“Please Mr Bebbington, don't come here and tell us what to do”

Betsy Olson's and Andrew Sayer's article hits close to home. I have been, indeed am, deemed a modernist development geographer by colleagues, and in recent work in Perú have been criticized for ethnocentric meddling. When that comes in conjunction with our work having to run the gauntlet of legal review, with being denigrated in public interviews ("just because a gringo from Cambridge wrote something are we going to take it as being as sacred as the Bible"), and with dismissive comments from senior public officials, I sometimes wonder whether "embracing the normative" is worth the candle. Of course, these hassles are minor in comparison with those faced by other friends and colleagues working on the same topics as us – a Jesuit colleague, researcher and friend was savaged by Peru's right wing press and elites and dismissed as nothing less than a "false prophet" by the Peruvian President as the (Opus Dei) Cardinal of Perú merely looked on, saying nothing.