Urban Anthropology

 

 

Definition:

Urban Anthropology examines the social organization of the city, looking at the kinds of social relationship and pattern of social life unique to cities and comparing their different cultural and historical contexts. It emerged as a separate subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to earlier studies of urbanism, urban anthropology applied anthropological concepts and field research methods to urban populations where the city was the context of the research rather than the phenomenon under study.       

Historical Genesis:

This focus is most readily apparent in the tendency of urban anthropologists to examine the social organization of small social worlds within the city, analyzing their social life in terms of larger institutional structures of power. Some of these studies are based on territorial units such as neighborhoods; others examine social networks, webs of relationships linking people who may or may not live nearby. Social networks in cities are frequently nonlocalized, stretching from rural areas of origin to larger ethnic settlements in the cities (Boissevain 1974; Gmelch &  Zenner 1995).            

Urban anthropology also examines social problems characteristic of large cities such as crime, social disorder, poverty, homelessness, and transience. These studies examine the social organization and cultural practices of distinct groups within the city such as gangs (Suttles 1968), ethnic villagers (H. Gans 1962), kinship networks (Stack 1974), homeless alcoholics (Spradley 1970), and criminals and prostitutes (Merry 1981). These studies usually include the systems of bureaucratic regulation, urban politics, welfare administration, urban renewal, and economic conditions that shape local communities. Other research focuses on systems of formal social control such as police, courts, and prisons.     

Despite the concentration of research on the United States and Great Britain, urban anthropology is a comparative field. Studies of kinship and neighborhood in British (Michael D. Young & Willmott 1957) and American cities (Liebow 1967; Lamphere 1987) are paralleled by similar studies in India (Lynch 1969), South Africa (Philip Mayer 1961), Japan (Bestor 1989), and many other parts of the world. Some anthropologists explore the changing nature of work and union movements in urban centers in developing countries (Epstein 1958). Others examine the disproportionate growth of primate cities at the expense of regional towns as a result of economic development in Third World countries.          

Urban anthropologists have worked extensively on the migration of rural peasants to the cities. This research has challenged the proposition that as rural migrants settle in cities their social order and cultural life disintegrates, an argument fundamental to the theory of urbanism as a way of life. Studies of the squatter settlements that grew up as a result of rural migrants flooding into the cities of developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s revealed not anarchy, but emerging forms of social order, planning, and institutional structure (Peattie 1968; Mangin 1970; B. Roberts 1978).                               

Urban anthropology has always focused particularly on the plight of the urban poor. In his controversial work, Oscar Lewis (1966) argued that there was a culture of poverty, a uniform way of life that emerged among the poorest groups in a variety of urban environments such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New York. Although this concept has been extensively criticized, it was an important effort to theorize the social impacts of living on the economic fringes of a large industrial city (Valentine 1968). More recent research views local communities in large industrial cities as the product of late-capitalist development and the progressive impoverishment of the poor. Susser (1982), for example, explored how the changing political economy of the city shapes the life situations of poor people. D. Harvey (1989b) examined changes in urban life as a result of global capital and labor flows. Anthropologists examine political and economic forces that transform urban neighborhoods such as urban renewal, gentrification, disinvestment in cities, the flight of jobs from the city, racial discrimination in the private housing market, public housing policies, and the creation of new towns. Some work explores the way features of architectural design and urban planning shape social life or foster criminal behavior (J. Jacobs 1961; Merry 1981). There has been considerably less published on the way postmodernity is redefining urban life.                     

Race, ethnic group, class, and gender as forms of differentiation and exclusion are fundamental to the field, and studies frequently examine how categories of race and ethnicity shape migration and settlement patterns, job opportunities, voluntary organizations, community institutions, access to work and leisure, and the maintenance of kinship relationships (Philip Mayer 1961; Mullings 1987). Ethnicity, in particular, persists in urban areas in the form of ethnic neighborhoods or in such voluntary associations as rotating credit associations and burial societies (Hannerz 1980). Thus, urban anthropology, although inspired in its earlier years by theories of urbanism, now examines social life in the city as it exists for the people who live in it, rather than the city itself.                

