“Village Life and How to Improve It”: Textual Routes of Community Development in the Late British Empire

<p>This paper offers an ethnographic account of seven village songs associated with community development in postwar rural Japan. These songs belong to Oyama Town in the southern island of Kyushu in Japan, and were created by the local community members mostly between 1961 and 1965. In Japan the village songs in prewar period were rooted in daily village life, and sang the glory of nostalgia in the form of work songs, party songs, calendrical or communal festival songs. In the postwar period, however, village songs embraced modernity as their focal theme. These seven village songs, created during high growth days, are songs with a difference as they portray efforts to bring about community development, under the New Plum and Chestnut (NPC) movement, with plum and chestnut as main crops, against the backdrop of a strongly centralized policy oriented rural Japan. The research found that the village songs had encouraged and motivated a rural community like the Oyama Town to create a “sense of community” through shared values and common goal. By exploring these songs, the research also identified that the local government such as the town office, which acted as a legitimate vehicle either by nurturing the potential local human resources or by entrusting the responsibility of community development with the local employees, had played an important role in devising and materializing the common goal—the development of Oyama.</p>

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The Fabianisation of the British Empire: Post-War Colonial Summer Conferences and Community Development in Kenya, 1948–1956

Britain and the World ◽

10.3366/brw.2020.0338 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 69-89

Author(s):

Joseph M. Snyder

Keyword(s):

Community Development ◽

British Empire ◽

Indigenous Populations ◽

Policy Framework ◽

Cultural Institutions ◽

Secretary Of State ◽

Development Goals ◽

Post War ◽

Fabian Society

This article examines the influence of the Fabian Society on post-war colonial development from 1948 to 1956. This study demonstrates that a primary vehicle for the ‘Fabianisation’ of the British Empire was the Cambridge Summer Conference series, particularly the conference convened in 1948. Held on the encouragement of initiative in African society, the conference devised a policy framework of community development based on a model of mass education long favoured by Arthur Creech Jones, secretary of state for the colonies and former chair of the Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB). This article also looks at the practical outcomes of that influence through a case study of community development in Kenya. It demonstrates that, despite Creech Jones' appointment as secretary of state for the colonies, severe challenges remained for the realisation of Fabian-favoured designs, including those posed by inertia and resistance in the territories, which emanated from both colonial officialdom and indigenous populations. Moreover, the findings indicate that the fulfilment of British development goals was critically dependent on the translation of those goals through the medium of indigenous cultural institutions. While the findings attest that ‘Fabianisation’ during this period produced tangible development projects that concretely impacted social welfare in the colonies, the results suggest an ambiguity surrounding the relative success of ‘Fabianised’ development. The findings indicate that ‘Fabianisation’, dependent upon the processes of negotiation that transpired between the African communities being ‘developed’ and the agents responsible for change, and the ability of those agents to inspire and motivate the indigenous populations, was at best partial.

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Doing Development One Chicken at a Time: Happy Hollow Egg Production as an Unlikely Spin-Off from an Agroforestry Development Project

Practicing Anthropology ◽

10.17730/praa.31.1.y41845j463wn0h15 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 9-10

Author(s):

Ben Wallace

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Community Development ◽

Egg Production ◽

The Philippines ◽

Development Project ◽

Applied Anthropology ◽

The Past ◽

The People ◽

New Ideas ◽

Village Life

As most of us involved in community development know, often a good idea originates with the people we are trying the help. In fact, one of the keys to success and sustainability in many development projects rests in our ability to accomplish our goals or deliverables within a methodology that is sufficiently flexible to incorporate new ideas into an already carefully defined set of goals. This basic truism of research in community development is illustrated here with an example of a livelihood project seemingly unrelated to the overall goals of an agroforestry development project—Good Roots-ugat ng buhay—that I have directed in the Philippines for the past fifteen years (see The Changing Village Life in Southeast Asia: Applied anthropology and environment in the Northern Philippines, 2005, New York and London: RoutledgeCuzon).

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