Journal of Media Arts Culture (original) (raw)
Scan | Journal of Media Arts Culture
Volume 10 Number 1 2013
The Comparative Episteme, Temporal Categorisations and Epistemological Collisions: Representations of Development in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream
Michael Spann
Well the film is rather blatant about having something of a message. It has such a self righteous tone to it […] it stinks to high heaven
Werner Herzog on Where the Green Ants Dream
Perversely, I have to admit that it was this quote that cemented my choice of which Werner Herzog film to use as a template in developing the following paper. This was rather than the film’s more obvious images of rusting and abandoned machinery in a desolate landscape evoking failed development schemes or the incalculable cost of the colonial ‘wound’ (Mignolo 2005) on Indigenous Australians. Even though these images are part and parcel of the film, I will concentrate on some of the more conceptual issues of development as seen through the lens of Herzog’s camera. As such, the central concern of this article is investigating the temporal convening of space and the positioning of people on a development continuum where some are considered advanced and others are behind. When the concept is spelt out in such clear terms, many of the issues I will raise seem apparent but are rarely problematized in mainstream development. Possibly, the simplicity of the concept leads to a naturalness that makes such an investigation into this core concept (in both the prescriptive and descriptive sense) of mainstream development policy and practice seem unnecessary. Hopefully, this paper in using Where the Green Ants Dream (1983) as a source and departure point will uncover how a simple manoeuvre that places people on a single development continuum can help embed a politics of comparison based on a singular vision of growth, progress, modernity and Homo Oeconomicus (Williams 1998).
Figure 1: Trailer: Where the Green Ants Dream (1983)
This paper will move through two sections. The first section will flag some of the assumptions and historical constellations of Where the Green Ants Dream as well as briefly sketching the plot. The following section will explore the more substantive issues regarding the temporal convening of space. This will emphasise the non-innocent use of the categorisations and schema derived from such a convening and how this forecloses the possibilities of heterogeneity by positing contemporaneous peoples in the past.
One of the central themes of the film is the migratory and mating habits of the ‘green ants’ (hence the title) and their connection to a group of Indigenous Australian’s dreaming. Many first time viewers, perhaps swayed by Herzog’s reputation and the seriousness of the academic discussing the ‘green ants’ and their importance in the dreaming are convinced the information about the green ants is fact. However, even though a green ant dreaming does exist for a different ‘mob’ near Oenpelli in the Northern Territory, the green ant dreaming in the film is an invention by Herzog who stated: “I made up the story of the green ants. There is a character in the film, some kind of specialist, who spouts all sorts of facts about green ants, but of course it is all invented […] I can say that this film is certainly not their dreaming, it is my own” (in Cronin 2002: 207). Some may also have been convinced that Herzog had a deep understanding of Indigenous Australians but he himself dismisses this claim: “ My understanding of them is so limited, therefore I want to develop my own mythology” (Mizrahi 1984: 10) whilst admitting that he was liberal in his use of Indigenous Australians’ mythologies and stories as he wrote the script (Hurley 2007: 186). Indeed, Philip Adams, who was a major player in getting the film off the ground, considered the green ants myth to be a little Walt Disneyish (Adams 1984:2) whilst other commentators have suggested that this liberal appropriation is in line with other criticisms regarding Herzog’s exploitation of Indigenous peoples to realise his ‘dreamings’ (Franklin 1983, Lewis 1995, Hurley 2007).
These issues noted, it is worthwhile remembering that the film was unashamedly a fictional feature film. As such, it is worth sketching some of the real life constellations that inspired Herzog to make Where the Green Ants Dream as well as bringing some other issues into focus. In 1973, Herzog was a guest at the Perth Film Festival and it was during this time that he learnt of the Milirrpum v Nabalco land rights case that had been heard in the Northern Territory Supreme Court in 1970-71. This case centred around the Yolngu of eastern Arnhem Land and their objections to the Australian Federal Government granting a mining lease to Nabalco, a Swiss company who wanted to mine bauxite on traditional lands near the Gove Peninsula. Even though the traditional owners lost the case because, under Australian law at that time the land was seen to be unoccupied before the arrival of the Europeans, it brought the land rights issue to wider public attention. This included the then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam calling a Royal Commission to investigate Land Rights in the Northern Territory. Herzog, influenced by this exposure as well as Michael Edol’s documentaries Lalai Dreamtime and Floating this Time, wrote a screenplay in 1973. The connection to the Milirrpum v Nabalco case was further strengthened when Herzog ultimately cast Roy Marika as Dayipu and his nephew, Wandjuk Marika as Miliritbi in the lead Aboriginal roles. Both had been claimants and witnesses in the Milirrpum v Nabalco case. Wandjuk Marika, a Rirratjinu from north eastern Arnhem Land, was also one of the most respected Indigenous Australian leaders in the country (Hurley 2007: 179) and who travelled widely both in Australia and overseas as a leading representative of Indigenous Australian culture (Marika 1995). To further help flesh out these preliminary contextual issues, I will briefly sketch the plot of the Where the Green Ants Dream before getting to the central conceptual concerns of this paper.
