Open access
Autor(in)
Datum
2018-08Typ
- Journal Article
ETH Bibliographie
yes
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Abstract
This article explores the North America-dominated YMCA as an influential agent promoting ‘rural reconstruction’ schemes on the Indian subcontinent from the 1920s to the 1950s. During that period, religiously inclined civil society actors from the United States played a crucial role in shaping reform programmes designed to improve South Asian agriculture and educate the ‘backward’ village population. It sheds light on the global history of ‘sustainable village development’ programmes by reconstructing the emergence of a specific new body of development knowledge that was ostentatiously ‘low modernist’ — that is simple, cheap and easily reproducible — and thus deemed ideally suited for the uneducated and impoverished peasants of the global South. The new method was forged in South Asia through the mingling of American ‘scientific’ agricultural expertise and a protestant missionary impulse to morally ‘uplift’ the subcontinental villager with various strands of ‘colonial’, local and global knowledge. This ‘pidginised’ template enjoyed a worldwide circulation from the late 1930s onwards and informed the emerging transnational development regime that would flourish later during the early Cold War era. Mehr anzeigen
Persistenter Link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000285695Publikationsstatus
publishedExterne Links
Zeitschrift / Serie
Past & PresentBand
Seiten / Artikelnummer
Verlag
Oxford University PressOrganisationseinheit
03814 - Fischer-Tiné, Harald / Fischer-Tiné, Harald
Anmerkungen
It was possible to publish this article open access thanks to a Swiss National Licence with the publisher.ETH Bibliographie
yes
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