Lost in translation: development politics in between the spaces of "the cultural"

Abstract

This paper suggests a theoretical framework of different spaces of ‘the cultural’ in order to assess recent changes towards more culturally minded policies in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). I trace the ideational transition of ‘the cultural’ in development from the modernist, economistic discourse of culture to the postmodern rise of ‘the cultural’ in its own right and show how these two concepts are intertwined with two spaces of ‘the cultural’: on the one hand the discursively constructed Other Space of the economistic discourse, on the other hand the Self Space of the cultural langue. I argue that we are currently entering a third phase in this transition which sees the attempt of a re-negotiation of ‘the cultural’ in a critical engagement between Self Space and Other Space which produces what Homi Bhabha calls an ‘interstitial Third Space’. The necessary translation between Self Space and Other Space engenders a Third Space of cultural hybridity marked by the indeterminacy of perpetually negotiated in-betweenness – a space of ‘the cultural’ which is lost in translation