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Ambiguous
Participation
Maria
Inácia D'Avila, Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Participative
research programmes in the field of development, which have been
set up as a moral basis by their instigators, tend to seek out
the original purity of local communities, guarantee of an inviolate
and inevitably dominated tradition. However, this all-embracing
vision masks the contradictions and challenges posed by the power
struggles resulting from new balances of power and agreements.
 he
methods used by social and human science experts with regard to
communities targeted by development operations make participation
their touchstone, or even their fundamental value and moral code.
Participation, community development, popular culture and the
sharing of decision-making processes constitute an untouchable
recipe in the programmes of international bodies and NGOs, or
for anybody wishing to carry out research on communities considered
to be disadvantaged, oppressed or dominated.
The New Missionaries
The significant amount of research devoted to the development
of populations no longer rejects methods and techniques termed
participative, as was once the case. Labels such as 'participative
research' or 'action-research', once condemned by dominant positivist
science - which preferred quantization since it involved planning
based on measurement - are today considered, at least from a strategic
point of view, to be a way of making the voices of the dominated
heard in order to develop action and/or planning.
Just
as the missionaries of old set off to evangelize the 'savages'
and convert them in the name of their faith, the modern (or postmodern)
missionaries set off in search of the pure and original wisdom
of populations, and this encounter between experts or specialists
promoted to researchers and the community targeted is known as
'participative research'.
The
aim here is not to criticize participative methods of development
action; this would be running counter to our own action and our
work as researchers, both inside and outside the academy. Nor
is it a matter of questioning the 'spontaneity' of the masses
faced with the orders of political parties, States or development
programmes, but rather of challenging the conception social and
human scientists have of popular participation in the decision-making
process for development actions. In this sense, I am less interested
in the contribution of the masses, their participation or their
decision-making process, than in the way in which development
agents, experts or researchers define popular participation and
represent it in their action and research. However, I am today
seeing a dangerous confusion among students of community psychosociology
and experienced researchers alike: based on the common interpretation
of Gramsci's concept of the 'organic intellectual', many tend
to think that the mission of experts and researchers is to ensure
popular knowledge and practices are recognized as the knowledge
of the dominated, in response to the scientific and theoretical
knowledge of the dominant authority. According to Stuart Hall,
Gramsci himself was aware of the social and cultural complexity,
which he described using the expression 'dispersion of power'.
Outside the sphere of the State, power struggles shape the relationships
and institutions of civil society: voluntary associations, education,
family, religious life, cultural organizations, private life,
gender identities, ethnic groups, etc.1
We
can therefore begin by stating that the oppressed, or dominated,
do not form homogeneous units. In the search for popular participation,
the sociocultural complexity of oppression itself must be taken
into account. Encouraging the oppressed to talk is not enough
to identify all forms of oppression. Class oppression, for example,
is not the same thing as gender oppression. Listening to a disadvantaged
community as part of a project for developing a polluted area
is not enough to comprehend all the rights and identities of the
men, women and children, young and old, consulted. The multiplicity
of struggles and opposition constitutes what defines the 'dispersed
power'.
Consequently,
it is important to realize that the dispersion of power results
in the fragmentation of popular knowledge, with all its practices
and forms of expression. In the most misguided conceptions of
participative methods, raising awareness appears to be all that
is required for emancipation. By denying politics and its dispersed
power, we reduce common sense to a single unit. Believing working-class
consciousness, or the historic responsibility of women, to be
totalities or uniform blocks makes it impossible to understand
the contradictions.
According
to Gramsci, organic intellectuals should work to raise popular
thinking by clarifying and renewing the collective consciousness.
But Hall stresses that Gramsci's concept wholly rejects the idea
of a unified and predetermined ideological subject, such as the
proletariat with their 'correct' revolutionary thoughts, or black
people with their general antiracist consciousness guaranteed
a priori.2 For Hall, Gramsci's
approach of the ideological field, the collective consciousness
and its transformation makes it possible, on the contrary, to
grasp the simultaneity of "Stone Age elements and principles
of more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history
and intuitions of a future philosophy".3
Let
us take the example of participative research with a population
living in precarious sanitary conditions, such as can be seen
in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. The culture of
the favelados, like that of workers, female servants or farmers,
does not exist as a homogeneous unit and this is of great importance
for grasping the contradictions found there. Understanding these
contradictions does not mean forgetting them or hiding them. On
the contrary, researchers should integrate them into their intervention
programmes and their preliminary observation stages, interviews,
negotiations and participative feedback. This is an indispensable
condition if research with the participation of populations or
communities is to achieve its aim of raising awareness and transformation.
But
the issue is not resolved with this naive statement. Certain research
argues for the protection of cultural and environmental heritage
as bastions of popular culture. In most cases, in the name of
local or endogenous development, the tasks of native populations
are multiplied in order to increase their income. In several regions
of Brazil, instead of having more time for leisure or relaxation,
women who have been 'made aware' are adding craftwork to their
farming activities, thereby increasing their already heavy daily
workload. The same situation is found in many parts of the world.
The
myth of popular culture
In the 1990s, community actions/interventions, under the influence
of theories such as that of Douglas North,4
began to define 'community social capital' as a product of popular
culture; a relatively natural shift when popular knowledge was
called 'heritage' by all international organizations. The immediate
result was that the dialectic of popular culture, so dear to the
work of Paolo Freire and crucial for transformation (Gramsci,
Hall), was obliterated and relegated to oblivion. Culture became
a commodity and was appropriated as such. In social capital theories,
it seems obvious that those who have no initial capital will be
unable to develop it. According to Hall, the danger arises because
we have a tendency to see cultural expressions as a complete and
coherent entity: either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic.5 However,
autonomous popular culture does not exist outside the sphere of
the relationships of power and domination.
It
is not hard to see why social capital theories have been so successful
among researchers using methods of community participation. Everything
we call local traditions, whether we mean secular practices or
folk or craft activities, can be turned into tangible cultural
objects or commodities. So these researchers act as if popular
cultural expressions of this kind could contain, per se, a fixed
and unaltered meaning (Hall, 2003). Tradition is therefore dealt
with outside its historical context and the involvement of local
populations in development projects stems from the recognition
of an original myth, in which each community is a source of purity
to be protected from all the dangers of the world. What matters
is not tradition and its outward signs, but the issues resulting
from the power struggle between assimilation and resistance, with
their new balances of power and agreements.
This
movement - integrated into the framework of research and action
calling for the participation of communities - is the only one
capable of providing a political space for difference, with the
occupation of new areas by social movements such as feminism,
environmentalism, pacifism and new gender and race policies, etc.
Finally, we must not overlook the issue of codification in research
and action known as participative. Most researchers, even if they
are able to recognize the differences and the power struggles
inherent in their research, are not capable of abandoning the
'logocentric approaches' found in the field of reading and writing.
Introducing new codes, such as visuals and sound, in the representation
of the daily life of populations who have not had access to the
dominant codes is one way of recovering the expression of a more
complex repertoire, without resorting to the essentialist expressions
of culture or reifications of knowledge considered popular.
| Maria
Inacia D'Avila leads the interdisciplinary study project on
communities and ecology at the Federal University of Rio
www.eicos.psycho.ufrj.br
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74 - Social Sciences