Anthropology and Development: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

241 Pages·2015·2.31 MB·English

by  Katy Gardner

Anthropology and Development
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Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Professor Christina Garsten, Stockholm University
Recent titles:
Becoming Arab in London: Discordant Development: Contesting Publics:
Performativity and the Global Capitalism and the Feminism, Activism,
Undoing of Identity Struggle for Connection in Ethnography
Ramy m.K. aly Bangladesh lynne phillips
Community, Cosmopolitanism Katy gaRdneR and sally Cole
and the Problem of Human Organisational Anthropology: Food For Change:
Commonality Doing Ethnography in and The Politics and Values
VeRed amit andnigel RappoRt Among Complex Organisations of Social Movements
Home Spaces, Street Styles: edited By JeFF pRatt and
Contesting Power and Identity ChRistina gaRsten peteR lUetChFoRd
in a South African City and anette nyqVist Checkpoint, Temple, Church
leslie J. BanK Border Watch: and Mosque:
In Foreign Fields: Cultures of Immigration, A Collaborative Ethnography
The Politics and Experiences of Detention and Control of War and Peace
Transnational Sport Migration alexandRa hall Jonathan spenCeR,
thomas F. CaRteR Anthropology’s World: JosnhaathhUaln h gaosBoUdlhlaanhd, ,
Dream Zones: Life in a Twenty-First BaRt Klem, BenediKt KoRF
Anticipating Capitalism and Century Discipline and Kalinga tUdoR silVa
Development in India UlF hanneRz
Race and Ethnicity
Jamie CRoss Humans and Other Animals in Latin America
A World of Insecurity: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Second Edition
Anthropological Perspectives Human–Animal Interactions peteR wade
on Human Security samantha hURn
Race and Sex
edited By thomas eRiKsen, Flip-Flop: in Latin America
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A History of Anthropology Globalisation’s Backroads
The Capability of Places:
Second Edition CaRoline Knowles
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thomas hylland eRiKsen The Anthropology of Security: Community Response to
and Finn siVeRt nielsen Perspectives from the Frontline Intrusion and Change
Ethnicity and Nationalism: of Policing, Counter-Terrorism sandRa wallman
Anthropological Perspectives and Border Control
The Making of an African
Third Edition edited By maRK magUiRe,
Working Class:
thomas hylland eRiKsen CataRina FRois
Politics, Law, and Cultural
Small Places, Large Issues: and nils zURawsKi Protest in the Manual Workers’
An Introduction to Social and The Gloss of Harmony: Union of Botswana
Cultural Anthropology The Politics of Policy Making pnina weRBneR
Third Edition in Multilateral Organisations
thomas hylland eRiKsen edited By BiRgit mülleR
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Anthropology and
Development
Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
Katy Gardner and David Lewis
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First published 2015 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Katy Gardner and David Lewis 2015
The right of Katy Gardner and David Lewis to be identified as the authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3365 6 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3364 9 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1275 5 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1277 9 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1276 2 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the
country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Text design by Melanie Patrick
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK
and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
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Contents
Series Preface vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xi
Glossary xii
Development jargon xii
Anthropological jargon xiv
Acronyms xvii
Prelude: Development, Post-Development and More
Development? 1
1. Understanding Development: Theory and Practice into the
Twenty-First Century 9
Development: history and meanings 9
The ‘aid industry’ 15
Theories of development 18
Global changes and continuities 31
Anthropology and post-development: into the twenty-first
century 43
2. Applying Anthropology 46
Anthropology, cultural relativism and social change 48
The evolution of applied anthropology 50
Development as an applied field of anthropology 59
Dilemmas of applied work 67
Engaged anthropology in the twenty-first century 72
Dissolving the boundaries? 76
3. The Anthropology of Development 78
Anthropologists, change and development: the view from 1996 78
The anthropology of development from 2000 onwards:
new agendas, old questions 103
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vi Anthropology and Development
4. Anthropologists in Development: Access, Effects and Control 125
Access 127
Effects 135
Control 140
Conclusion 148
5. When Good Ideas Turn Bad: The Dominant Discourse
Bites Back 150
When good ideas go bad: the rise and fall of politicised
development 152
Ethnography, participation and empowerment, round two 167
Conclusion: Anthropology, Development and
Twenty-First-Century Challenges 177
Control, access, effects 178
Notes 183
Bibliography 188
Index 209
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Series Preface
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works
that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local
conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues
explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish
work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is
strongly area-studies oriented and offer genuine theoretical arguments
that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless
located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to
argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must
surely be through such research.
We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us
about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather
than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic
context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in
