Culture and Development: Taking Culture Seriously in Development for Andean Indigenous People

Abstract

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which ‘culturally appropriate development’ is thought and practiced in the Andes.

Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities

“…Characterized by some as part of human geography's cultural, institutional, or relational "turns" (Crang, 1997;Amin and Thrift, 2000;Amin, 2001;Bathelt and Glückler, 2003;Yeung, 2005a), scholars with a wide range of empirical and theoretical interests have considered or studied how socio-spatial practices influence a diverse range of phenomena and processes: learning and innovation (Gertler, 2003;Amin and Cohendet, 2004;Faulconbridge, 2006;Hall, 2008;, industrial organization (Bathelt et al, 2004;Glückler, 2005;James, 2007;Jones, 2007;Palmer and O'Kane, 2007;Pain, 2008), market systems (Crewe et al, 2003;Gibson-Graham, 2008;Berndt and Boeckler, 2009), networks and globalization (Amin, 2002;Hess, 2004;Murphy, 2006a), livelihood strategies (Smith and Stenning, 2006;Stenning et al, 2010), development (Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006;Abbott et al, 2007), race, class, and gender relations (Cameron and Gibson-Graham, 2003;Slocum, 2007;Dowling, 2009), neoliberal governance (Larner, 2005;Larner and Laurie, 2009;Dowling, 2010), and consumption and householding (Barr and Gilg, 2006;Mansvelt, 2009). A common link between these literatures is an explicit interest in what can be broadly defined as 'socioeconomic practices': the stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which diverse actors (e.g., entrepreneurs, workers, caregivers, consumers, firms) and communities (e.g., industries, places, markets, cultural groups) organize materials, produce, consume, and/or derive meaning from the economic world.…”

Wellbeing in international development: What's new?

“…Similar ideas have contributed to a growing anthropological literature on how cultural disjuncture (desencuentros) can undermine the goals of development agencies working in the Andes (e.g. Poole, 2004;Vincent, 2004;Coxshall, 2005;García, 2005;Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006;Bebbington et al, 2007).…”

Well-Being in Development: Comparing Global Designs with Local Views in Peru

“…Despite being aware of the criticisms levelled at it by other Peruvian social scientists Mignolo is mildly supportive of the attempt of PRATEC and other groups to build a distinctive Andean ideology (2000: 300), whereas his analysis is silent on Guzman's tragic adaptation of Maoist ideology to an Andean Peruvian context. The actor-oriented sociology and ethnographic literature referred to in Section 2 has also contributed to the debate over Lo Andino, particularly how cultural disjuncture (desencuentros) can undermine the goals of development agencies working in the Andes (for example De Vries and Nuijten, 2002;Trawick, 2003;Poole, 2004;Vincent, 2004;Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006;Bebbington et al, 2007). Although Starn (1991) and other anthropologists warn against essentializing local experience, the renaissance of identity politics in the Andean countries is evidence of its enduring resonance (Yashar, 2005).…”