2 posts tagged “poor”
ok I've made it my goal to point out any academic articles that have meaning in life outside of the university.
Lamia Karen's article, Demystifying Micro-Credit - The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh, is easily readable and well reseached. I think it's brave for her to publish this work and this kind of research is an example of the kind of critiques social sciences should be making. she's actually become one of my favorite anthropologists.
I've included the abstract, introduction and conclusion of her article. I recommend reading it in it's entirety, here's the link to the entire paper. She captues all the ideological and practical concerns I have had with micro-credit as a model of "development." when I spoke to people in India involved with micro-credit, I didn't encounter anyone who spoke positively about it withouth giving all the disclaimers or launching into a discussion about their financial and social concerns. the main point was that that financial and the social were not complementing each other other as well as they did in the beginning. They all said it seemed to work well when the program first started, but the lenders themselves who were small NGO's would start talking about how they weren't making $ and were being forced to push up their interest rates but at the same time they didnt want to do that to their clients- clients whom they have worked with for years in a non-lending relatioship. they would talk about all the cultural specificiteis of a village and how certain ways of dealing with the loans didn't work out or challenged them to rethink how to encourage their clients to return their loans but more so how to encourage them to make money conciously. From the NGOs point of view - it wasn't just to return their loan, because these NGOs worked with them in community building capacities prior to the micro-credit relationship, the NGOs genuinely wanted the women to do something with the $ beyond just paying back the loan. The saw the first hand effects of the pressures of being brought into a capitalist system. anyways - read Lamia' s article! It's a crash course into neoliberalism and micro-credit! PDF of paper here
ABSTRACT:
This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of micro-credit on gender relations in rural Bangladesh. Focusing on the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and three other leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country, I analyze the role of gender in the expansion of globalization and neoliberalism in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank has become a global symbol of poor women's empowerment and is celebrated for its 98 percent loan recovery. In this article, I examine some of the NGO tactics behind the loan recovery programs. In particular, I examine how Bangladeshi rural women's honor and shame are instrumentally appropriated by micro-credit NGOs in the furtherance of their capitalist interests.
INTRODUCTION
While economic globalization refers to the removal of trade barriers and open markets, its effects on communities are variable, contingent, and locally constructed. This article is an interpretation of these variable, contingent, and local expressions of grassroots globalization through an ethnographic study of globalization and neoliberalism in rural Bangladesh. It examines how globalization and neoliberalism are brought to the grassroots—the most intimate sphere of the social, the home and women—through the modernist discourse of women’s empowerment through micro-credit.
Focusing on the micro-credit policies of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, and three other leading non-governmental organizations in the country, I analyze the centrality of gender in the expansion of globalization and neoliberalism in Bangladesh. I examine how Bangladeshi rural women’s honor and shame are instrumentally appropriated by NGOs in the welfare of their capitalist interests. I analyze this relationship between rural women and NGOs by placing it within the political economy of shame, a concept I explain later.
Arjun Appadurai has defi ned grassroots globalization as:
this kind of globalization strives for a democratic and autonomous standing in respect to the various forms by which global power seeks to further its dominions. (2001: 3) The grassroots globalization I studied in Bangladesh is contrary to Appadurai’s model. It works through and not against corporate capital, donors, state, NGOs, and members of civil society, and creates complex new maps of social interdependencies that are laden with the fi nancial investments of multiple actors at the local, national, and global levels. Grass-roots globalization weakens the sovereignty of the patriarchal home family, and replaces it with the sovereignty of the market through NGOs, contracts, courts, juridical subjects, and the remaking of subjects as a community police to safeguard their investments. The developmental NGO is the purveyor of this new economic sovereignty that is represented by corporate capital interests and local institutional interests (NGOs), and is an architect of neoliberalism within a modernist developmental discourse of poor women’s empowerment through the market.. . . new forms of social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and the nation-state system . . . these social forms rely on strategies, visions, and horizons for globalization on behalf of the poor . . .