Contemporary situation:

There was a death and rebirth of urban anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s through the addition of spatial theories drawn from geography and a fuller understanding of the political economy of place. This transition, often referred to as the “spatial turn” or in this volume “spatialities,” is discussed by tracing the methodology, history, and substance of urban anthropology with an emphasis on works that employed spatial theory and privileged the built environment. With its origins in traditional ethnography, urban anthropology initially focused on small groups of culturally distinct people living in urban enclaves, leaving the study of urban space to geographers, sociologists, and urban planning. However, during the 1980s a transition occurred, the so-called “death and rebirth of urban anthropology” based on linking macro and micro analyses of urban processes through re-thinking the city as a space of flows, that is, circuits of labor, capital, goods, and services moving ever more rapidly through space, time, and the internet; and a space of places, that is, the physical locations of social reproduction, recreation, and the home. This discussion reviews both the components of the spatialities approach and highlights how this important change in theory and method occurred within urban anthropology. Briefly, the death of urban anthropology was occasioned by a rejection of traditional ethnography strategies as inadequate for dealing with the complexities of modern cities. The so-called rebirth was then stimulated by theoretical work on urban systems, labor flows, and social networks by Anthony Leeds (1973), the incorporation of political economic approaches drawn from geography, sociology, and political science (Mullings 1987; Susser 1982), and the emergence of the anthropology of space and place that examined the city as a material and spatial as well as cultural form (Low 1999; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993). Theories of transnational and translocal anthropology, also emerging at that time, played a dominant role in conceptualization of the city as a nexus of local and global relationships. 

 class lecture on YouTube

 

 

Methodology for Urban Anthropology:

The most distinctive aspect of an anthropological approach to the study of the city is the centrality of ethnography and the production of urban ethnographies of groups of people in urban settings, called “anthropology in the city.” An ethnography is a methodology for describing, analyzing, and theorizing about a group of people from a sociocultural perspective as well as the written text of the results produced by this methodology. There has been lengthy discussion as to what constitutes an adequate ethnography, but for the purpose of this chapter, I refer to urban ethnography as the cultural  anthropological study of cities, urban peoples, networks, systems, and environments. Ethnographies are generally characterized by participant observation, a qualitative method that relies on the anthropologist as a recorder and interpreter living among the people studied within their cultural setting, and the process by which he/ she learns about local social, political, and economic life. Most ethnographers, however, use a wide range of methods, including quantitative surveys and maps as well as qualitative interviews, life histories, and personal documents. An urban ethnography offers an intimate glimpse of city life through the eyes of its residents as seen and understood by the anthropologist. It differs from other methodologies because of its emphasis on what has been called “thick description” and narrative explanation of the rich details of everyday social life. Yet the death of urban anthropology occurred because of a widespread disenchantment with some aspects of small-scale urban ethnography and the anthropology in the city model. The critique was based on the inability of traditional ethnographic methods to conceptualize the city as a whole – as a system of symbols, process, networks, or relationships – that was necessary to understand rapid transformations in the global economy and urban landscape. Urban anthropologists retained the use of culture as a theoretical construct, but at the same time challenged its essentialized nature and deconstructed the concept to produce a more fluid and complex notion. At the same time, urban ethnography expanded to encompass historical, political, and economic as well as spatial analyses advocating an anthropology of the city, rather than in the city. The “urban,” then, became re-conceived of as a set of processes rather than a setting, and its material and spatial form integrated into the study of social relationships. While ethnography still plays an important role in defining an urban anthropological approach, it is more likely to be a “multi-sited” ethnography. Bestor’s (2001) study of tuna trade traces the circuits of fishing, marketing, trading, and consuming of tuna as it occurs throughout the world. The “ethnography”  includes data collected at all of these sites, including a fishing village in Spain, the central Tokyo fish market, and a high-end sushi restaurant in New York City. He argues that to understand the tuna trade the flow of capital, labor, and commodities needs to be examined and researched. Low, Taplin, and Scheld (2005) argue in a similar vein that to produce an adequate park ethnography, a variety of sites, activities, parks, and neighborhoods must be considered. The point of multi-sited ethnography is that the phenomena studied should be tracked through its local and/or global landscape, following the actors and social processes involved without artificially capturing them within a predetermined location.

