SNOB in its early expressions was thus an intra-cultural phenomenon, operating within closed frontiers. Those who attempted to cross rigid class barriers were objects of ridicule because they tried so earnestly to imitate their 'betters' and did such a rotten job of it.
With the rise of consumer culture, advertisers and merchandisers were quick to see the goldmine SNOB promised. Calvert whiskey's 'Men of Distinction' campaign of the 1950s was a classic that changed the image of a decidedly lower-class brand. With transnational capitalism, SNOB began to creep across frontiers and now flourishes wherever insecure people gather: for example, one can sell very expensive raincoat to Americans, using pictures of Lady X and Lord Y strolling across lawns obviously trod by the same family for the past 500 years.
Harmless, you may say, and a further illustration that a fool and his money are soon parted. So, alas, are a fool and his culture. As SNOB steals from North to South; from the ex- colonists to the ex-colonized, it erodes the cultural topsoil and washes it away to sea, leaving barren ground that will readily soak up a variety of products profitable to their purveyors, if not to their purchasers.
The goal of the practising corporate (or development agency) SNOB is to enrol Third World bourgeoisies in the brotherhood: they can be counted on to carry along their own masses. In winning hearts and minds, modern SNOBs wouldn't dream of using bombs and napalm when training programmes, foundation grants, marketing experts and mass media work so much more effectively. The fun of the game is to make the victim want your . The blank may be filled in with 'dangerous pharma-ceuticals', 'plastic shoes', 'infant formula', 'soft drinks', ad libitum; and easily extended to include 'hospital-based health care', 'educational system', 'agricultural techniques', etc.
This has proved almost too simple. The only element that adds spice and subtlety to the mind-colonizing game is this: the target population must be encouraged to abandon its own authentic culture in favour of a lower-middle-class, Western, wholly commercialized ersatz. Third World elites must not, with very rare exceptions, be allowed to witness or to participate in the culture of Western upper classes, for the very reason that this upper-class culture is often uncannily close to the one the conditioned victim must learn to despise as 'backward' and 'inferior' in his own country, for obvious commercial reasons.
The point can be illustrated in an area which is at once a basic need and an intensely cultural activity: food and eating. Witness the sleight-of-hand involved in the shift from an authentic Third World culture to raw Western consumerism aped by Third World bourgeoisies and back full circle to the values of the Occidental upper crust.
Breastfeeding
• 'Savages' breastfeed, as the quoted African doctor puts it.
• Western masses and nouveaux riches (and not-so-riches) Third Worlders bottlefeed with infant formula.
• Upper-class, educated Western women breastfeed. Shapes and Sizes
• 'Natives' are thin because they work hard and often go hungry.
•Lower- and middle-class Westerners are often obese - as are rich Third World wives - living proof that their husbands can afford to stuff them.
•Rich Westerners are slender - indeed they may spend as much money losing weight as putting it on.
State of the Plate
• Peasants eat, necessarily, whole unprocessed food because they can ill afford anything else.
• Hoi polloi in the rich countries and the rich in poor countries are great customers for junk food, as transnational food- processing companies have learnt to their advantage. Here, too, Third World bourgeoisies have played their destined role of bringing much of the rest of the (far poorer) population to the joys of commerciogenic malnutrition.
• Upper-class Westerners now pay premium prices for whole, unprocessed foods.
Meals versus Food Contacts
•Peasants serve their fare in hand-crafted clay, wooden or metal utensils, and they eat as a group - family or clan.
•Plastic and Pyrex prevail among the commoners who, in the West, may rarely enjoy a family meal. In the United States, 'eating' is now sociologically described in terms of 'food contacts' - as many as fifteen to twenty a day in the snack civilization.
• Avant-garde Westerners seek out hand-crafted utensils and are the only ones who can still afford the time for leisurely dining and commensality (a variant of this is the business lunch). If they are especially chic, some of the food will come from their own gardens, just like Third World peasants.
It would be nice to make a similar case for peasant polyculture (mixes of different kinds of crops and animals) as opposed to standardized, vulnerable Western monoculture and back - but the environmental movement has not yet forced industrialized countries to recognize the importance of biological complexity in farming systems. The Third World, naturally, is working flat out to transform its polycultural systems into much riskier, mono- cultural ones.
Time-lags complicate the whole SNOB issue. Third World bourgeoisies also imitate Western styles often or fifteen years ago, now totally passe in their places of origin. Look at the young blades in Asia who think they are fashion-plates in bell-bottom trousers no Western kid (even a lower-class one) would be caught dead wearing today.
I believe SNOBism is here to stay. That is why I propose, on the principle, 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em,' that we encourage Third World imitation of Western mores, but that we make some effort in the direction of social equality. Like poor Henry James, Third World elites never do meet the right people. Perhaps the United Nations could open a new agency, designed to receive Third World opinion-makers, with branches in the more desirable Western countries.
