. Also, it's a visible store of wealth—if you have a lot of cattle, you may loan them out to a bunch of friends, and therefore all your friends will like you more, and this will be very useful if you're poor in retirement since, like, all those friends now owe you a fucking break, right?
Plus, it's a visible store of wealth even if you're away—which matters if you're spending ten months out of every twelve in a South African mine, far away from your whole village!
This all adds up to a system where men will "irrationally" refuse to sell their cattle, even for a handsome profit, because (1) socially, selling a cow looks to everyone like you're having to prematurely liquidate your 401k; it means you've fallen on hard financial times and that's shameful; (2) they may just prefer having their wealth safely "stored."
(Naturally, this caused great frustration to the project team, whose whole idea was based around, "wow, I bet we can teach them to raise fewer, higher-quality cattle, and then they will sell them regularly at the market and make bank...!" lmao what a misunderstanding of, like, everything)
Moreover, this "cattle 401k" system is not static. It could only really develop in the first place in a context where most men are earning their income elsewhere—so, e.g., it likely started emerging only in the early 1900s, when Lesotho's economy was transitioning from mostly-agrarian to mostly-migrant-workers. Also, there's plenty dissent within the community about how valuable the cattle really are! Young women, when interviewed, often complained about their husbands wasting too much money on cattle, and were 100% on board with the project's aims. Older women tended to have a more mixed opinion—while they would rather have more money, they also said they liked that their husband had cattle... which makes perfect rational sense; if you're closer to retirement, you want everyone to keep assigning value to your retirement plan! Thus, while it's obvious that something about the 401k system may change at some point, it's not going to be because a project comes in and tells them "did you know you can sell cattle for money"; it would be more likely e.g. if migrant labor stops being the dominant form of income in the area, or if the young/old male/female social struggle comes to the fore, etc
4) I was curious to see Ferguson's current thinking on international "development", since, after all, this book was first published in 1990, which I reluctantly admit means it is now 31 years old. What's changed since then? He apparently published a book in 2015 where he speaks positively of direct payments and UBI schemes (this Goodreads review seemed like a decent summary), so, that's where his head's at these days.
5) ....ahogiehalgieh omg I just googled "economy of Lesotho" and. The first few sentences of this Wikipedia article:
It's a quick enough and engrossing enough book that I'd recommend just reading it yourself if any of that sounds entertaining to you, but, a few of my high-level thoughts:
1) Essentially, Ferguson's project is to try and analyze a specific World Bank + Canadian International Development Agency project in the late 1970s + early 1980s, which had the ostensible goal of improving agricultural production (both livestock and crops) in the Thaba-Tseka district of Lesotho. While obviously Canada, the World Bank, and the government of Lesotho all have their own hopes for what the project will achieve, Ferguson's mostly interested in studying the project itself, assuming that it likely ends up achieving or working toward unexpected or surprising emergent ends (drawing direct inspiration from Foucault's analysis of prisons), as opposed to strictly what those in power are expecting to happen. This is an analytic approach that's always quite pleased me as a Systems Thinker TM; I generally think more about computer systems than human systems, but I like them both a great deal! (tl;dr while the projects basically always fail on their own terms, they do serve to expand/entrench state bureaucracy, which may be the real "success"... thus the ostensibly apolitical project is in fact leveraged for political ends, hence the book title)
2) The author himself doesn't drill into this point too much, but, when the actual residents of the Thaba-Tseka district are polled on what they would like out of a "development" project, their leading asks are: clean water and education. Clean water is only nominally addressed by the project, and education not at all. While obviously there's reason to be skeptical even if the project were trying to address those specific needs, I'm a little surprised how completely they're ignored by the project? Like, is this the kind of thing where North America is weirdly obsessed with this Platonic-ideal Jeffersonian democracy of all these cute little self-sufficient farmers, and thus there's a huge bias toward trying to export that everywhere? (even when North America hasn't even been that for like over a century now, if it ever was?)
3) Okay, I alluded to "cattle as 401k plans" already, but honestly that whole bit was SO fascinating? I think I will talk about it more??