The production of urban space and the social construction of urban places and their contestation also have become central in anthropological, not just geographical, analyses. Space has become an analytic tool that complements traditional ethnography, particularly in studies of the consequences of   architectural and urban planning projects and embodied analyses of the use of urban space. These spatial analyses require new techniques such as behavioral mapping, transect walks (journeys or tours with informants), physical traces mapping, movement maps, and population counts that complement traditional ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviewing. The overall strength of urban anthropology methodologies lies in their ability to provide empirical in-depth and embodied understandings of everyday life and individual practices inextricably embedded in and contingent to global socioeconomic and political forces. The link between social forces and global capital with local politics and practices is especially clear in studies that examine grassroots organizing in response to urban transformations, and power dynamics, both local and global, in a variety of community contexts. The linking of the macro political economic analysis with the micro ethnographic reality of individuals provides an integrated social science and humanistic perspective for urban design, planning and policy decisions, and a solid intellectual framework for future urban anthropological endeavors. 

 

 

 

Society - A preliminary idea

 

In classical sense society refers to a group of people who share a common ‘culture’, occupy a particular territorial area and feel themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity (Frisby and Sayer 1986).

For Zinsberg “a society is a collection of individuals united by certain relation or modes of behaviour which marks them from others who do not enter into these relations or who differs from them in behaviour.”

W Green has defined the society as “a largest group to which any individual belongs. A society is made up of a population, organisation, time, place and interest.”

McIver defines society as “a system of usage and proedurs, of authority and mutual aid of many groupings and divisions, of control over human behaviour and of liberties. This ever changing and complex system is society. It is a web of social relationships.

In its classical sense, Society entails a number of characteristics:

1.      Society is a network of social relations

2.      A society exists on social interactions and interface

3.      A sense of mutual awareness exists among the members of a society.

4.      There is a direct or indirect forms and varieties of interdependece among the members of a society.

5.      While one cannot image to have a society without collection of individuals similarly, one cannot have human beings without forming a mutual social relations.

Approaches:

Society has been the central theoretical object of much European anthropology, especially *British social anthropology, so that any history of the theoretical use of the term swiftly becomes a history of anthropological theory. In that history, various tensions and oppositions appear and reappear: society and the state, society and the individual, society and culture, society and nature, primitive society and modern society. In recent years, as the particular use of the term to denote a specific group of people and their way of life has grown ever more problematic, while some of these tensions have approached breaking-point, anthropologists have started to suggest abandoning the very idea of society as a theoretical construct.

There are different positions occupied by social scientists in explaining society. These are

Society in essentialist approach:

Society can be seen as a basic, but not exclusive, attribute of human nature: we are genetically predisposed to social life. Becoming fully human depends on interaction with our fellow creatures; the phylogenesis of our species runs parallel to the development of language and labour, social abilities without which the organism’s needs cannot be met.

Society in Constructivist approach:

Society can also be seen as constituting one particular, exclusive dimension of human nature (Ingold 1994), our dependence on the rules of our particular society. The very idea of social agency is revealed in behaviour which is not founded in instincts, selected by evolution, but instead in rules which have their origins in history rather than in the requirements of the human organism. The notion of ‘rule’ may be taken in different senses: in structural-functionalism it is moral and prescriptive; in structuralism or in symbolic anthropology it is cognitive and descriptive. Despite this important difference, in both cases an emphasis on rules expresses the institutional nature of the principles of social action and organization. The rules of different human societies vary in time and space, but there are rules of some sort everywhere (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1949], Fortes 1983).