It would be partially staffed with volunteers from the best families and would devote itself to the display of authentic upper- class Western lifestyles. Trendy New York hostesses could lecture on how they serve unpolished rice and perfect vegetable terrines (nothing quite so declasse as a steak nowadays) at their most fashionable dinners. Their husbands would explain that 'nobody' watches American series on television or buys anything plastic when a natural substance is available. Elegant Britishers would put down polyester and nylon; Scandinavian industrialists' daughters would carry on pleasant conversations while breastfeeding their babies. French intellectuals would take participants to film festivals to watch aesthetic movies about workers and peasants. The possibilities are endless...
Who knows? Western corporations could lose a few marginal markets, but Third World elites might begin to feel secure in their own traditions.
9
THE KNOWLEDGE OF HUNGER
In 1981, Nicole Ball published a remarkable critical bibliography entitled World Hunger: a Guide to the Economic and Political Dimensions (libraries in particular should be urged to purchase Ball's work: available from ABC-Clio Press, Riviera Campus, 2040 Alameda Padre Serra, Box 4397, Santa Barbara, CA 93103) to which she kindly asked me to write a foreword. As soon as I saw the text, I realized that whatever needed to be said about hunger itself had already been said by Ball. The only path left open to the writer of a foreword was to make something of the fact that the bibliography's 3,000 and some entries actually existed - i.e., that hunger has been, to say the least, a problem very much in the academic limelight in recent years. Thus I tried to talk about the peculiar ambiguity of the 'hunger-and-development' scholar, his/her place in the power structures, and how we might 'apply ourselves to transforming the contents of future bibliographies into explosive devices and instruments of liberation'. This foreword, which is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publishers, also appeared in the Institute for Policy Studies' collective volume entitled First Harvest, 1983.
Inclusion of this bibliography on world hunger in the War/Peace Bibliography Series published by ABC-Clio is a, clear recognition that hunger and underdevelopment are forms of violence and sources of conflict. Nicole Ball, who prepared this outstanding instrument for researchers, the first of its kind, subtitled her work A Guide to the Economic and P
olitical Dimensions. This in itself is a step forward for scholarship. Indeed, until recently, hunger was generally regarded as a technical problem, amenable to technical solutions, or at most as the temporary malfunctioning of an essentially viable world economic system. Ball, both in her general introduction and in her headings for subsections, correctly guides the reader towards those studies which examine hunger as a function of poverty and poverty as a function of fundamentally inequitable power structures both within and between nations. She has done this as competently as she has collected the source materials- which is saying a great deal - and this foreword need not restate her fully justified conclusions.
Ball has also given us an important tool for examining how the allocation of power influences scholarship itself. A bibliography is not merely a convenience to the general reader and a time-saver for academics in libraries. It is also, particularly in the present case, a contribution to the sociology of knowledge - a documentary record of the ways in which scholars and institutions have viewed one of the great issues of their time. If we try to analyse this bibliography as an object in itself - concentrating not, as most of the following entries do, on poverty and hunger, but on what has been said about them - we may ask a few basic questions conducive to healthy critical thinking (This is the approach taken by Pierre Spitz, to whom I am much indebted, in 'Silent Violence: Famine and Inequality', a study of the significance of the views on inequality within and between nations, especially the views of those in a position to institutionalize violence against the poor and to deprive them of their right to food).
First question: Who is doing the talking? Which is to say, who is in a position to publish books, monographs and scholarly articles on various aspects of world hunger and underdevelopment? Despite Ball's careful inclusion of many Third World sources and authors (a rarity in the bibliographical genre), she herself would be the first to admit that those who publish are mostly Westerners. In other words, certain groups have the power to make their views known. Whatever their personal hardships may have been, chronic hunger has surely not been among them. Just as there were no Third World peasant representatives at the 1974 World Food Conference or at the 1979 World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, so there are no hungry people speaking from direct and painful experience in these pages. Although it is perhaps not necessary to have known physical or social deprivation to write about them, one should still note that the works listed here proceed from a particular kind of external knowledge and that a collection of people with university educations, frequently Ph.D.s, are, by any standards, part of a privileged minority. This does not, of course, predestine them to adopt the point of view characteristic of the group to which they belong, but, statistically speaking, they are likely to share common intellectual or class biases and to ignore certain problems, not out of personal malice but because these problems may appear unworthy of notice or remain wholly invisible. Non-Western authors are not exempt from such tendencies, particularly when they have received their education under Western auspices.
