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Issues of racial identity have been extensively explored in relation to contemporary Western multicultural societies and the historical relations between different parts of the world, for example between Africa and Europe. However, these issues remain largely invisible in the context of inter-national development, where they constitute something of a blind spot. My concern in this article is how international development stimulates and recreates racialized notions.

International development, which arose with the begin-ning of the Cold War and the initial stages of decoloniza-tion, signalled a new way of thinking about the world and the relationships between its different parts, even though, as Knud Nustad (2001) has pointed out, the idea of devel-opment is also based on old conceptions. Former colonized lands – now independent states – were defined as under-developed countries in need of assistance to attain to a better quality and more ‘modern’ way of life. International development thus meant reconfiguring relations between different parts of the world, both relationships between nation-states, sometimes mediated by international organizations and actual encounters between individuals from different geographical and cultural environments. Increasingly scholars are also locating development within global processes (Edelman and Haugerud 1994) involving movement of people and ideological constructions across boundaries (Tsing 2000, Loftsdóttir 2002).

Here I explore race and whiteness in relation to inter-national development, emphasizing the importance of analysing how historical constructions of racial identity continue to inform actual lived relationships between people belonging to different geographical spaces. Development as lived activity is an important site of encounter between individuals from the developing world and the West, and a source of images of certain regions of the world as displayed in the West. Arturo Escobar (1995) has drawn attention to how development relates to identi-ties, affecting and creating subjectivities in different parts of the world. How are racial identities constructed through such encounters, and how is the historical memory of race reinvested? How is whiteness made meaningful and under-stood in such encounters? What racialized landscapes are

created and made meaningful by the practices of devel-opment? In what way have racial notions of development taken gendered forms interacting with localized meanings in different parts of the world?

My goal here is not to understand if or how development works, as David Mosse would view it when speaking of different camps that focus on development (2004). It is to make visible effects of international development that are neither intended nor planned, and to point out the entan-glement of development with certain historical memories that help to create meaningful maps or guides to the world. Vincent Crapanzano speaks of one of anthropology’s tra-ditions being ‘defamiliarization’, i.e. the self-distancing required to recognize social constructions and to ‘re- evaluate our respective cultural presumptions’ (2003: 4).

In order to capture the importance of development in visual culture and the everyday lives of people in different parts of the world, I use the term ‘developscape’, adapting Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) idea of globalization consisting of different ‘scapes’. In a similar vein, Faye Harrison has coined the phrase ‘racialscape’ to reflect how racial identi-ties are ordered ‘within, across or beyond’ the boundaries that create imagined communities (1995: 49). By the term ‘developscape’, I am referring to lived practices, imagined constructions and visual representations of development in countries that give and receive aid. The concept of the developscape underlines the global nature of development and the way it involves movement of people, products and images, in addition to ideas, conceptions and desires that influence localized settings and are appropriated in a local-ized context.

In Niger, where I have conducted extensive fieldwork, this developscape is visible and experienced through visual representations such as signs advertising different projects or cars marked with the logos of development institutions, and through individuals initiating different projects. In Iceland, where I was born and grew up, the developscape is presented in various discourses about Iceland as a donor country, and images of people in ‘need’ as popularized by the media and different governmental and non- governmental aid institutions, as well as in public

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Kristín LoftsdóttirKristín Loftsdóttir is Assistant Professor in anthropology at the University of Iceland. She conducted fieldwork among WoDaaBe pastoralists in Niger in West Africa, and researches racial identity and international development in Iceland. Her book The bush is sweet: Identity, power and development among WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger was published in 2008 by the Nordic Africa Institute. Her email address is kristinl@hi.is.

Fig. 1. An image from a publicity brochure entitled Ten things you never knew about the World Bank, published by the World Bank in 2003. The WoDaaBe are not discussed at all but this man’s picture to illustrate text explaining World Bank’s goals and policies. W

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Crapanzano, V. 2003. Reflections on hope as a category of social and psychological analysis. Cultural Anthropology 18(1): 3-32.

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Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton UP.

statements around fundraising initiatives that celebrate Icelanders’ generosity to impoverished people in the world. Appadurai speaks of images as an organized field of social practices (1996), emphasizing that they are not only something that exists ‘out there’ but also act in the world.

I begin my discussion with an overview of studies of whiteness, which importantly have turned the gaze toward those whose skin colour is generally normalized in Western society. I then focus on the landscape of devel-opment, attempting to draw out some of the problematic issues involved.

