Development Anthropology and Anthropology of Development

 

Development Anthropology Vs Anthropology of Development

Development has been seen as a mechanism of social change which is a) associated with postwar reconstruction of  underdeveloped areas of the world, b) a mechanism of  domination of south by north, i.e. neo colonialism, and c) something that has a close link with capitalism’s need for new markets. Famous anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1991) attacked anthropologists working in development for failing to react to changes taking place within anthropology, for questionable methodological practices and –most damningly – for reproducing discourses of modernisation and development. In a later work Escobar (1995) suggests that development makes anthropological encounters with third world others possible – just as colonialism once did. Rather than challenging it, anthropologists overlook the ways in which development operates as an arena of cultural contestation and identity construction.

 

Escobar has been one of the major effects in the development linked discourses of anthropology which then divided into two major approaches. One approach has been development anthropology, and the other became anthropology of development.

Development anthropology: Anthropologists working in development field

Development anthropology refers to the role played by the anthropologists in the field of executing development projects. The role anthropologists play in facilitating economic growth, designing and implementation of specific policies and plans whether at the level of the state, donor agencies or indigenous social movements. These can have either positive or negative or both on the people who experience them. Development is a series of events and actions, as well as a particular disxourse or ideological construct.

Anthropologists are now employed in growing numbers by development agencies, organisations and private consultancy firms. A discussion of applied anthropology does not therefore simply raise questions of what a professional anthropologist might do. The type of work which professional anthropologists are asked to undertake can vary considerably. They may include applied research to produce supporting data for planned interventions; contributions to the appraisal and evaluation planning of development projects; or attempting to build local participation into the project. Assignments can vary from a short consultancy job lasting a few weeks, to a placement on a project for several years as one of the full-time staff.  

Some of the important positions that anthropologists are occupying in development agencies are:

1.       Social Development Advisors (SDA).

2.       Consultants

3.       Research officers

4.       Counsellors

5.       Advocacy role

Apart from the strict routine duties of anthropologists in development agencies, they are increasingly becoming a mediator between the developers and those to be ‘developed.’ Anthropologists are trained sceptics: they tend to argue that situations and ideas are usually more complicated than is immediately apparent; they believe that no fact or detail is too trivial to be considered; they may prefer quality to quantity; they are rarely ready to offer conclusions or advice in terms of straightforward course of action.

Anthropologists are well equipped to monitor the process of project implementation, which in effect is the task of monitoring social change. To do this, a combination of national and expatriate anthropologists, with boith men and women involved, will be able to draw on their different skills and perspectives in order to present different, though mutually reinforcing, analyses of events.

Anthropologists are involved in project design, appraisal and evaluation by national and international NGOs and aid agencies. Since the second world war the notion of the project has become central to mainstream development activity, whether centred on large scale infrastructural work such as building of a dam or bridge or softer areas such as health or education provision. Projects tend to pass through a series of staged activities, often known as the project cycle.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the World Bank and United Nations were promoting what they termed “Integrated Rural Development”, in which conventional planning methods were cast aside in favour of a measure of community participation in setting needs and a more comprehensive approach to tackling problems on a number of sectoral fronts simultaneously.

In consequence, a number of anthropologists were employed in carrying out impact studies among the local community to whether or not prohect’s objectives have been met.

The appearance of what has been termed ‘advocacy anthropology’ by its practitioners (Miller 1995) has involved itself with the efforts of indigenous people to gain more control over their lives (Escober 1992).

 

Anthropology of development: Importance of anthropology in development

Anthropologists have long made practical contributions to planned change and policy. However, many have also studied development as a field of academic enquiry in itself. These studies have challenged the dominant development discourses, its key assumptions, representations, and paved for alternative ways for development. This is known as the anthropology of development. It sees development linked policies as cultural constructs and aims to explore their impact both theoretically and empirically. Major issues which call for an anthropology of development include:

1. The social and cultural effects of economic change
2. The social and cultural effects of development projects

The social and cultural effects of economic change

Although the study of economic change has not always been academically fashionable, individual anthropologists have long been grappling with it. There are several works anthropological in nature which focus on the social and cultural effects of economic change.

