The Community on Friday

The Pitfalls of Development Language in Understanding Culture and Civilisation by William C Chittick

Development language is strewn with pitfalls for anyone who wants to speak about culture and civilisation. What sort of problems arise when we employ the language of development? By “development language”, I mean the well-known words that are current in the United Nations and governmental agencies throughout the world. I quote list of these words from the table of contents of The Development Dictionary, a book that should be required reading for anyone who is not convinced that modern Western society provides the model that all peoples in the world must follow: “development, environment equality, helping, market, needs, one world, participation, planni population, poverty, progress, production, resources, science, socialis standards of living, state, technology.”