Neoliberalism as an ideology rests on the idea that human welfare is best served by the withdrawal of the state from welfarist policies (Harvey, 2005: 64). Extending this economic defi nition, Ong has termed neoliberalism as a rationality of governance stating that ‘governing relies on calculative choices and techniques in the domain of citizenship and of governing’. It subjects citizens to act in accordance with the ‘market principles of discipline, effi ciency and competitiveness’ (Ong, 2006: 4). Neoliberalism is about the subjection of targeted populations to certain rules that inform and regulate behavior. In many postcolonial countries with weak sovereignties, the notion of citizenship as a set of entitlements that are bound up with a nation-state that guarantees those rights, is lacking. In its place, we see the articulation of a postcolonial governance authorized by NGOs whose clients are subjected to act in accordance with the values of ‘discipline, efficiency and competitiveness’. By postcolonial governance I refer to the subjection of targeted populations by non-state actors such as NGOs to new technologies of market-oriented disciplinary mechanisms. It also refers to governance by NGOs that have begun to act like a state with what Ong has termed as ‘graduated sovereignties’, and they seek to implement social engineering programs (population control, HIV/AIDS management, primary education, voter education, etc.) that was formerly in the domain of the state.
But neoliberalism and globalization have also created new pathways for rural people to access new routes of capital circulation and have facilitated new movements of migrant labor. In Bangladesh, micro-credit borrowers and their families have been networked into Appadurai’s ‘fi nanscapes’ (Appadurai, 1996: 37). These new circulations of ‘fi nanscapes’ have brought new wealth, ideas, and social identities into rural spaces. Successful rural women are sometimes able to pool their loans together to send a male kin to the Middle East or Malaysia as migrant labor who, if all goes well, repays the investment at a high interest rate to them. While these opportunities are limited, they function in a similar way to the lotteries in the US. While the chances of ‘making a windfall’ are extremely rare, people begin to believe that they too can win.
In the analysis under consideration, neoliberalism and globalization operate at the grassroots through the micro-credit policies of NGOs. As providers of credit, jobs, and sustenance to a fi nancially strapped poor rural population, NGOs in Bangladesh have tremendous power to regulate people’s behavior, and subject them to NGO mandates and priorities. I make three arguments. Firstly, NGOs that work with micro-credit manipulate existing notions of Bangladeshi rural women’s honor and shame in the furtherance of their capitalist goals, and instrumentally violate local norms of cohesion and community. I call this the economy of shame. Secondly, the work of micro- credit has resulted in unanticipated neoliberal subjects, the female petty moneylender for example, that this article examines. Finally, I argue that the developmental NGO operates as a shadow state in Bangladesh, and is able to exercise tremendous control over the lives of the poor through a Gramscian notion of hegemony where their relationship is characterized by a ‘combination of force and consent, which balance each other recipro- cally, without force predominating excessively over consent’ (Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971: 248). This enables the NGOs to neutralize dissenting voices in public spaces, a point I discuss at the conclusion of the article.
The research for this article was conducted over eighteen months (1998–9), and was based on a study of the Grameen Bank and three of the largest NGOs in the country. Each of these NGOs works with micro-credit, has millions of dollars in donor support, and millions of rural subscribers. These NGOs reach 80 percent of the rural people.2 According to the Bangladesh NGO Affairs Bureau (NGOAB), during 1990 to 1998 the cumulative amount of foreign funds disbursed to NGOs stood at Taka 1,364,421,079 for 5096 NGO projects. In 1994–5, 20 percent of foreign funds were disbursed through the NGOs (Karim, 2001: 96). For western donors in Bangladesh the NGO sector is the preferred mode of developmental aid. The NGOs offer a streamlined and accountable system of aid delivery compared to the Bangladeshi state that is bureaucratic, corrupt, and inefficient, and is considered a ‘failed’ state by western aid agencies. The celebration of the neoliberal policies of the Grameen Bank has to be understood against this predicament of postcolonial governmentality.
CONCLUSION - Neutralizing Dissent: Power/Knowledge in Development
“The texts of development have always been avowedly strategic and tactical— promoting, licensing, and justifying certain interventions and practices, delegitimizing others . . . What do the texts of development not say? What do they suppress? Who do they silence—and why?” (Crush, 1995: 5).
