The Daughters of Development

Sinith Sittirak

This is a powerful feminist critique of the Western concept of development, which has brought profound changes to the lives of women in the South over the last thirty years. It is also an attempt to rediscover and rehabilitate traditional indigenous knowledge as an important basis for empowering women and re-establishing the foundation of reciprocity in the North-South dialogue. Sinith Sittirak looks at the wreckage "progress" has wreaked on the lives of Thai sex workers and of Indigenous peoples globally and contrasts this a portrait - in words and pictures - of her own ‘undeveloped’ mother: gardener, agriculturalist, cook, entertainer, tool and toy inventor and maker, traditional doctor, resources manager, energy conservationists, food scientist, home economist, sustainable developer, ecologist and environmentalist. In exploring the possibilities for an appropriate development path, Sinith Sittirak applies the framework of a political economy of development which acknowledges the politics of identity and difference. Central to her framework is the recognition that development is part of that universalizing process which imposes sameness by speaking for or naming the Other by excluding difference.

2001 | ISBN 9781876756000 | Paperback | 218 x 137 mm | 153 pp