Rural to urban migration and detribalisation:

There are several anthropological studies in Africa focusing on the influence of urbanism over rural life. Wilson (1941, 1942) argues that while Central African society was normally in a state of equilibrium, destabilising changes in African society was brought by increasing influence of capitalist production within the region, and growing rural to urban migration. Richards (1939), Schapera (1947) focus on many villages which lost their male labour force, most migrants could not sent enough resource for their families, and there was a large scale ‘cultural decay.’ Murray (1981) focus on oscillating migration resulting in marital disharmony, in other words the capital accumulated at the urban core was at the expense of rural periphery.

Agriculture change: polarisation

Clifford Geertz (1963a) focus on the Indonesian agriculture change in Agriculture Involution. With a historical reference of Indonesian agriculture, Geertz shows that colonial policies encouraged the development of a partial cash economy in which peasant farmers were forced to pay taxes to support plantation production for export. In consequence, majority of farmers could not produce surplus.

Epstein (1962) in Economic Development and Social Change in South India and in 1973 South India: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow discusses the effects of the introduction of new irrigation techniques and the growing importance of cash cropping. In the village of Wangala, where farmers were increasingly producing for and profiting from local sugar refinery, the changes had not led to major social readjustment. The village continued to have limited link to outside economy and social structure remained unaltered. In contrast in the second village Dalena, which had remained a dry land enclave in the midst of an irrigated belt, male farmers were encouraged to move away from the relatively unprofitable agricultural pursuits and participate in other ways in the burgeoning economy which surrounded them. Some became traders, or worked in white-collar jobs in the local town. These multiple economic changes led to the breakdown of the hereditary political, social and ritual obligations, the changing status of local caste groups and the rise of new forms of hierarchy.

Capitalism and ‘world systems’:

With increasing integration among the worlds, researchers increasing focus on relationship of local communities and cultures to the global political economy. This can be linked to the growing dominance during the 1970s of theories of dependency, and especially to Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory (Wallerstein, 1974), as well as the use of Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s by some anthropologists, for example Bloch, 1983. The emphasis is now on the ways in which societies on the periphery had long been integrated into capitalism, and on the cultural expressions of economic and political dependency and/or resistance.

A classic attempt to fuse neo-Marxist political economy with anthropological perspectives is Eric Wolf’s (1982) Europe and people without history. This is an ambitious attempt to place the history of the world’s peoples within the context of global capitalism, showing how the history of capitalism has tied even the most apparently remote areas and social groups into the system.

Drawing more directly from Neo-Marxist theories of dependency, an important study by anthropologist working in Latin America is by Michael Taussig’s (1980) The devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. This is an account of the cultural as well as economic integration of Columbian peasants and of Bolivian tin miners in the money economy and proletarian wage labour. The Columbian peasants who seasonally sell their labour to plantations present the plantation economy and profits made from it as tied to the capitalist system and thus to the devil. Plantations are conceptualised as quite separate from the peasants’ own land; in the former, profit making requires deals to be made with the devil, whereas in the latter it does not. In the Bolivian tin mines, workers worship Tio (the devil), who Taussig argues is a spiritual embodiment of capitalism and a way of mediating pre-capitalist beliefs with the introduction of wage labour and industrialisation.

Gender issues:

During 1970s a new generation of feminist minded anthropologists like Sachs (1975), Leacock (1972) started working on what became known as GAD (Gender and Development). Some feminist anthropologists focus on the restudy of the subjects of ethnographic classics from a feminist perspective. The feminisation of subsistence has been one of the major arguments of these anthropologists. Moore (1988) for example showed that:

1. Since women have reproductive as well are productive duties they are less free to produce cash crops. Thus while men could experiment with new technologies and production for exchange, women must first and foremost produce the subsistence foods on which their household depend.
2. Male labour migration leaves women behind to carry the burden of supporting the subsistence sector.

The social and cultural effects of development projects

One of the most common criticisms made by anthropologists of development planning is that it is done in a ‘top-down’ manner. Planning is done at a distant office, and hence, often the plan does not match the local requirements. Robert Chamber’s (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First is a seminal statement of this position and draws heavily upon the insights of anthropology. Chambers attacks the biased preconceptions of development planners, most of whom have only a very shaky understanding of rural life in so-called developing societies (Chambers, 1983, 1993). The only solution as Chambers argues is to ‘put the poor first’ and, most importantly, enable them to participate in projects of their own design and appraisal.