Whiteness and powerThe invisibility of the skin colour and gender of certain social groups is the result of their grip on power; the power of being white and male tends to make these categories invisible, leaving them as unmarked and thus normalized and self-evident (Puwar 2004). Historically studies of race have paid little attention to whiteness, which was often treated as static, normative and ahistorical (Bonnett 2000). Whiteness is currently analysed across various disciplines from different angles (Fine et al. 2004). My aim here is to address how whiteness becomes constructed, naturalized and normalized within certain social and cultural contexts (Hartigen 1997). Since whiteness studies problematize the notion of race, they need to be placed within the context of research on racial identity in general (ibid.).

This critical assessment of the normalization of ‘white-ness’ forms a part of a practice of turning the gaze onto those holding more powerful positions, i.e. the norm, rather than focusing only on marginalized groups. Scholarly studies

have in general tended to focus less on those in power, as reflected in Peter Rigby’s critical comment that scholars need to pay attention to this discrepancy and to examine the ‘culture of the rulers, rather than that of the ruled’ (1996: viii). In this sense, whiteness studies problematize those in power, revealing the different levels of power people interact with in their everyday lives. Abu-Lughod’s (1990) nuanced reading of Foucault draws attention to the com-plexities and multiple layers of power, where individuals who have power in certain circumstances can be power-less in other contexts. Thus individuals can simultaneously be oppressors and oppressed within certain structures of power (see also Loftsdóttir 2004).

The social categorization of skin colour does not stand alone but intersects with different categories, such as race, sexuality, religion, gender and class, as feminist scholars have noted (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000, Moore 1996). The term ‘intersectionality’ is often used by critical feminist race theory to capture this intersection of various dimen-sions of identity (Staunæs 2003). The term highlights the fact that whiteness is always interacting with other socially defined variables such as age, gender and sexual orien-tation, as well as being historically fluid and unstable. However, even though identities can be manipulated to a certain extent, they still involve a process whereby spe-cific identities are ascribed to individuals by their larger society, as Althusser (1971) recognized when he spoke of recruiting subjects, referring to how individuals learn to recognize their positions as specific subjects.

This insight becomes particularly crucial in relation to racial identity, as Franz Boas realized early on, when he pointed out that race was not only a conception but also involved a perception (Jacobson 1998). As Cooper and Brubaker (2005) argue, the scholarly emphasis on iden-tity at that time too often tended to prioritize agency, as if identities were only recreated and reinvented by the individuals concerned, thus failing to recognize how dis-courses recruit individuals, in addition to forcing them into historically constituted subjectivities.

Scholars have for some time now stressed how expres-sions of racism have changed, as racial discrimina-tion is now illegal and condemned in most nation-states (Gullestad 2002, Harrison 2002). At the same time, even though racism is generally openly condemned, racialism, i.e. the belief that human diversity can be classified into different races, continues as an important factor in the understanding of human diversity in most Western coun-tries. Racism can thus be seen as a social memory, and as such it consists of a ‘body of knowledge’, as V.Y. Mudimbe (1994) put it in his discussion of the ‘colonial library’ which informs and explains a certain order in the world.

Imaging and performing developmentInternational development aid is an all-encompassing concept, covering initiatives ranging from state- initiated, sector-wide approach (SWAP) or budget support to small-scale NGO support for an individual construc-tion project in one village. As development and security issues become merged (Brack 2007, Duffield [2002] 2006, UNDP 2005), development becomes even more complicated, involving relationships between people in military uniforms from the donor countries and civilians from the developing countries. Although this problematic extension of ‘development’ is an important question (see Loftsdóttir and Björnsdóttir forthcoming), my focus here is elsewhere. Arturo Escobar’s and James Ferguson’s (e.g. 1994) assessments of development as emerging out of an unequal encounter between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ paid little attention to the difficult and hierarchal relationships obtaining among those within development institutions, as

Fig. 2. This flyer featuring an Icelandic advertisement for the Body Shop suggests that by buying certain cosmetics both ‘your’ skin and Namibian producers of the nuts used in the product will benefit. The pictures seem to imply that by taking a relaxing bath using these products ‘you’ can actually help people in distant countries.

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Ferguson, J. 1994. The anti-politics machine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Harrison, F.V. 2002. Unraveling ‘race’ for the twenty-first century. In: MacClancy, J. (ed.), Exotic no more: Anthropology on the front lines, pp. 145-166. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

— 1995. The persistent power of ‘race’ in the cultural and political economy of racism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 47-74.

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— 2004. ‘This time it’s different’: Globalization, power and mobility. In: Ingimundarson, V., Loftsdóttir, K. and Erlingsdóttir, I. (eds), Topographies of globalization: Politics, culture and language, pp. 149-162. Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan.

