Chapter 25 Chapter Summary

In this chapter we looked at the difficult concept of culture, its varied manifestations, and its relationship to development. One of the main goals has been to dispel the many myths that surround the concept of culture. While the increasing focus on culture is justifiable, societal processes cannot be reduced to a single explanatory variable. In reality, these processes cannot as easily be broken down into various elements, such as culture, politics, and economics, as they are in academic analysis. All elements are interlinked and cannot be abstracted and studied in isolation. Therefore, development does not make sense at all without an understanding of the meanings and the cultural value attributed to it by the people who are subjected to it. At the same time, these meanings cannot be entirely disparate because of certain universal features of the human condition—and also because the same material processes of commodification and marketization are taking place across the world. The task for the development studies student is to negotiate the lines between acknowledging the importance of agency, the process of creating meanings, and understanding the structural limitations imposed by material factors on the imagination of the symbolic.