Discordant Development

Katy Gardner

Description

What happened when Chevron, a multinational mining company, opened a gas plant right next to densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh?



This book reveals contradictory ways that local people attempt to connect to, and are disconnected by, foreign capital. Commentators on the situation have different frameworks, whether of dispossession and scarcity, the success of Corporate Social Responsibility, or imperialist exploitation and corruption. Yet as Gardner argues, what really matters in the struggles over resources is which of these stories are heard, and the power of those who tell them.



Based on the narratives of dispossessed land owners, urban activists, mining officials and the rural landless, Discordant Development shows the real picture behind the effect multinational capital has on indigenous communities.
1. Discordant developments: an introduction

2. Histories of connection: colonialism, migration and multinationals

3. Material Connections: Resources and Livelihoods in Duniyapur

4. Our Own Poor: Social Connections, ‘Helping’ and Claims to Entitlement

5. Claims of Partnership and Ethical Connection : Chevron’s Programme of ‘Community Engagement’

6. Rumour and Activism: Politics Break Out

7. Blow Out! Stories of Disconnection and Loss

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture
• Bangladesh

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 17 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849647076
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Discordant Development
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex
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First published 2012 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Katy Gardner 2012
The right of Katy Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3150 8 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3149 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 8496 4707 6 Epub
ISBN 978 1 8496 4708 3 Kindle
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents

Series Preface

1 Discordant Developments: An Introduction
2 Histories of Connection: Colonialism, Migration and Multinationals
3 Material Connections: Resources and Livelihoods in Duniyapur
4 Our Own Poor: Social Connections, ‘Helping’ and Claims to Entitlement
5 Claims of Partnership and Ethical Connection: Chevron’s Programme of ‘Community Engagement’
6 Rumour and Activism: Politics Break Out
7 Blow-out! Stories of Disconnection and Loss

Appendix: The Chevron Way
Notes
References
Index
Series Preface

Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places . This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research.
We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’
By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.
Professor Vered Amit
Dr Jon P. Mitchell
1
Discordant Developments: An Introduction

A field, a few kilometres away from the Kushiara River in Habiganj District, north-east Bangladesh: a small group of foreign men stand under the hot sun taking measurements from the damp soil. They have travelled here in a gleaming four-wheel drive, bumping along the dirt track that branches from the Sylhet to Dhaka Highway, past a seemingly endless vista of electric green paddy fields and small hamlets, the mud and thatch homes occasionally interspersed by the brick houses that characterise this Londoni (UK migrant) area. Bundles of straw lie drying across the road; the jeep’s progress has been frequently interrupted by the bleating goats and runty cows that have wandered in its path. Now that they are finally here the men work quietly, studiously ignoring the small crowd of children who have followed them from the road, and, amidst much hilarity, are calling laal bando! (red monkey!) from the safety of the path. It is not the first time the men have visited the area and, judging from the results of these early explorations, it will not be the last. They work for the company Occidental, and are prospecting for natural gas. It is the late 1980s.
March 2007: The rice fields have gone. In their place is a large gas plant, spread over 50 acres and connected to the newly metalled road by a grid of steep banked highways that cut across the surrounding agricultural land with industrial precision. Known as the ‘South Pad’ this is linked to the ‘North Pad’ a few miles away, as if both sites involved a mission to the moon. The North Pad was constructed by Occidental in the late 1990s at Dighalbak, close to the Kushiara River. But it is the completion of the South Pad in 2007 that heralds the opening of what becomes known as ‘the Bibiyana Gas Field’. Constructed and operated by the American oil giant Chevron, this is to be the smartest and most technologically advanced gas field in Bangladesh and is inaugurated with a fanfare of publicity. By 2010, it is predicted, it will be the biggest supplier of natural gas in Bangladesh, producing energy for the next twenty to thirty years. Included among the guests at the opening ceremony are government ministers, the US ambassador and the President of Chevron Bangladesh. Speeches are made, congratulations extended for the efficiency with which the project has been completed, corporate backs patted. In the national context of acute power shortages, where only a year earlier, farmers’ frustrations at the irregular supply of electricity boiled over into violent protest leading to the death of six people in Shibjanj, 1 and where industrial growth is held in check by limited and faltering energy flows, the country’s newly discovered natural gas reserves are the cause of significant optimism. If there have been national protests concerning the details of profit-sharing arrangements between Chevron and the government and rumours of a pipeline that will export the gas to India, not to say local agitation at the loss of land, now is not the time to mention it. In the four villages that surround the plant, glimpsed distantly across the shimmering fields, life appears to go on as normal.
Nadampur, December 2008: half a mile from the So