Why is it that what I have written in these pages is not legible as a public discourse? The answer to that question is that the critiques are silenced in NGO-dominated research spaces. Knowledge is power, but power also legit- imizes what counts as knowledge, and NGOs are powerful institutions in Bangladesh. The hagiographic transcripts of the Grameen Bank have to be apprehended at the crux of power/knowledge in the context of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, there is only one academic English publishing house, called University Press Limited (UPL). The editor of UPL declined to publish Aminur Rahman’s critical assessment of the Grameen Bank, Women and Micro-Credit in Bangladesh (1999), stating that a prominent economist had advised against its publication.29 Interestingly, although Rahman’s book was published by Westview Press in the US, his critique of the Grameen Bank lending practices was silenced in Bangladesh through the lack of alternative academic publishing institutions.
Similarly, in the absence of a responsible state or a progressive social movement, the rural poor have to rely on the goodwill of the NGOs.30 Villagers critique NGOs with the qualifier that NGOs offer them services that they need, but that they want the terms of these loans to be more humane. NGO officials in their private scripts admit that development cannot take place solely through micro-credit but they censor this in their public scripts for fear of jeopardizing their jobs (Pereira, 1998). The fragmented political left continues to talk about this but since the 1990s they have lost legitimacy as a political voice. The role of feminists is complicated in this scenario because feminists find it more important to focus on other violent forms of aggression against women, such acid burnings and rape, and to keep a united NGO voice against the tyranny of the clergy.
The vernacular press is a rich source of these critiques but western donors and researchers do not access them. In NGO-dominated research spaces where donors and western researchers gather, the medium of communica- tion is English and that precludes the majority of Bangladeshis who cannot communicate in English. In fact, the use of English in NGO research spaces is ostensibly to accommodate the western donors, but in reality it regulates who can be heard in these spaces.
On 22 August 1998 a conference was held in Dhaka entitled ‘Yunusonomics’, organized by a local professor. The intent of the conference was to offer micro-credit as the new panacea in development economics. The conference papers were presented in English. When the fl oor was opened for questions, the fi rst speaker was an angry retired doctor who said that he had expected the discussion to be carried on in a language that was accessible to him. He added that he would speak his opinions in Bengali. He often went to his village and found that most people were becoming poorer after several years of membership with Grameen Bank. He had calculated the interest charged by Grameen to be over 50 percent. He asked, ‘How could they claim that this was a new paradigm to be followed? How was this high interest helping the poor?’ Yet not a single person among the speakers engaged with the doctor, an ordinary citizen who had come to the conference to engage in a dialogue. There were some donor representatives present at the conference but it was unclear if they understood what the doctor was saying. Thus, critique expressed in vernacular language is neutralized within NGO-dominated research spaces that are sustained by western agencies in the aid of their policies.
Finally, on a more significant level, for middle class Bangladeshis the Grameen Bank operates as a source of symbolic capital. For the fi rst time, we, the people of Bangladesh—Henry Kissinger’s ‘bottomless basket’—have given a gift to the western development community. Now visitors, from former US President Bill and Senator Hillary Clinton to Queen Sophia of Spain, come to Bangladesh to study a development phenomenon. It is a source of tremendous national pride for many Bangladeshis, which makes it all the more difficult to critique the Grameen Bank, or for that critique to be taken seriously. In fact, speaking out against the Grameen Bank makes one into a ‘traitor within’.31 In this scenario, Grameen Bank’s latest triumph in winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, operates as a form of governmentality and authorizes what can be said about the Grameen Bank. In the absence of a robust social movement in Bangladesh, it makes it all the more difficult for a radical critique against micro-credit policies to be heard. The Nobel Peace Prize signals Bangladesh’s arrival onto the modern landscape as equals with the West. Consequently, the Grameen Bank gains more power and authority both locally and globally by enmeshing profi t with poor people’s empowerment to create ‘brave new worlds’.