a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place
for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study
villages; they study in villages.’
By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of
‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We
therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious
movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development
agencies and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically
based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self.
The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs;
comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of
the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to
demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship
and the contemporary world.
Professor Vered Amit
Professor Christina Garsten
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Preface
We originally chose to write this book for two main reasons. The first was
that during the early 1990s we could find no single text that engaged with
the various histories, opinions and debates that had emerged during the
relationships between development people and anthropologists. While
Lucy Mair’s book Anthropology and Development (1984) was an invaluable
text, it had been written well before both subjects embarked on periods
of intensive reflection informed by the rise of postmodernist theory. We
therefore hoped to move debates forward in a manner that could engage
researchers, students and practitioners. Reviewers were on the whole kind
about the book, and this made us feel that our work had at least gone some
way towards achieving our intention.
The second reason was more personal. By the middle of the 1990s
both of us were interested in trying to make sense of our disparate
experiences to date working as anthropologists, researchers and
development practitioners – in the field, at universities and research
institutes, behind desks in development agencies and within interdis-
ciplinary consultancy teams. Katy Gardner and David Lewis had both
studied social anthropology as a first degree in the early 1980s. Katy
Gardner’s PhD research involved fieldwork in a Bangladeshi migrant
village. After completing her dissertation, she spent a year working for
the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA) as an assistant
social adviser. During this period she was involved in short visits to various
projects in South Asia as well as administrative work in London. Since
leaving the ODA Katy has worked as a full-time lecturer in anthropology
at the Universities of Kent and Sussex (where she worked from 1993 to
2013, becoming Professor of Anthropology in 2009). Earlier in her career
she was also involved in a range of consultancy work for both private and
governmental agencies. She is the author of Songs at the River’s Edge: Stories
from a Bangladeshi Village (Virago, 1991); Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel
and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford University Press, 1995)
and Age, Narrative and Migration: Life History and the Life Course amongst
Bengali Elders in London (Berg, 2002). In 2013 she became professor of
anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the London School
of Economics and Political Science. Katy Gardner’s most recent book is
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Preface ix
Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection
in Bangladesh (Pluto, 2012). Katy has also written several novels, including
Losing Gemma (Penguin, 2001).
David Lewis moved from anthropology into a more interdisciplinary
study of development. After a postgraduate course in development studies,
he completed a PhD in rural sociology, in which he studied the effects of
rural technological change in a Bangladeshi village. A five-year period of
freelance research and consultancy work followed, including working as a
Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London.
He undertook research and consultancy work for a number of government
and non-governmental agencies in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka
and Albania before becoming a full-time academic in the Department of
Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
David Lewis’s books include Technologies and Transactions: A Study of the
Interaction between Agrarian Structure and New Technology in Bangladesh
(Centre for Social Studies, University of Dhaka, 1991); Trading the Silver
Seed: Local Knowledge and Market Moralities in Aquacultural Development
(Intermediate Technology Publications, 1996); The Management of Non-
Governmental Development Organizations (Routledge, 2001, 2007 and
2014); and Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and
Agencies (Kumarian, 2006, co-edited with David Mosse). His most recent
books include Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge
University Press, 2011) and Popular Representations of Development: Insights
from Novels, Films, Television and Social Media (co-edited with D. Rodgers
and M. Woolcock, Routledge, 2014).
We ended our original preface with a few words about our overall
intentions. We felt that many prevailing assumptions about and
approaches to development were flawed or basically wrong-headed, but
we did not see much value in simply being critical without trying to offer
any creative alternatives. Instead, we believed in options that were rooted
in reality rather than simply in rhetoric, in breaking down the barriers
which existed between ‘developers’ and the ‘developed’, and in the need
for a fuller critical discussion about what ‘development’ meant, one
which reflected a true multiplicity of voices. We believed that there was a
pressing moral and political responsibility to work towards improving the
quality of life for the bulk of the world’s population, and that in general
a poor job was being made of this task. We did not wish to suggest that
anthropology could somehow ‘save’ the development industry, nor that
it could necessarily make the process of change more benign. However,
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