Multiple Meanings of Development
This chapter provides a genealogy of the idea of development in Western thought and reviews related “post-development” arguments which critique the ways in which discourses of development construct subaltern peoples. It then brings together ethnographic work that traces how people in specific localities adopt, conceive of, deploy and negotiate discourses and practices of development and the politics inherent in this. In reviewing this, at each step the author further advances key arguments in the literature, with reference to the material pertaining to Siquijor detailed in the chapters that follow.The author then argues that discourses of development can simultaneously yet differentially act on power relations at different scales, from local to global.