Conclusion

This book shows that far from simply a narrative about societal change, for many people throughout the world development is a narrative about transforming selves. As such, it both shapes and is shaped by local categories of difference and intergenerational life aspirations. It also shows that notions of development vary not only across localities and between groups, but individuals can at once hold multiple and even contending ideals of development, prioritizing different views in different contexts. These contending notions are underscored by wider tensions in society regarding what constitutes a good life and how we should relate to one another morally, as social and economic beings.

Performing Development

This chapter focuses on development as a “civic project.” It explores local symbols of orchestrated community-wide development, including infrastructure, ceremony and signage. The chapter argues that a defining feature of such symbols is a concern with development as a performative display. Tied as they are to clientelist politics, local government-led development initiatives are largely about “branding” both projects and people in their patron’s name, (re)producing webs of utang kabubut-on(debt of obligation), intended to reinforce the status quo. Entangled in this local political economy of development, are international bilateral and multilateral agencies, equipped with the latest international development orthodoxy and a remit to work in “partnership” with the local government. The incommensurability of these approaches is revealed when “partnership” morphs into a system of largely separate and parallel structures for implementing local development.

Imagining Amerika

The term “colonial mentality” is popularly used among many Filipinos to refer to a tendency to compare themselves negatively to Amerikanos. This chapter explores the everyday form such deprecating self/other constructions take on Siquijor, shedding light on how these constructions are socially situated and reproduced, their limits and their effects. It shows that comparisons between categories of Filipino and Amerikano must be understood in relation to local hierarchies. On Siquijor, local imaginings of Amerikano lifestyles and bodies not only serve as reference points for ideals of affluence and beauty, but act as markers of prestige in competitions for status between neighbours and kin, sustaining a sense of Amerikano superordinancy. While, on Siquijor, superordinancy usually presumes neither innate nor moral superiority, there is a strong presumption specifically that the “failure” of the Philippines to achieve similar levels of affluence to the US is due to moral deficiencies of the Filipino self.

Living off the Land

This chapter expands on the exploration of meanings of development at the personal and familial level, finding narratives of development woven into personal histories and aspirations. It recounts the life stories of four village residents, revealing that they understand the local livelihoods of fishing and farming as inextricably tied to poverty and formal education and labor migration as key to breaking from the land. These desires for upward mobility through education and migration are more than economic – they are part of a desire to become a cosmopolitan person, a person at home in the wider world and admired in the village. In this sense, local notions of development on Siquijor concern changes in cultural style, bodily form and knowledge.

Revolution of the Mind

This chapter examines KALAHI-CIDSS—a carefully planned and ambitious World Bank-engineered project, rolled out in thousands of villages and suburbs across the Philippines. It is designed not only to deliver basic services to poor villages but also to change the way villagers think and act. Exploring the course the project took in a Siquijor village, the chapter considers who participated, why and how, and the ways in which the project was variously received and evaluated by residents. It also considers the project’s goal of empowerment. By drawing on neoliberal assumptions suggesting people are responsible for their own poverty, the project eclipsed structural causes of poverty. This reinforced a tendency for residents to read their inability to attain high levels of consumption as a personal failure.

Mystic Island

Throughout the Philippines, Siquijor is infamous as a realm of sorcery, witchcraft and hyperactive paranormal activity. At the same time, the island is promoted as an unspoiled haven of white beaches and undulating palms. Both caricatures position Siquijor as an isolated place, eluded by progress. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Siquijodnon are Christian—a religion with which official public performances of development are closely aligned in much of the Philippines. The chapter explores the symbolic associations between belief and development, and the ways in which people on Siquijor negotiate social categories of modernization through representations of belief. It is argued that as Siquijodnon attempt to challenge nationally dominant stereotypes of themselves as backward, the often reinforce the very framework that has defined them as backwards.

Poverty and Prosperity

This chapter introduces Siquijor Island and sketches the socio-economic terrain of the village. It then considers key material markers of development—such as infant formula and concrete block houses—and how these are deployed by individuals and families as they compete for status. While this aspect of the local concept of development emphasizes social mobility anchored in conspicuous consumption, it sits in tension with a contending local ideal of how one should live. Ang simpul nga kinabuhi, the simple life, involves contentment in an austere lifestyle and attention to personal relationships. These ideals respectively embrace and reject liberal norms of enterprise, individual accumulation, competition and the defining of identity in terms of consumer goods. The chapter shows that even within individuals, notions of development are not necessarily singular or fully coherent and these tensions are tied to ambivalent assumptions concerning what constitutes “proper” social and economic relations.

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.

Moral Development

Chapter Seven considers local folk explanations for wealth and poverty, development and underdevelopment, on Siquijor, probing the often tacit socio-economic ideals which underlie them. The chapter is divided into two overlapping sections: explanations for inequalities between people and explanations for (larger scale) inequalities between places. On Siquijor, these are different in important ways. The former incorporate luck, fate and hard work. However, the latter explanations, focusing on cooperation and its locally perceived opposites—“crab mentality,” politicking and corruption. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio-economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio-economic organization.