Rereading The Passing of Traditional Society
Cultural Studies, 22 (1):
1--25 (2008)Abstract
This paper employs a proposed alterity discourse analysis (ADA) framework to argue that The Passing of Traditional Society – the bible of the modernization paradigm of development communication research – exemplifies far less a discourse on the relationship between empathy and development, as it does on the political/ideological imperatives governing the construction of the Other (i.e. the Middle East) by the Self (i.e. the US). To substantiate this claim, the paper debunks the book's claim to social scientific objectivity by pinpointing the methodological shortcomings of the empathy model and of the Middle East project from which the model was derived, and highlights the paradigm's dogma by revealing the religious metaphors with which the book's narrative is infused.