Singular and Plural senses:

The idea of a ‘society’ is applicable to a human group having some of the following properties: territoriality; recruitment primarily by sexual reproduction of its members; an institutional organization that is relatively self-sufficient and capable of enduring beyond the life-span of an individual; and cultural distinctiveness. In this sense, society may denote the group’s population, its institutions and relations, or its culture and ideology. Therefore, in its singular sense it represents a group of people or a particular type of humanity.

While in its plural sense of the term society is equivalent to ‘social system’ or ‘social organization’, the socio-political framework of the group is important: its morphology (composition, distribution and relations between the subgroups of society), its body of jural norms (ideas of authority and citizenship, conflict regulation, status and role systems), and its characteristic patterns of social relations (relations of power and exploitation, forms of co-operation, modes of exchange).

One of the ways to handle the relation between the two senses of ‘society’ has been to divide anthropology into ‘ethnographic’ description and interpretation, focusing on the analysis of the particular and emphasizing the differences between societies; and ‘theoretical’ comparison and explanation, which attempts to formulate synthetic propositions valid for all human societies. In spite of efforts to define the two activities as methodologically complementary ‘stages’, anthropology has tended to polarize between ‘ethnography’, which deals with specific societies, and ‘theory’, which deal with society in its abstract and general sense. The universalist perspective predominated in the early years of anthropology, with an emphasis on the ‘comparative method’ and on the definition of major types of society. The golden age of the ethnographic method was the period of culturalism and functionalism, in which ethnography was used polemically to demolish speculative typologies (by *Boas) or as the royal road to the universal (for Malinowski). The structuralisms of Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss, and American neo-evolutionism (†White, †Steward), in turn shifted back to comparison and generalization.

Since the 1960s this polarization has intensified. On the one hand, the interest in meaning and interpretation has restored ethnography to a pre-eminent position, privileging the actor’s perspective and seeking a critique of the anthropologist’s concepts in the different emic views of society. Society in the general sense came to be subordinated to society in the specific, plural sense. On the other hand, developments in sociobiology, the psychological study of cognition, and cultural ecology have led to ambitious hypotheses concerning ‘sociality’ as a genetic property of the human species, along with behavioural and cognitive universals (eventually attributing the ‘phenotypic’ diversity of the human ethogram to such extrinsic variables as the *environment). This polarization between ever more specific culturalist interpretation and ever more grandiose naturalist explanation has ultimately emptied the concept of society of any significance, reducing it either to particular representations or to universal behaviour.

 

 

Sustainable development: 1

Key Features of Sustainable Development. 1

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 2

Approaches to sustainability and development: 3

Neo-liberal/ free market approach: 3

Reformist and interventionist approaches: 3

Radical approaches: 3

Sustainable development:

Sustainability can be defined as the practice of maintaining world processes of productivity indefinitely—natural or human-made—by replacing resources used with resources of equal or greater value without degrading or endangering natural biotic systems. Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social, political, and economic challenges faced by humanity (Kahle and Gurel-Atay 2014). In 1980 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published a world conservation strategy that included one of the first references to sustainable development as a global priority and introduced the term "sustainable development" (Sachs 2015). Two years later, the United Nations World Charter for Nature raised five principles of conservation by which human conduct affecting nature is to be guided and judged. In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the report Our Common Future, commonly called the Brundtland Report. The report included what is now one of the most widely recognised definitions of sustainable development.

Alternatively Sustainable development is defined as a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

·          The concept of 'needs', in particular, the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

·          The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

[World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987)]

 

Key Features of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development can be achieved if we follow the following points,

·          Restricting human being from over-exploitation of the environmental resources both at individual level and as a corporate.

·          Technological development should be input effective and not input utilizing. Therefore, ensuring technology that minimises the use of finite resources and maximises the output.

·          The rate of consumption should not surpass the rate of salvation.

·          For renewable resources, the rate of consumption should not surpass the rate of production of renewable substitutes.

·          Minimisation of all kinds of pollutants and safer disposal of waste.

·          Sensible use of Natural Resources.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030.

