The Developmental Hierarchy Cultural Schema

In everyday conversation, popular media, and scholarly work, terms like the “Third World” or “developing countries” are often contrasted with the “First World” and “developed countries.” These common terms imply that most people share a cultural schema of a developmental hierarchy of societies. How prevalent has this schema been throughout history? Drawing from cognitive anthropology, I argue that in general the terms people use are indicative of specific cultural schemas. This is the especially the case with terms that refer to societies’ position on a developmental hierarchy (e.g. “developed” versus “developing countries,” or “advanced” versus “primitive societies,” etc.). Using the Google Books N-gram Database, I analyze the usage of over 80 such terms by year, measuring their relative frequencies in all books written in English from 1700-2008. I then combine this quantitative data with archival data and other scholars’ historical work, constructing a historical narrative of the developmental hierarchy cultural schema over the last three hundred years. The terminology of the developmental hierarchy has been prominent throughout the time period examined, though it has experienced significant changes. During the eighteenth century, developmental hierarchy terms gained popularity as the ideas of social evolutionism expanded. Notions of sovereignty and capability eventually challenged social evolutionary ideas in the beginning of the twentieth century, leading to their demise. In their wake, modernization theory quickly became prominent, bringing a new set of developmental hierarchy terms. Institutionalized by the founding of various international organizations in the mid-twentieth century, modernization theory renovated the developmental hierarchy cultural schema by shifting the object of development from societies and peoples to that of the nation-state. The developmental hierarchy cultural schema has exercised considerable power in organizing the way people classify societies.