Anthropology and the development encounter: the making and marketing of development anthropology

Abstract

One has to ponder, of course, the reason for this change in the anthropologist's position with regard to development and change. We have to take seriously the fact that today, more than ever, anthropologists are evincing great interest in "the development process," and significant numbers of "development anthropologists" roam, more or less at ease, the world of development, teaching at universities or working as consultants or employees for institutions such as the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID), and nongovernmental organizations. The apparent failure of economically oriented approaches to development prompted a reevaluation of development's "social" aspects and goals beginning in the early 1970s and, more recently, of its cultural aspects, among them the impact of development projects on local communities and the importance of local knowledge systems for programs. The new emphasis on culture has in turn opened up unprecedented opportunities for anthropologists. "Culture"-which until the 1970s was purely a residual category, since "traditional" societies were thought to be in the process of becoming "modern" through development-has become inherently problematic in development, calling for a new type of professional participation, that of the anthropologist. As with any problematization, new discourses and practices are appearing, discourses and practices that help to shape the reality to which they refer. The consequences of this process have to be ascertained.' It is thus crucial that we examine the role of anthropologists in development. To what extent do their critiques undermine the dominant discourse of development? Conversely, to what extent do anthropologists still depend on the perceptual configurations and cultural fields inaugurated by post-World War II development? Finally, do other current critiques in anthropology and development allow us to problematize the involvement of anthropologists in development projects? Inevitably, the description of local realities by anthropologists for development purposes involves a positioning in the present and a use of categories and cultural totalities that are not as free of past conditioning as researchers might wish. In their studies, and in spite of themselves, development anthropologists impose upon local realities social and political analyses that have traveled well-known terrains. These types of analyses originate in theoretical traditions in both anthropology and development that are the product of accumulated scholarly and political action, not merely neutral frameworks through which "local knowledge" innocently shows itself. It is through these analyses that anthropologists constitute themselves as subjects capable of knowing and modifying the real. Their actions create a domain of experience-certainly related to real conditions-that opens up ways to intervene in, and to control, the Third World, thus placing anthropology at the service of power. Development anthropologists argue that a significant transformation took...

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