Vocabularies of power surround the 'development' myth and reality. Coined and reinvented to support old structures and drive the adoption of new ones, they follow their own life cycles, occasionally find themselves hijacked, but are ignored only at one's peril.
Those who dominate, the late Winin Pereira had once said, have the advantage of being able to impose definitions. Pereira, a former Indian nuclear physicist and an ecologist until he died in 1999, had then referred to the Warli, an adivasi (indigenous) clan whose ancient homelands were in the region north of Mumbai. The Warli, he had said, can "read" a tree the way a good reader reads words, at a glance, in their entirety, not like a botanist, who plods from one letter to another like a neo-literate.
There is little left of the Warli desh. Since they had no use for the concept of ownership, they were swindled of their land by the overlords of the then Bombay Presidency, and swindled again by tribal development commissions. They never understood the language of development, particularly not when they were told plants and fish are 'resources' for human use, that insects are 'pests', that trees can become 'overmature' from a human-use perspective. These were the Warli's "gaia", earth-system. A 'development professional' and a Warli adivasi would find each other mutually unintelligible.
And so it is with economic change, which tends to be represented as an accumulation of processes without human or social agents, rendered with descriptions that are culturally sterile. There is not even an attempt to anthropomorphise them, although I suspect if there would be, the resulting creatures could take their place amongst the ranks of animated animals in Disney's Fantasia. Technologies, we are told, "emerge" in a magical way; new markets "open up", as if they were exotic tropical orchids suddenly discovered, and pleased to have been.