Nina Holm Vohnsen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526101341
- eISBN:
- 9781526128539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526101341.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Public Policy
The book opens with a montage of ‘ethnographic snapshots’ which in very different ways exemplifies central aspects of development and planning. Each snapshot is 10-15 lines long and might be a ...
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The book opens with a montage of ‘ethnographic snapshots’ which in very different ways exemplifies central aspects of development and planning. Each snapshot is 10-15 lines long and might be a conversation, a dilemma, a scene from a bureaucratic setting, a decision taken or a situation confronted. The prologue will in this manner introduce the reader to the book´s main analytical pair: the numerous attempts to make sensible decisions and the resulting experience of absurdity when confronted with the sum of them. The montage makes use of two writing techniques: American novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s dispensation with ‘beginning, middle and end’ in narratives, and Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual’ montage – here adapted with American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as a principle for destabilizing conclusion.Less
The book opens with a montage of ‘ethnographic snapshots’ which in very different ways exemplifies central aspects of development and planning. Each snapshot is 10-15 lines long and might be a conversation, a dilemma, a scene from a bureaucratic setting, a decision taken or a situation confronted. The prologue will in this manner introduce the reader to the book´s main analytical pair: the numerous attempts to make sensible decisions and the resulting experience of absurdity when confronted with the sum of them. The montage makes use of two writing techniques: American novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s dispensation with ‘beginning, middle and end’ in narratives, and Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual’ montage – here adapted with American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as a principle for destabilizing conclusion.