The SDGs are:

1.       Complete eradication of poverty

2.       No hunger

3.       Good health and well-being

4.       Quality education and life-long learning opportunity for all

5.       Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girl

6.       Ensure availability and sustainable management of water for all

7.       Ensure the availability of reliable, affordable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

8.       Promote sustained inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Full and productive and descent work for all.

9.       Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation

10.   Reduce inequality within and among countries

11.   Make cities and human settlement inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable for all

12.   Ensure sustainable production and consumption pattern

13.   Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact

14.   Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development

15.   Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial eco-systems, sustainably mange forest, combat desertification, halt reverse land degradation and halt bio-diversity loss.

16.   Promote inclusive and peaceful societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

17.   Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.

(Accessed from https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html)

 

The 17 SDGs are integrated—that is, they recognize that action in one area will affect outcomes in others, and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.

Through the pledge to Leave No One Behind, countries have committed to fast-track progress for those furthest behind first. That is why the SDGs are designed to bring the world to several life-changing ‘zeros’, including zero poverty, hunger, AIDS and discrimination against women and girls.

Everyone is needed to reach these ambitious targets. The creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context.

Approaches to sustainability and development:

Sustainable development is based on environmental theories of economic development. Based on them the policies and programmes of the development of a state is often decided. These theories range from welfare state  models of economic activity to radical approach that suggests to overthrow the capitalist system and live life according to ecological principles. There are several trends, here we will discuss broadly three major categories of development approach that address the issues of sustainability. These are:

·          Free-market/neo-liberal

·          Reformist and interventionist

·          Radical

Neo-liberal/ free market approach:

Proponents of the free market believe that trade is not the cause of environmental degradation and that capitalism encourages the rational use of resources under conditions of free market competition and the specialisation of production through comparative advantage (Ricardo 1973). For free-marketers, economic globalisation is an opportunity to rationalise the use of resources. Restrictions on trade would merely lead to economic decline, which would in turn devastate environment and human societies. Because, degradation of economic growth would mean that people will less care about environment and will try to meet their immediate need without thinking about the environmental sustainability. As scholars like Gouldson and Murphy (1997) show, free-market principle suggest that trade and environment conservation is in a win-win situation, as profit generated can be channelized into environmental conservation.

They believe in converting common properties like sea to be converted into the concept of private properties so that over-exploitation can be stopped.

Reformist and interventionist approaches:

Reformist approach provides incentives or penalties for consumers and producers to move towards environmentally friendly economic behaviour. This may be in the form of financial instruments such as subsidies (reward) or taxation (punishment). Interventionist approaches attempt to achieve environmentally friendly development by making legislation changes. Taxes and subsidies are used to alter the economic behaviour and development approaches by manipulating markets. It is a strict form of control involving legal penalties for ‘dirty’ producers.

Radical approaches:

Radical approaches like ‘deep green’, eco-centric’ and ‘deep ecology’ suggest that western consumption patterns are environmentally unsustainable and undesirable. Driven by capitalism’s imperative for continuously expanding demand rather than any relation to meeting human needs, ‘consumptive growth doesn’t make people happier […] people would actually be better off, Greens argue, if they consumed less and concentrated more on genuine well-being: on personal development, on relationships with others and social belonging’ (Jacobs 1997: 50).

 Further reading: 

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CEA_202_0563--an-application-of-anthropology-in-develo.htm#

http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2013/06/anthropology-and-public-policy.html

http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2012/05/anthropology-and-development.html

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

Tribe: Anthropological notions

 

Different words like French Tribu, English Tribe and Latin Tribus were used to designate social divisions among the Roman population. Similarly the Greek word Phule also represented Indo-European Social Organisations. The word "tribe" has a long and ignoble history and remains one of the most variably used terms within and outside of anthropology (Helm 1968). Anthropologists often use it as a catch-all substitute for "primitive," avoiding the invidious comparison of "nonstate." But most who use the term analytically narrow it to mean some form of political unit, as distinct from "ethnie" or "nation," which suggest a cultural identity.