— 2008. The bush is sweet: Identity, power and development among WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute.

— and Björnsdóttir, Helga (2009 forthcoming). The ‘jeep-gangsters’ from Iceland: The merging of militaristic operations and international development. Critique of Anthropology 29(4).

Mascia-Lees, F.E., Sharpe, P., and Cohen, C.B. 1989. The postmodernist turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist perspective. Signs 15(1): 7-33.

David Mosse has pointed out. Mosse (2004) stresses the need to understand any disjunctures between policies and actual practices of development in terms of the diversity of the interests involved in the underlying policy models. Even though Mosse criticizes Ferguson’s approach to development for ignoring multi-layered aspects of devel-opment, both Mosse’s and Ferguson’s arguments can be used to analyse ‘power’ as intrinsic to development, as it is to all social praxis.

It is important to look at development as an issue involving a wide variety of social actors, as Mosse sug-gests, but at the same time it is important to continue looking at it from a birds-eye view; identifying the social categorizations that development as all-encompassing activity creates and stimulates. We need also to continue exploring the historical roots of development, and the con-texts of relationships between donor and recipient coun-tries, in order to overcome imperialist bias and be able to assess critically what development is and what it should be. Such critical engagement should not be seen as nec-essarily aimed at abolishing development, as many post-structuralist critics of development are often accused of doing (see for example Kiely 1999), but could rather be seen as an important tool for those involved in develop-ment practices in one way or another, for them to assess and understand better their own context within develop-ment as a social praxis.

Development is about power in multiple ways. It aims at distributing resources on a local level, and since large aid organizations impact national policies locally, it has more influence than we might think. The International Monetary Fund, for example, has to give the green light before countries can be approved as potential recipients of aid. Analysing the multiple ways in which such powers manifest themselves in development praxis and ideologies is of some importance.

In looking at the developscape, I am utilizing Appadurai’s (1996) identification of globalization as a process of disjuncture which creates different and to some extent separated ‘landscapes’ of people, money, images and technology; he labels these ethnoscape, finances-capes, mediascapes and technoscape. Developscape con-sists of the tangible and intangible elements associated with progress and development in the developing coun-tries, such as billboards advertising the success of various projects, buildings, and cars. All of these are embedded in ideas about success and modernization. In more affluent parts of the world, the developscape consists of images and categorization of ‘the’ developing world; industries and public and policy discourses promote certain ideas over others, which then serve to divide the world into these cat-egories. The relationships maintained between countries are informed but also constrained by such ideas and by the praxis of development. The concept of developscape thus underlines the global nature of development and the movement of people, desires and ideas that it entails, influ-encing local settings and in turn themselves appropriated and modified in these localities.

The racialized developscapeVisually, one of the troubling aspects of the landscape cre-ated by international aid is that most of those delivering aid are ‘white’-skinned people, while those receiving have predominantly dark skin pigmentation. The fact that those working for development institutions within developing countries also have a radically different lifestyle from the majority in these countries makes it especially significant. I emphasize that I do not see the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ as only an issue of skin colour, nor as a fixed constructions, but as social categorizations that are to some extent local-ized (Loftsdóttir 2002), and draw from a historical catego-

rization of human diversity formalized in 19th-century European discourses (see Smedley 1998). As such, these are relational concepts sustaining categories that become meaningful within certain contexts, but not concepts that carry any intrinsic meaning. We have to ask: what are the effects of this on the lived reality of people, both within the donor countries and those receiving the aid? How is ‘whiteness’ created and recreated through the discourses and actions of development institutions and others inter-ested in aid? How do images of dark-skinned people in developing countries as an almost objective reality – espe-cially when accompanied by scanty media coverage of other aspects of these regions – perpetuate a certain image of ‘whiteness’? One can also ask, as Karen Brodkin (2000, 2007) does in relation to race and global capitalism: how does class feature in these ‘developscapes’, and how does it interact with, condition or resist any embedded racial-ized notions (see also Heron 2007)?

When I did my fieldwork in Niger during the period 1996-1998, I was troubled to find that most if not all WoDaaBe pastoral nomads and migrant workers that I spoke to saw development projects as deriving from and belonging to ‘white’ people. WoDaaBe understanding of ‘white’ in this context refers generally to Europeans or Americans with relatively fair skin colour (see Loftsdóttir 2002). This means that development is in a sense ‘racial-ized’, seen as belonging to the domain of ‘white’ European

Fig. 3 (above). Part of the profit from selling these pastries went to support to an Icelandic non-governmental organization focusing on children in developing countries.Fig. 4 (below). My daughter Alexía really wanted one and I bought it in order to photograph it as an example of visual representations of international development in Iceland.

