CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Aungo, Justus Bw'Onderi |
|---|---|
| Title | DEVELOPMENT AS CHAOS: AGROMANUFACTURING, DISPOSSESSION AND PLANTATION LABORERS EVERYDAY LIVES IN KENYA |
| Summary | The dissertation is based on two and half years of field research in South Nyanza Sugar plantations in Kenya. It explores agromanufacturing- from the colonial period to the present-day Kenya to show the evident underlying continuity of colonial structures and contradictions characteristic of different large-scale commercial agriculture as a strategy of national and regional development across the country. By focusing on everyday lives of the plantation labourers in the South Nyanza sugarbelt, the dissertation reveals the nature and dynamic of development generally and the large scale commercial farming economy in particular as unpredictable and chaotic. What is more significant from the findings is the demonstrated acceptance, integration and accommodation of chaos into the constitutive and operational logic of the plantation economy and its development itinerary. Throughout the dissertation, the relations between the agromanufacturing complex as a structure designed for modernization intervention and the invisible everyday lives of those in its orbit are shown to be characterized by unpredictability, contradictions, differentiations, violence, deprivations and exploitative dispossession. Combined, these make lives under such development interventions insecure, disjointed, vulnerable and disorderly. My study contributes to the sociology and social anthropology of development by proposing a fresh look at development interventions as ‘chaotic projects’ which produce disorder rather than smooth solutions to technical disorder. Such a look, building on works of other such as Tania Li and James Ferguson, integrates the ideas of Foucault to show how development has in effect become a series of normalizations where more attention is focused on making things seem normal rather actually transforming them. For instance, the study shows how dispossession of land, labour and employment safeguards are part of repertoire of tactics employed to enhance efficiency and productivity in the factory though they expose the plantation workers and villagers to extreme deprivation and invisibility. Furthermore, the study responds to the significant absence of a disciplinary society approach to development related research in Africa though much of the interventions are implemented as disciplinary projects. By combining Foucault’s conception of power and the concept of chaos in studying agromanufacturing as development in Kenya, the study shows how development is not only chaotic but sustained by chaos: under development, disorder is the order. This is the central argument in the dissertation. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram Prem Kumar (1st. Supervisor); Kalb, Don (2nd Supervisor). |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/aungo_justus.pdf |
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