Whilst aspects of Where the Green Ants Dream are reminiscent of other works in Herzog’s oeuvre (Prager 2007: 136), it has been suggested the conventional and scripted narrative may even be an “aberration” (Prager 2007:136) when considering his other films up to the making of Where the Green Ants Dream. Elsaesser contends the plot “holds few surprises and disdains suspense […] after less than ten minutes, the issues are clear, there is no doubt about the rights and wrongs and who is in the middle” (1986: 137). Such interpretations aside, the plot revolves around a young geologist Lance Hackett (Bruce Spence) who is employed by the (fictional) Ayers Mining Company. Whilst exploring claims for potential rich veins for exploitation, the mining company workers are informed by a group of Indigenous Australians that their explosions will wake the green ants and disturbing this sacred site might cause a disaster of “cosmic proportions” (Elsaesser 1986: 137). As the Indigenous Australians place themselves in front of the company’s equipment (especially an earthmover) the plot develops with a sympathetic Hackett trying to mediate between the two groups (Hurley 2007: 180). Paralleling the efforts by Hackett is the legal stoush between the mining company and the Indigenous Australians. This culminates in the mining company winning the case, albeit with a sympathetic judge, like in the Milirrpum v Nabalco land rights case. However, Hackett does succeed in getting the mining company, in a pre-court gesture of goodwill or bribery depending on your perspective, to buy the Indigenous Australians a Hercules Aircraft that bizarrely, represents an oversized green ant (Hurley 2007: 180). One of the Indigenous men, Watson (Gary Williams) drunkenly boasts that he had been in the air-force and, singing ‘My baby loves to do the hanky panky’ manages to get the plane off the ground with Dayipu as his passenger. The plane heads into the distance although later it is intimated that the plane has crashed. Hackett, as well, ‘disappears’, withdrawing from civilisation (Prager 2007: 141) heading for life living in a water tank outside a remote Indigenous Australian community (Hurley 2007: 181).
As indicated in the foregoing paragraphs, the Milirrpum v Nabalco case was both a source and departure point for Herzog’s ‘dreaming’. In certain respects, I would like to mirror this by using the courtroom scene in Where The Green Ants Dream to extend my argument further into the central realms of the paper, that is, distancing the contemporaneous other and the epistemological collisions that, in a sense, are a product of such distancing. For a feature film, the court scene in Where the Green Ants Dream show an authenticity which Hurley (2006, 2007) believes stems from the director using references from real life legal cases as well as some of the arguments raised in the Milirrpum v Nabalco case. Even so, the lengthy and densely worded courtroom scene was, to some, a hindrance to viewing pleasure with one critic describing it as “the most boring courtroom scene in cinematic history” (Koeser 1984: 367). Aesthetics notwithstanding, the courtroom scene invokes a situation where not only the contestation between particularism and universalism is played out, but also where the notion of bounded entities and spaces are created and seen to be discrete entities is introduced. This ensures the courtroom scene represents a site of struggle, as differences between worldviews are made explicit as alternative conceptions of time, space, memory and ‘territoriality’ struggle against the hegemonic ‘necessity’ of reducing alternative conceptions to a dominant, universally accepted ‘standard’ (Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007: xx).