These observations may become more persuasive when we ask a second question: What - and whom - are these authors talking about? The subject matter of most 'development' writing is more circumscribed than such a copious bibliography suggests. The disregard for the specific problems of Third World women in the male-dominated literature is one striking example; the absence of consideration for peasants' specific agricultural knowledge as opposed to that of 'scientific experts' is another. Cause for even more serious concern is the proportion of research devoted to the study of poor and powerless groups. This choice of subject is generally accompanied by a lack of interest in the doings of the rich and powerful in the same society. Research directed exclusively towards the victims of hunger, rather than towards their relationships with the powerful (locally, nationally and internationally), helps to mask the basic reasons for the poor's lack of access to food. Such a focus may help to explain the success of the 'overpopulation-is-the-cause-of-hunger' school. (Here, had Ball wished to provide an exhaustive bibliography, she might have needed roughly a third of the pages of this volume.) By placing the hunger problem squarely in the laps, figuratively and literally, of the people having the babies, scholarship has deflected attention from the responsibilities of the 'haves' to the plight of the 'have-nots', thus obviating the need for any changes in present power arrangements. The sheer weight of the literature devoted to topics that are at best marginal in explaining, much less attacking, the root causes of poverty also stifles academic and public debate and creates confusion in the minds of the general public. And yet, in spite of such obvious cases of scholarly bias or blindspots, a significant portion of the academic establishment would still have us believe that the social sciences are objective or, in the jargon of the trade, 'value-free'; that the social scientist is an impartial, politically neutral expert. Here a paraphrase of Orwell seems called for: All social scientists are neutral, but they are more neutral towards some social groups than towards others.
Third question: What goals does research serve, and whose goals are they? At one level, not so trivial as it might first appear, it serves the interests of the people publishing. All of us listed in these pages must live with the uncomfortable truth that at least a part of our own livelihood derives from the existence of the suffering of others. Our published works and inclusion in catalogues like this one may help us gain income or prestige and a higher rang on the career ladder. This in itself should cause us to feel in some way accountable to the Third World countries and people who provided raw material for our research or at least to our colleagues on the three poor continents. This, unfortunately, is not often the case. As of 1979, a massive publication on the Sahelian countries, compiled by a prestigious US university team was unavailable to scholars in Upper Volta. This is not merely a lack of academic courtesy, but a demonstration of the social and political priorities and loyalties of mainstream scholarship.
What of the goals of research and the accountability of intellectuals at a more general level? Just as most work done in the physical and natural sciences ultimately serves production, so much social science eventually contributes to social control.
Research is intellectual production and, like other kinds of production, must be paid for. The government or international agencies and large foundations which fund scholarship have their own economic and political vision of what constitutes the desirable society. Viewed in this light, it is doubtful that (as Ball states in her introduction) 'foundations sponsoring the HYV research and the plant scientists whom they employed could have chosen to address the question of developing "peasant-biased" high-yielding varieties of seeds rather than the "landlord-biased" varieties which ultimately became the basis of the "seed-fertilizer [green] revolution"' (emphasis added). This revolution was, in fact, an alternative to agrarian reform, which implies redistribution of power: it was a means of increasing food production without upsetting entrenched interests (as well as a means of providing increased revenues to the Western firms supplying industrial inputs). The choices made by research sponsors were, from their point of view, altogether logical ones; the alternative of peasant-biased varieties was probably not even imagined, much less given serious consideration. Academic defenders of the Green Revolution - and they were and are legion - rarely bothered to ask 'Production by whom? and for whom?'; questions which have now been answered, for example, in the case of India where substantial grain reserves exist partly because half the population is too poor to buy them.
Knowledge costs money, and money is not thrown away by those who dispose of it. It is no accident that our libraries are filled with studies on the hungry and poverty-stricken of the Third World. Cynically but realistically put, the more one knows about those who may, in desperation, become restive and dangerous, the better tools one possesses for keeping them in check. Scholarship may also, wittingly or unwittingly, serve purely commercial interests. One fears, for instance, that the current vogue for
studying 'appropriate technology' may become a vehicle for introducing new dependency-creating products in societies where incomes are inadequate for the purchase of expensive high- technology goods, but which can contribute to Western corporate interests at their own level.
Finally, social scientists can also function as promoters of particular ideologies and help to create a climate in which development strategies devised by the powerful may be pursued without hindrance or criticism. Intellectuals, as Noam Chomsky has put it, are 'experts in legitimation' and in packaging concepts so that they will sell, even if the wrappings conceal shoddy and adulterated merchandise.
There are basically three paradigms or models in the literature of development and hunger alleviation. The first is the 'growth/trickle-down' model, more fully described by Ball, which seeks the increase of gross national product through industrialization and by concentrating on those elements of society supposedly most 'modern' or 'entreprenurial' (poor peasants, in contrast, are 'backward' or 'traditional', although it is no longer considered fashionable to say so). The accumulated wealth of these 'modernizing elites' will, eventually, also benefit the worse-off. This model encourages the import of foreign capital and technology (as well as the implantation of multinational corporations) and assumes that the development process in the Third World should imitate the one that occurred in the now industrialized Western countries. Economic and social control is concentrated in the hands of the classes which act as motors of growth. This paradigm presupposes harmony: harmony at the national level (the elites will somehow want to share their advantages with their poorer compatriots, towards whom their attitude is essentially benevolent); harmony at the international level, also called 'interdependence' (the present world system is beneficial to all nations which should trade according to the principles of 'comparative advantage'). Due to its generally recognized failure, this first model has lately been perceived as badly in need of a facelift. This has been undertaken but is largely rhetorical. New keywords are basic needs and participation, but, as defined by experts, mostly from developed countries. Deprived people are neither to be consulted as to their needs nor allowed to participate to the extent that they might demand fundamental changes in existing patterns of income or power distribution.