As I watch this disaster unfold, I keep comparing how the news frames the San Diego 2007 Firestorm in contrast to how they framed New Orlean's Hurrican Katrina. Race and class are at the heart of the comparisons. So much of this sounds different when you are talking about SD's primarily Caucasian middle-upper class communities being affected by the fire - whereas in new Orleans it was primarily poor black people stranded in the hurricane.
we can see many differences just by comparing how the media and government talks about the evacuees who stayed behind despite a mandatory evacuation. In New Orleans, helicopters didn't rescue all the black people on their roofs, supposedly because they were hearing "gun shots." I remember the reaction from the news and online community was that those who didn't listen to the mandatory evacuation were complete "idiots" or people trying to defy the law- essentially those stupid poor blacks folks. In San Diego - firefighters can't focus their resources on fighting the fires because of the winds and because they are also busy doing emergency rescues on people who didnt' listen to the mandatory evacuation. HOWEVER - the news frames these people in a more sympathetic light - by saying well you can understand why these people are so attached to their beautiful homes they own because of all the hard work they've put into it and even though they should have listened we understand the pain they are - essentially we are sympathetic to middle-upper class folks for staying behind in the face of a fire if they are protecting their houses. White people again are reinforced as HARD-WORKING and PERSISTENT even when they FAIL to evacuate while blacks are framed as LAZY and UNOBEDIENT for not evacuating.
Remember how the media
said black folks were raping, murdering and eating each other in the
New Orleans Superdome? Now the media in San Diego frames the 10,000
primarily white middle-upper class folks from North County in the
Qualcom Stadium as peacefully sharing oral stories about their homes
and eating home-baked brownies dropped off by sympathetic volunteers, and getting massages by compassionate massage therapist volunteers!!!! And please notice the headline of the article by ABC about those who are giving massages, "CIVILITY REIGNS IN SAN DIEGO," as if the opposite - UNCIVILITY - reigns in other places. CIVILITY refers so much to those who are CIVILIZED and separates the civilized from the uncivilized. This implies that the situation in Qualcomm stadium is totally different from the situation in other uncivilized evacuee areas - like the Superdome, where the black evacuees were supposedly unpolite, violent, sweaty, dirty and smelly - and where the Black Evacuees were called REFUGEES. So at least San Diego has learned so much from Katrina - they are taking the names of people who enter the stadium, and they are not referring to them non-US citizens. We have no white refugees in San Diego- truly they are first-class civilized citizens! 
I have to admit that I am so upset right now that I am having a hard time finishing a deconstruction of this headline and the images - so if anyone wants to write more about this please do - and I will link to you.
I know the situations (Katrina and Southern California Wildfires) are completely different and do not stand for a sound comparison, but a comparison in media representation is worthwhile and reveals how the class and race of community matter. . For a reminder at how much race and class does matter in media discourse- here's a photo where I examined from the Hurrican Katrina and how the news framed a black man wading in water as "looting" while they framed a white man wading in water as "finding" floating goods. Btw- Many New Orleans evacuees are STILL homeless and not doing ok 2 years after the disaster. For those in Malibu and San Diego who had their mansions burn down - I wonder what will happen?
I am so mad that the city I live in is filled with so much sweet words of prejudice. Not that this doesn't happen everyday everywhere - but it's just really intense when your city is burning down and there is so much racial and class politics in the media. As Raquel has written - the whole South side of San Diego county is burning down, but it the press coverage is scant compared to North County of San Diego - where all the super-rich super-luxury mansions are loacted. It's where people, like this person, go to escape their 2nd home or to their friend's hotel or book a room at the Aviara for $350 a night with sculpted flamingos and golf courses.
(South County is more middle-low income, racially and ethnically mixed and 10-5 miles from Mexico.)
You can read my other thoughts about the National news coverage of SD fires here, distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here.
UPDATE: NPR just did a piece on how bloggers are either comparing or arguing against a comparison of Katrina vs.Southern Ca. Wildfires. They link to many other excellent blog posts that do some great comparisons.
this photo was taken by ABC News and was part of this story and part of The Stencil.