This is exemplified when the Solicitor General (Ray Marshall) for the Commonwealth of Australia and its proxy the Ayers Mining Company, becomes enraged as the Indigenous Australian claimants respond to questions about the limits of their ancestral lands by answering, ‘little long way’ and using sweeping gestures of their arms. Western produced maps of the contested lands help little and when ancient oral histories are offered in support, the exasperated Solicitor General asks the court if such 'hearsay' is to be allowed. Apart from this being an obvious example of an epistemological collision as ways of knowing stare at each other across a seemingly unbridgeable divide, these attempts to pin down borders could be seen as trying to bind groups, cartographically speaking, for the purposes of what Trouillet terms a “geography of management” (2003: 36). In his terms, such a geography is inherently tied up with modernisation and the reorganisation of space for explicitly economic or political purposes. With this ‘geography’ on board, one can interpret the Solicitor General’s utter frustration and anger as being borne from not being able create a discrete entity for analytical, and thus political and economic purposes.
By answering in such a manner, the elder, Dayipu also challenges both the political and ontological assumptions (Trouillet 1995: 82) of the court and in the wider sense, the Australian community’s conceptual frames of reference for progress and development. In making the court and the Australian community question the nature of the existence of the cartographically bound traditional lands or indeed, whether in the hegemonies frame of reference they exist at all, Dayipu, becomes an active participant in how they should be analysed and treated (Zalanga 2011: 126). In doing so, this challenge may also be interpreted as an attempt to counter the external disembodiment (Mitchell 2002: 209-243) of the court and the mining company who, in both time and space, stand outside the object described (the traditional lands and the Indigenous Australians), thus embedding the unidirectional flow of information regarding the ‘created’ entity. In turn, this relegates the Indigenous Australians to refractory objects, and simply something to be acted upon (Waswo 1997: 271).
To explore these ideas further it is necessary to make the journey from the ‘authentically fictional’ courtroom scene to the broader sense of how, generally speaking the social sciences conceptualise space as being premised upon rupture and disjunction. Thus, discontinuity and a non-relational perspective form the starting point from where it is possible to externalise contradiction and difference (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:6) from theorizing and analysis. Such a premise flows onto one of core conceptual assumptions of modernisation and mainstream development as these disjunctions and contradictions facilitate a system where spatial difference is convened into temporal difference. In short, different spaces or places (which may have been ‘created’) are seen as being different stages in a “single temporal development” (Massey 2005:68). Indeed, this manoeuvre and stages of growth imaginary is clearly seen in Rostow’s work (1960), which was one of the ‘canonical’ texts of modernisation theory and where societies moved through stages from the ‘traditional’ to the epitome of the ‘age of high mass consumption’. Even though, the core epistemological, economic and social assumptions of modernisation have been critiqued in the recent past by a number of commentators (Stiglitz 2002, Chang 2006, Herrera 2006, M. Weber 2007, Serra, Spiegel, Stiglitz 2008, McMichael 2010) the premise of converting spatial heterogeneity into a single temporal series (Massey 2005: 68) where some nations or blocs (i.e. the ‘third world’) are seen as more advanced or backwards than others, is still very deeply embedded in concepts of development (Latouche 1996, Blaney and Inayatullah 2004, Lepenies 2007, Weber 2007, McMichael 2010, McMichael 2012). Indeed, the deep embededness of development conceived as stages of growth is shown in the fact that it is utilised by, for instance, theorists and policy makers otherwise highly critical of the neo-liberal development project (Chang 2002). The strength of these ideas is further seen in the usage of the metaphor of the ‘development ladder’ (Sachs 2005) and the idea of ‘catching up’ (Collier 2007, 2011) which have been vigorously employed by two of the most prominent development ‘experts’ in recent times, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier.
Furthermore, the spatial and temporal logics inherent in these metaphorical renderings are some of the core descriptive and prescriptive elements of mainstream development through the comparative episteme. Briefly sketched, the comparative episteme illuminates that development is primarily conceived in state centric terms (Saurin 1996) and is clearly demonstrated in the usage of measurements and indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP). Through these indicators, ‘spaces’ (states) are “positioned and compared hierarchically in relation to preconceived standards of development” (Weber 2012: 16). This positional perspective, in turn feeds the other main comparative imaginaries of modernisation and mainstream development: urbanisation, industrialisation and the overcoming of those who are considered ‘backwards’.
