Week 8: Who wins and who loses in a war on poverty?

Week 8: Who wins and who loses in a war on poverty?

DVST 6901: The global politics of development (Semester 2, 2026)
September 21, 2026

Development policy and practice will inevitably lead to a clash between cultures and distinct ways of imagining the individual’s place in a larger social order. For this reason intervention leads to unintended consequences.

Main reading: Ansell (2014), intro. and chaps. 4-5

What do you see?

Joseph Jastrow (1901) used the popular image of a “duck-rabbit” to demonstrate that one’s mind supplies a frame to interpret visual stimuli (p. 295). Whether you see a duck or a rabbit depends on what you project onto the image, and one can switch from one frame to another. There is no way to view the image objectively.

Are there situations which feel the way or work the way that looking at this image feels?

Mentimeter poll results

A new classroom is a possibility, but working in small groups should have a purpose.
There is a range of levels and kinds of experience with independent library research.
We should talk about moving from an interest to a topic.
We should talk about how to find and to evaluate sources of information.

What’s the connection?

guanxi
wantok
wasta
many others…

Is it corruption?

Are these relationships deviations?

What are the consequences of these kinds of relationships, especially for the issues we discuss in this class?

What is a topic?

A topic is like the setting of the story.

It has a

who
what
where
when

What is a possible topic that could shed light on “intimate hierarchy”?

How can we anchor the study of this kind of social relationship in the real world in a real place and time?

Notes

Keywords

intimate hierarchies, nostalgia

Learning outcomes

Be able to identify examples of social forces that create the conditions for political conflicts around development initiatives
Be able to explain the unqiue qualities of ethnographic description and interpretation and be able to formulate a view on its relevance for understanding development practice

References

Ansell, Aaron. 2014. Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil. Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Jastrow, Joseph. 1901. Fact and Fable in Psychology. London: Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/factfableinpsych01jast/page/294/mode/2up?q=%22Do+you+see+a+duck%2C+or+a+rabbit%22.