Uprooting and Development

Book excerpt: Uprooting has to do with one of the fundamental properties of human life-the need to change-and with the personal and societal mecha nisms for dealing with that need. As with the more general problems of change, uprooting can be a time of human disaster and desolation, or a time of adaptation and growth into new capacities. The special quality of uprooting is that the need to change is faced at a time of separation from accustomed social, cultural, and environ mental support systems. It is this separation from familiar supports that either renders the uprooted vulnerable to the destructive conse quences of change, or creates freedoms for their evolution into new and constructive patterns of life. Whether the outcomes will be destruc tive or constructive will be determined by the forces at work: the nature and power of the uprooting forces versus the personal and societal capacities for coping with them. Uprooting events are so widespread as to be compared with the major rites of life, but with the difference that dislocation is involved. Uprooting reaches from self-imposed movements such as rural-to urban migration, running away, and traveling abroad for schooling, to natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, political oppres sion, and war. The impacts vary from the need to adapt to. a new culture for an interim period of study to the desolating consequences of the total loss of family, friends, home, and country.