This creation of a hierarchy of spaces through a temporal strategy as seen through the lens of Where the Green Ants Dream means the Indigenous Australians, who are thought to be ‘behind’ and needing to ‘catch up’, are considered to be both inside and outside the space that has been defined by modernity (Trouillet 2003: 38-39) and the positional perspective of the comparative episteme. To clarify this, the Indigenous Australians are ‘outside’ because they have not reached the place where the substantive judgment on their status occurs whilst they are also ‘inside’ in the sense that the place in which they have been posited can be viewed from the more advanced place within the temporal line. That this is a manoeuvre that creates an elsewhere and an otherness is plainly clear, however it must be remembered that this manoeuvre is also an attempt to embed a universality/commonality that is paradoxically based on a demarcation between inside and outside; tradition and modernity (Blaney and Inayatullah 2004: 97).
In terms of modernisation and development, the universality is the sequence of development and stages of growth through which all societies and cultures must pass (Rostow 1960). In mainstream development this is a commonality/universality that is presumed (Dallmayr 1996: 151-155), even though it is based on an otherness and elsewhere that must be moulded and cajoled through various disciplinary strategies to create a commonality (Williams 1998, Weber 2002, 2006). It is thus not ‘natural’ and because of this it contested and resisted in various ways (McMichael 2010: 1-13). Such contestation and created commonality based on demarcations is clearly demonstrated in a scene in Where the Green Ants Dream.
This scene involves the foul-mouthed Aussie ‘bloke’ Cole (Ray Barrett). Cole can be considered to be the antithesis of Hackett as he abuses the Indigenous Australians in racist terms and is not averse to using violence on the Indigenous Australians to advance the mining company’s claims and remove the ‘obstacles’ and ‘impediments’ to modernisation and development. This removal of such obstacles and impediments through violence, Dussel suggests, is justified by the hegemony as the ‘primitive’ opposes the process of modernisation, thus giving the praxis of modernity the recourse to violence to remove the obstacle. Dussel deepens this by postulating the redemptive and emancipatory character of modernity creates a further layer of justification, as the suffering caused by the violence (both epistemological and physical) is both inevitable and necessary (1992: 75-76). This redemptive violence is manifested as Cole tries to smooth the path of modernity and development by using the earthmover on the Indigenous Australians. However, an angry Hackett intervenes and gets a company representative, Baldwin Ferguson (Norman Kaye), to explain to the protestors that, “all of us, and that includes you, are subject to the binding strictures of the Land Rights Act of the Commonwealth of Australia” (Herzog 1983). Apart from further strengthening the view of the comparative episteme that development takes place in and through the state as a discrete unit (Shah 2009: 18), this ‘universal’ law, as Herzog intimates, becomes patently unjust when it makes the presumption of a universal subject to whom it can be applied to (Prager 2007: 139). In other words it makes an assumption of my values with the values (Todorv 1984:154). As Readings (1992) perceptively notes, it is in this effort to bring the Indigenous Australians into the fold of commonality/universality that their otherness is clearly defined even as they are subsumed under the category of ‘we’. In reading this through the lens of the temporal stages of development, these are the stages that ‘we’ must pass through or be left behind.
Furthermore, as was seen in the court room scene, the attempt to cartographically bind the traditional lands can be seen as an attempt to try and lock another space into the world of ‘like units’ (Waltz 1979: 95-97), ready for comparison. This paves the way for the temporalisation of space through development stages or sequences (Fabian 1983: 13-15, Blaney and Inayatullah 2004: 99-103). Reading Ferguson’s attempt at recognising the equality of the protestors through ‘like units’ and the temporalisation of space, emphasises that rather than the recognition of equality being at the base of such an act, it is, however, an attempt at assimilating the heterogeneous/different into a common model (Blaney and Inayatullah 2004: 101). Such assimilation, in the guise of a common model of development, ultimately “projects a single vision onto a diverse world” (McMichael 2010:16).
