Maureen Silos came to America in search of a library, and in UCLA's University Research Library, she found just the right place. "URL is one of the best things that happened to me at UCLA," she says with delight and conviction. She was unable to remain in Surinam, the land of her birth, because it had no such extended library facilities, no place where she could examine and gather ideas on a wide range of topics across different disciplines. The inadequacy of university education in the Caribbean is discussed in her recently completed dissertation in Comparative Education, Economics Education and the Politics of knowledge in the Caribbean. It is an attempt to come up with an integrated theory and philosophy of development and university education in the Caribbean.

Underdevelopment is usually understood in purely economic terms. The goal is to come up with policies that will create economic growth and eliminate poverty. To many minds, the "bad guys" are the European colonial powers and United States's imperialism. This is the understanding that Silos brought home to Surinam in 1983 after her first venture abroad in search of education: to Holland in the 1970s. But when she found work as a researcher at the Ministry of Education and as a lecturer at the University of Surinam, she soon "encountered situations I could not explain with the theory that the outside world is solely responsible for our problems.".

These experiences forced her to radically alter her views of development theory to a new perspective tersely expressed in the title of a book she wrote in 1991: Underdevelopment Is a Choice. The book "jolted people out of the notion that Holland is the problem and the solution," but her viewpoint was not well-received in political circles.

At UCLA, Silos has expanded upon her initial insights, combining ideas from philosophy, anthropology, economics, sociology, and biology into a theory that sees Caribbean underdevelopment as resulting from a complex interaction between psycho-cultural, economic, and political factors. She argues that until Caribbean economists seriously consider the "cognitive confusion" of the Caribbean colonial worldview they will continue to be part of the problem instead of the solution.

Silos sees a correlation between the Caribbean colonial worldview--which is a hybrid of vastly different worldviews from Africa, Asia, and Europe,--the command democracies, and mercantilist economies of the region. What intrigues her most is the fact that the surface structures of Caribbean societies have all the trappings of a modem society: parliamentary democracy, market economy, modern education, and so on, and yet the inner workings of these institutions express the deep psychological legacy of commandism on the colonial plantation.

Silos feels that social and economic theorizing in the Caribbean has to start from the recognition of this psycho-cultural reality in order to understand how these behavioral patterns, attitudes, and mentalities contribute to the perpetuation of underdevelopment. Caribbean people turn to the world a face of reason, while magical and mythical worldviews grounded in their African and Asian cultures exert considerable power," Silos says. Her dissertation research therefore is part of a larger project to understand the relationship between hybrid worldviews, social institutions, and processes of social change in the developing world in general and the Caribbean in particular.

Silos believes that the application of neoclassical economics to analyses of underdevelopment in the Caribbean has been problematic because it denies any psycho-cultural influence on economic behavior. Her dissertation is an analysis of the theoretical and methodological limitations of neoclassical economics in Caribbean development theory. She hopes that this study will make a contribution to a holistic Caribbean development theory that integrates all levels of social analysis.

In addition to the library, Silos also found at UCLA mentors who furthered her work at many levels. When Silos lost essential funding due to the foreign exchange crisis of her country, Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Claudia Mitchell-Kernan gave her research assignments that provided crucial support and many important learning opportunities. When Silos's multidisciplinary interests seemed at times to be irreconcilable, she could always count on the patience of Assistant Vice Chancellor Jim Turner. "He just let me talk, talk, talk," she said, "and then he comes up with one of those profound statements that clarify so many things." Her committee members have also been very supportive, as was the staff of the Center for African American Studies where she has an office and teaches part-time.

During her graduate years, Silos was a Fulbright Fellow and an Organization of American States Fellow. With funding from the Graduate Division and the Center for African American Studies she spent five months at the University of the West Indies, in Trinidad and Tobago, interviewing faculty and students and the Department of Economics.

Her immediate plan for the future is to do her postdoctoral research on three selected East Asian economies, replicating more or less her Caribbean research to further examine and deepen her understanding of the relationship between psychology, culture, and economic development. Silos thinks that only through comparative research will we begin to have a theoretical grasp of processes of social change that go beyond the reductionist, modernist, linear, and universalistic formulas of current neoclassical economic development theory.

Published in Spring 1997, Graduate Quarterly