Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

Ferguson, therefore, is key to thinking through the ways in which evaluations of development are in themselves a site of politics, so that claims regarding success or failure are not facts which can be accepted or refuted as much as discourses which display the link between development and power.

Ferguson, however, has been subject to criticism for understanding the construction of discourses as an unmediated imposition of power, instead of also considering the ways in which the flow of discourses opens them to appropriation in local contexts (e.g., Everett 1997). In other words, by focusing on official texts of development, Ferguson did not directly consider the ways in which discourses of development are matched by counterdiscourses in local places. Thus, a more enabling framework would be to chart the ways in which locally prevalent discourses of development also diverge from official development discourses, so that the separation between local and global contexts of development would not only illuminate how official development has to make place for itself within local contexts, but also trace the multiple meanings which can be attached to local development itself.

Pigg's (1992) study of the targeting of villages for development in Nepal provides an illuminating example of the ways in which discourses of development are both imposed on as well as appropriated and resisted within contexts of implementation. The main contention of her study is that the representation of Nepal as an overwhelmingly rural country has not resulted in a focus on actual villages within the country, but has led to the construction of a generic notion of the “village,” capable of being used to describe any village. For her, it is through this “systematic reduction of the diverse into the generalizable, [that] the village comes to seem ever more concrete because it is ever more knowable” (504). The “essence of villageness” here consists in approaching the villager as “someone who does not understand” and approaching the village as a “space of backwardness—a physical space that imprisons people in what is considered an inferior and outmoded way of life” (507).