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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
Dedicated development experts, keen on feeding the hungry and banishing poverty, are often impatient with what they take to be premature focussing on culture in a world of manifold material deprivation. How can you (so the argument runs) talk about culture … while people succumb to starvation or undernutrition or easily preventable disease? The motivation behind this criticism cannot be dismissed, but the artificially separatist – and stage-wise – view of progress is unreal and unsustainable. Even economics cannot work, as Adam Smith noted, without understanding the role of ‘moral sentiments’, and Bertold Brecht's note of cynicism in his Threepenny Opera, ‘Food comes first, then morals’, is more a statement of despair than of an advocated priority.
(Amartya Sen, Culture, Freedom and Independence, 1998)Introduction
It is a striking fact that one of the leading scholarly journals in economics concerned with the economic problems of developing countries bears the title Economic Development and Cultural Change. Few of the articles published in this journal deal directly with culture as such. Yet the acknowledgement is there in the title that in some fundamental sense culture, however it is to be interpreted, underlies the development process and will have some important relationships with economic behaviour in poor countries. The implication is that strategies to alleviate poverty in the Third World and to promote economic advancement will need to have regard for the processes of cultural change which may be critical in determining their success or failure.
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