To peel back yet another layer from this scene exposes that Ferguson’s claim of recognition and equality comes from placing the objects, which are external to him on the same level (Todorov 1984:240). This strengthens the company (and by association, the state’s) position as the self-referential subject and power brokers as this common model is one that is imposed on the Indigenous Australians. Todorov, in using the example of Cortés and Moctezuma, believes comparison through the introduction of a singular vision or common model ensures, “human alterity is at once revealed and rejected” (1984: 49). Moreover, the political aspect of such a situation is brought to the forefront of our enquiries by insisting that the schema and categorization borne of the comparative episteme is not innocent or natural and that the comparativist as the sole subject does not critically investigate their own categories (Todorov 1984:250, Waswo 1997: 225-268), thus embedding the spaces of hierarchy from the apex down. This inequality also works on another level, that of distancing the ‘other’ from the hegemonic loci of power and knowledge production (Fabian 1983: 26, Todorov 1984: 146-168, Mignolo 2005: 44, Robinson 2011: 128-130) although it is beyond the scope of this article to fully engage with such a many headed beast with more than this cursory glance.
Even so, the issues presented thus far and played out in Where the Green Ants Dream must also be critically analysed in terms of development objects being considered as ‘laggards’ or ‘residuals’ (McMichael 2010: 1) ‘backwards’ or as ‘past in the present’ (Hindness 2007). Of course, in Where the Green Ants Dream we are under no illusion that the laggards are the Indigenous Australians. This categorisation leads to exclusion, not only in the physical sense but also crosses into epistemological spaces as social imaginations, alternative logics and other voices are suppressed or dismissed as not measuring up to the ‘narrative of progress’ (McMichael 2010: 2-3) as defined by the universal standard of the market calculus. Defining people as anachronisms or treating their way of life as such, Hindess contends is an idea that still holds enough sway to exert substantive influence in political and social spheres (2007: 326). This is being demonstrated in a contemporary context where both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian groups and communities are seen as such by not granting full access to mining and coal seam gas exploration, thus not partaking in the accepted reading of the narrative of progress. The underlying power of this, however, is that such a deployment of this temporal strategy helps not only to create, but also sustain and justify conditions of economic, social and epistemological inequality.
The idea of a contemporaneous being placed in a different time, Fabian believes, is an example of ‘political time’ and is an “ideologically construed instrument of power” (2002: 144). In other words, there is a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology [development] in a Time other than the present of the producer […] of discourse” (Fabian 2002: 31). Herzog himself seems to fall into this trap when he stated of the Indigenous Australians, “there is something like 20, 000 years of history that separates us from them” (Cronin 2002: 207). As I have previously intimated through the exploration of the development sequence and its associated imaginaries and logics, this is also the case in mainstream development policy and practice. A salient example of this is when development workers and Guatemalan government officials interpret the Indigenous Ch’orti’s lack of enthusiasm towards ‘innovations’ as being part of their indigenous ‘mentality’ (Warren 2006: 12). Reading between the lines, by failing to take on these new innovations and reap the subsequent benefits puts the Ch’orti in another ‘time’, that is, one distanced from, in Fabian’s language, the observer. This is further enhanced when both development workers and government officials put this lack of willingness to embrace the ‘narrative of progress’ as down to the Ch’orti’s mentality, i.e. a mentality that comes from a ‘past’ time that fails to grasp the proffered opportunities of the ‘present’. In short, even though the Ch’orti are obviously contemporaneous they are seen to be of a time different from the temporal position of the ‘observer’. This further entails that the dominant orthodoxy of development both constitutes and demotes the Ch’orti through their “temporal relegation” (Bunzl 2002: x). Mainstream development literature is littered with such failures stemming from the employment of such temporal distancing and demonstrates quite clearly how ‘categorical violence’, that is, objectified meanings being seen as common sense (McMichael 2010: fn11) can be foisted onto those receiving development.
Another idea which has been previously touched on but now needs to be re-examined in the light of the argument thus far is the creation of the temporal or development space adding to the seemingly naturalised idea (even in these times of ‘globalization’) of great distances separating peoples entailing great differences between peoples (Hindness 2007: 325). Extra gravitas is placed onto this idea when such a difference is complemented with the distance of ‘time’ (Blaney and Inayatullah 2004: 90). Fabian interrogates the ideological process involved in this through the relationship between the ‘West’ and it’s ‘Other’ in anthropology. This relationship need not be constrained to the idea of the ‘West’ and it’s ‘Other’ but can be extended to the dominant orthodoxy of the neoliberal development project and it’s ‘Other’. This extension can further make visible the political underpinnings of a relationship that was/is conceived, “not only as difference but as distance in Space and Time (Fabian 2002: 147, his emphasis). These ideas of difference cohabiting with distance in space and time further embed comparative boundaries of difference and are clearly visible in Where the Green Ants Dream.