So, the vast majority of young men in Lesotho earn their income by working as migrant laborers in the mines of South Africa, right? They're away for 10 to 11 months at a time, and employment/income opportunities back home are pretty limited, so if they get fired or injured or just plain too old to work in the mines anymore, that's... pretty much the end of the most lucrative years of their lives.
Furthermore, there's a general social structure around money where:
* any cold, hard cash a man brings back from the mines belongs to both the man and his wife equally, and they're both entitled to spend it
* any income from "women's animals" (e.g. chickens) is totally under the woman's control, so, e.g. a woman can sell eggs to buy a nice dress, and the husband has no grounds for complaining about it
* cattle are "men's animals" and the sole property of men
Finally, while cattle aren't really a significant source of income (the grazing isn't good enough for them to produce much milk, etc), cattle are useful for some limited work-type tasks (e.g. ploughing), and for breeding more cattle, and thus neighbors may ask their buddies if they can borrow a cow or two on a short-term basis.
This means that, not only are cattle a convenient "store" for value after your retirement, it's a store of value that your wife can't access, which men obviously find useful for various reasons. Also, it's a visible store of wealth—if you have a lot of cattle, you may loan them out to a bunch of friends, and therefore all your friends will like you more, and this will be very useful if you're poor in retirement since, like, all those friends now owe you a fucking break, right?
Plus, it's a visible store of wealth even if you're away—which matters if you're spending ten months out of every twelve in a South African mine, far away from your whole village!
This all adds up to a system where men will "irrationally" refuse to sell their cattle, even for a handsome profit, because (1) socially, selling a cow looks to everyone like you're having to prematurely liquidate your 401k; it means you've fallen on hard financial times and that's shameful; (2) they may just prefer having their wealth safely "stored."
(Naturally, this caused great frustration to the project team, whose whole idea was based around, "wow, I bet we can teach them to raise fewer, higher-quality cattle, and then they will sell them regularly at the market and make bank...!" lmao what a misunderstanding of, like, everything)
Moreover, this "cattle 401k" system is not static. It could only really develop in the first place in a context where most men are earning their income elsewhere—so, e.g., it likely started emerging only in the early 1900s, when Lesotho's economy was transitioning from mostly-agrarian to mostly-migrant-workers. Also, there's plenty dissent within the community about how valuable the cattle really are! Young women, when interviewed, often complained about their husbands wasting too much money on cattle, and were 100% on board with the project's aims. Older women tended to have a more mixed opinion—while they would rather have more money, they also said they liked that their husband had cattle... which makes perfect rational sense; if you're closer to retirement, you want everyone to keep assigning value to your retirement plan! Thus, while it's obvious that something about the 401k system may change at some point, it's not going to be because a project comes in and tells them "did you know you can sell cattle for money"; it would be more likely e.g. if migrant labor stops being the dominant form of income in the area, or if the young/old male/female social struggle comes to the fore, etc
4) I was curious to see Ferguson's current thinking on international "development", since, after all, this book was first published in 1990, which I reluctantly admit means it is now 31 years old. What's changed since then? He apparently published a book in 2015 where he speaks positively of direct payments and UBI schemes (this Goodreads review seemed like a decent summary), so, that's where his head's at these days.
5) ....ahogiehalgieh omg I just googled "economy of Lesotho" and. The first few sentences of this Wikipedia article:
The economy of Lesotho is based on agriculture, livestock, manufacturing, mining, and depends heavily on inflows of workers’ remittances and receipts from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).[6][7] Lesotho is geographically surrounded by South Africa and is economically integrated with it as well. The majority of households subsist on farming.I'm... so curious, haha. The first couple chapters of the book absolutely dismantle any notion that the economy is "based on agriculture" or that people "subsist on farming" (most people's farmland activities produce, at most, four months of their own needs, let alone any surplus)... obviously something might've changed in the 30 years since the book was published, but, if Wikipedia's just parroting the same bad World Bank data all these years later then I'm very amused :P
no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 04:52 am (UTC)Though it is very frustrating to see another example of "if you had just talked to the people on the ground..."
no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 01:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 05:34 pm (UTC)FASCINATING
Date: 2021-05-18 04:33 pm (UTC)Would it be ok for me to link to this (and other public entries you've made) publicly?
Re: FASCINATING
Date: 2021-05-18 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-19 11:42 pm (UTC)