Tony Barnett’s (1977) The Gezira Scheme: An Illusion of Development is a classic critique of top-down development. Gezira scheme was a massive project of developing irrigation facility for cotton production in Sudan. Despite of apparent well being of Sudanese people the project failed, stagnated, and became dependent. Barnett argues that the workers were not allowed to have more land or sell it. The Gezira board was paternalistic and authoritarian, based on British effort to control ‘black’ labourers. This meant that cultivators had few incentives to be innovative, and the entire cotton product was dependent on foreign markets.

Barbara Rogers (1980) in The Domestication of Women argues that Western development planners make a range of Western and thus patriarchal, assumptions about gender relations in developing countries. It is often assumed, for example that farmers are male, that women do not do heavy productive work and that nuclear families are the norm. Through andocentric and biased research such as the use of national accounting procedures and surveys which assume that men are household heads, women become invisible. Women are thus systematically discriminated against, not least because there is discrimination within the development agencies themselves. The answer Rogers argues, is not simply more projects for women, for these often produce a ‘new segregation’ in which women are simply trained in domestic science or given sewing machines for income generation. Instead, gender awareness must be build into planning procedures, a process which will necessarily involve reform of the development institutions involved.

Day (1981) in a work on irrigation projects in the Gambia shows that by assuming that men controlled land, labour and income, the projects failed to increase national rice production and increased women’s dependency on men. Within the farming system of Mandinka, crop production is traditionally dominated by collective production for household consumption (maruo), but also involves separate cultivation by men and women on land they are allocated by the household head in return for their maruo labour (Kamanyango). Crops from this land are the property of the male or female cultivators. However, under rice irrigation projects sponsored by Taiwan (1966 – 74), Taiwan (1973 – 76), and China (1975 – 79), only men were given Kamanyango rights to irrigated land. In other irrigated plots designated as maruo, men increasingly used women’s skilled collective labour, but were able to pay them low wages because of the lack of other income generating opportunities available to women. Women’s traditional rights were thus systematically undermined by the projects, a process which had started during the colonial period, when once more the reciprocal rights and duties of farming were undermined by policies which encouraged male farmers to produce cash crops and failed to recognise the central role of female producers.

Anthropology of Success and failure:

Closely related to anthropological critiques of top-down planning is the criticism that planners fail to acknowledge adequately the importance, and potential of local knowledge. Instead, projects often involve the assumption that western or urban knowledge is superior to the knowledge of the people to be developed. They are regarded as ignorant, although the anthropologists have repeatedly shown, they have their own areas of appropriate expertise. Development projects often fail because of the ignorance of planners rather than the ignorance of the beneficiaries. This might inolve a range of factors, such as local ecological conditions, the availability of particular resources, physical and climatic conditions and so on. Mamdani’s classic analysis of the failure of the Khanna study, an attempt to introduce birth control to the Indian village of Manupur, is a fascinating account of developmental to-downism and ignorance (Mamdani, 1972). Because of cultural and economic value of having as many children as possible, Mamdani argues that population programmes are unlikely to have much success in rural India. The programme planners in the Khanna study, however, assumed that villagers’ rejection of contraception was due to ‘ignorance’, thus completely ignoring the social and economic realities of the village. Similarly Abhijit V Banerjee and Easther Duflo (2011) report the rural Indian villagers’ sense of insecurity to be one of the reasons for bigger families. They argue the children in rural India is seen as investment for old age pension, i.e. the more you have children the more the chance that you will be taken care of in old age. Once again, anthropological methods and questions, rather than bureaucratic planning, reveal the true constraints on successful development.

Considering development as a discourse much in the manner Foucault argues in his Order of things (1970) that fields of knowledge, their classification and hierarchic presentation in different periods is socially, historically and politically constructed and are therefore neither objective nor neutral. Considering development as discourse raises important questions about the nature of developmental knowledge and its interface with other representations of reality. Anthropology can have an important role here; first, in demonstrating that there are many other ways of knowing, and second, in showing what happens when different knowledges meet. In another contribution to the growing postmodern anthropology of development, for example, the relationship between scientific and local knowledge within development practice is explored.

 

Class lecture on Development Anthropology and Anthropology of Development