This is illustrated where Dayipu and Miliritbi are transplanted from the vast desolate landscape stretching around Coober Pedy (where the filming took place) to the hustle and bustle of Melbourne. This not only deftly emphasises the hegemonic narrative of progress being acted out in the presence of the spatially and temporally different ‘other’ but also in a more positive reading that the two groups are, “not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same time” (Fabian 2002:155). Working from this more positive premise whereby the “non contemporaneity of the contemporaneous” (Santos 2004:15) is contested entails a shift whereby coexisting heterogeneity/difference would not be seen to be or reduced to a place in a historical queue (Massey 2005: 69). This recognition of heterogeneity and difference of the contemporaneous ‘other’ would lead to a more inclusive politics (Bleiker 2001) of development as the suppression of existing multiplicities would be curtailed and they would be recognised as an integral part of the analytical procedure of development. This is rather than the orthodox view that they are something that should at best, disappear or be deemed irrelevant or at worst, be removed as an obstacle. In turn, this would also facilitate a challenge to the naturalisation of differences produced through categorising people in a manner that naturalises hierarchies of space (Santos 2004:16). As such, inherent in mainstream development’s refusal to substantively recognise co-temporality as an essential ingredient in a truly dialectical confrontation (Fabian 2002:69) is, of course, an admission of the temporal convening of space being the cornerstone of a privileged form of knowledge, power and ideological process (Massey 2005:69).
This privileging of the ideology of progress and modernisation is placed under the microscope by Herzog throughout the film, from the violent imagery of the tornados (filmed in Oklahoma) to where the lift stalls as Hackett and Ferguson are taking Dayipu and Miliritbi to see the a view of the Melbourne city ‘scape. Prager sees this, and a future attempt by the foursome to use the lift, as a metaphor on the “futility of progress” (2007:140) whilst later the sympathetic, but increasingly disillusioned and melancholic, Hackett admits that he is ‘stranded’ and ‘not going anywhere’. A nuanced reading that brings Hackett into the fold begs the question of who is the object and victim of such an ideology? Even though this question can and should be asked to illuminate the contested referents of the ideology in question, I believe that in the case of Where the Green Ants Dream, the answer would undoubtedly be the Indigenous Australians. I come to this answer in light of the films narrative but also the issues of time and space presented thus far. That is, in the film, the Indigenous Australians have been the absent ‘other’ from our time but whose presence can only be as an object or victim (Fabian 2002: 184).
Just as this impoverishes and stifles our view of Indigenous Australians being active participants in social and political processes in the wider Australian context, it also illuminates there is a politics of comparison at play. This is a politics that, Fabian believes, leads to a denial of ‘coevalness’ between people and cultures and is “expressive of a cosmological myth of frightening magnitude and persistency” (Fabian 2002:35). Such language is rare in the sterile tomes of academic literature, but the use of it illuminates this politics of comparison and its associated imaginaries, when combined with one of the central organising concepts of world politics: development (Cowen and Shenton 1995: 27) engenders a homogenisation of the human experience of contemporaneous peoples that is tied to a singular, western vision (Blaney and Inayatullah 2004:100, Banuri 2001: 65-66). Of course, in development terms this would be locking people into a certain development paradigm where countries and peoples should follow an upward trail through different stages of development or up the development ‘ladder’ finally reaching the positions held by the developed world (Sachs 2005).
To conclude, Where the Green Ants Dream was not well received by Australian critics with The Australian making no bones about its assessment: “…[the film] is grievously simplistic and self indulgent” (Williams 1984). Herzog himself, after his initial misgivings has said “the film is not that bad” (Cronin 2002: 208) and that over the years he likes the film more and more (Prager 2007: 136). Undoubtedly, the film is flawed, but in using this flawed though still fascinating film as a source and departure point to explore the temporal convening of space and the marshalling of difference and heterogeneity into a temporal sequence, I have attempted to show that the ranking of bounded entities and the people within them is still a deeply embedded feature of political cosmologies (Fabian 2002) that has substantive effects. To conclude, this manoeuvre creates distance between the hegemonic self and others by reproducing a ‘pecking order’ mentality (Nandy 1987: 14-15) that severely curtails chances of workable development outcomes.
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