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Fig. 5 (above). Young WoDaaBe men resting after herding the cattle in the bush. Fig. 6 (below). WoDaaBe boy observing the dance performances that WoDaaBe are renowned for in many Western countries.

or American others, but not in the realm of Africans. Local Nigeriens working for aid institutions are often subordi-nate to white, Western supervisors. For local people, such as WoDaaBe, it is visually obvious and significant that those who work in the low-paid jobs in development have for the most part different a skin colour from those man-aging the projects and offices. Nigeriens work as security guards, gardeners, drivers and secretaries for development institutions, as well as undertaking various specialized tasks relating more directly to the projects themselves.

The developscape was also visible in the everyday life of Niamey during the time of my fieldwork, with signs everywhere advertising an array of projects by a variety of development institutions. When large jeeps drove by, many were marked with the logo of such institutions. Certain spaces were also reserved for Westerners or more affluent Nigeriens, the supermarket being one of these, along with bars and restaurants. For many WoDaaBe I talked to, there was a strong relationship between skin colour and prosperity. Many were surprised to hear that in my native country my mother did not have servants to clean and cook for the family, and that my brother did not have a desk job.

Since many WoDaaBe had travelled widely in West Africa, where white people were also being served by dark-skinned people, their frame of reference for these impressions was in no way limited to Niger (see Loftsdóttir 2008). When I first arrived in Niger, the message was clear from many of those of my WoDaaBe friends who had spent most time in the city: I needed a big house, servants, a cook, a gardener and someone to clean my swimming pool. In these circumstances, ‘whiteness’ was a vibrant and meaningful category for all involved. Forgetting skin colour was in fact a luxury, which only I was able to afford. My ‘whiteness’ was still not a singular sign, but interacted with my gender and ethnicity as coming from a small mar-ginalized European country (Loftsdóttir 2002; see also Berg 2008 for an example from Malawi).

Such conceptions of whiteness stand in relation to conceptions of development projects more generally, but over the last few years many scholars and practitioners have focused more on whether projects are viable or not. WoDaaBe frequently identified specific development projects as the action of an individual white Westerner acting out of her or his good will, endowed with vast resources and bestowing them out of kindness. They did not by and large see themselves as active partners in the development process, but rather stressed the importance of making friends with ‘white’ people so as to receive gifts from them. I found this personalization also expressed by individuals who had worked for the larger projects and

had been in direct interaction with development special-ists. Thus in my experience, people did not assert this racialized developscape critically, but interpreted it as the natural order of things.

ConclusionMy aim here is to encourage more careful thinking about race and racialization in relation to international develop-ment. How does structuring of aid relations stimulate a certain racial cartography? We also need to investigate when the opposite happens, namely when international development deconstructs old racialized notions and the relationships that I have highlighted here.

As with other ‘scapes’, the ‘developscape’ takes dif-ferent shapes and textures within diverse localized envi-ronments. The landscape of development is of course not only one of Westerners or former colonial rulers aiding former colonies, especially now that China is changing the praxis of doing development, probably permanently. The fact is, however, that the line of ‘development money’ passing between those formerly seen as civilized and white and those seen as uncivilized and dark continues to be important. We have to write against the ‘norm against noticing’, as Robert Vitalis (2000: 336) puts it in his cri-tique of how the field of international relations has ignored racialization.

I am in no way claiming that those in the field, Westerners executing or performing development in the so-called developing countries, are willingly contributing to the racialization explored here. To some the power asso-ciated with their own ‘whiteness’ is probably invisible and normal, while for others this categorization is troubling and even alarming. My experience in Niger suggested that many Western individuals working in aid were deeply frustrated with their categorization as ‘white’ and the fact that Nigeriens often saw and understood ‘whiteness’ as a category of endless wealth and affluence.

Edward Bruner’s (2005) insights are useful here: in his discussion of tourism in West Africa he points out that tourists and ‘natives’ are caught in certain scripts, written by the international tourist discourse that entangles both parties, and is difficult to escape. As Bruner points out, ‘both are positioned by that discourse and are allocated space within it’ (ibid.: 70). That is not to say that this racialized set-up of development cannot be manipulated or transgressed by different agents from different parts of the world. But this analogy captures the way in which the racism of the past and its legacy remain noticeable in an unequal world, and continue to entangle or ensnare indi-viduals through structures of development and create a platform for the relations between them. l

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