The foundation structure of the tribe is Kinship. The smaller Kinship unites were known as Genos in Greek and Gens in Latin. Scottish people used to call them Clan. One can only be a member of a clan if s/he is connected through kinship relationships. A person is a member of a tribe by birth. Each of these clans had a separate name and a tribe constituted a number of clans. Since, tribal system is pre-state condition, there is no centralised administration among the tribal societies. The social order is maintained by the kinship organisations. Kin rules framed primarily on the basis of systems of affinity and consanguinity were used to determine the right over a geographical location or selection of the headman.

Tribe as a Pre-political and pre-contractual society and in the evolutionary schema

It was L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1861) and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) that made investigation on Tribal society a systematic enterprise. Morgan emphasised that even though there is a general absence of state system, yet, tribes are quite organised and disciplined society. He noted that there is a general absence of hierarchical division between Clans and Lineages. Emile Durkheim has termed such solidarity as between clans as Mechanical solidarity.

About a century later than what was written by Morgan, Marhshal Sahalins and Elman Service have tried to classify pre-industrial societies. Service (1962) followed a long tradition in positing tribe as a stage in political evolution falling between more independent BANDS and more centralized and hierarchical CHIEFDOMS. Sahlins (1968b) also saw tribes as evolutionary predecessors of states but was more concerned with mechanisms of integration than boundaries. Here tribes were seen as unified and bounded by kinship or other ties and constituted the broadest level of cooperation in a segmented hierarchy of functions.

They have classified societies according to the relative socio-political complexity into four major categories. These are a) Band, b) tribe, c) chiefdom, and d) state.

Band is the simplest form of social organisation. Its simple amalgamation of a number of families. The population of a band is quite small, usually range between 10 to 50. The concept of a single leader or headman is absent. The leadership is rather situational and it is never transmitted from one generation to the next. A band collects food from a designated locale. Since, band societies are always foragers, they are most often than not seen as roaming from one to place to another to collect their resources. Because of such movement, there is a general lack of the concept of private property system among the bands. Every member of a band has the equal usufructuary rights over every resources of the region where they inhabit. The kinship ties are usually patriarchal, but there is a relative prevalence of gender equality. In India we have Onge, Jaroa, Cholanakan, Birhar as bands. Africa has !Kung (bushmen), Mubti Pygmy. The patriarchal nature of band suggests that the contention that early men had matriarchy may not be true.

Tribe is relatively more complex. Tribe system is also pre-state and pre-inustrial entity. Tribes have team-leaders of headmen but they do not have institutional mechanism to maintain power relations within the society. Their economy is based on animal husbandry or farming. The primary difference between band and tribe lie in the existence of social segments. The presence of social segments and their integration is what characterises a tribe. It should be remembered that state system has developed about 4000 years ago, but human society survived without them for thousands of years. Even today, there are tribal and band societies which is surviving alongside the state. Therefore, it is important to understand what inner system has enabled these people to keep their social system intact for so many years. E.E. Evans-Pritchard has tried to explain this puzzle by his study of Nuer in Sudan, Africa. Prichard shows that Nuer are divided into different lineages. These lineages do not have hierarchy in terms of economy, politics, ideology or economy. They do not have much of interdependence, yet, together they form the tribe Nuer. Using classical Participant Observation method, following Malinowskian method Evans-Pritchard argued that there are conflicts between these lineages but then by some unwritten agreement and rules the conflicts are resolved. Sahalins in 1960s have argued that Nuers could beat Dinkas because of their effective lineage systems.

In india the Nagas, in Africa the Zulus and Asantis represents typical tribal system.

Chiefdom system is formed if one of the lineages among a tribe claims supremacy. For a variety of reasons ranging from natural to technological, it is seen that often among many lineages one becomes more powerful. They can achieve it by acquiring a relatively higher social prestige and position or by winning a war with others. In this way a new family system can be developed. After a few generations this family/lineage can become the king’s family. This is a system of state formation which is evidenced in Peru the Inca family. This has been studied by Robert Leonard Carneiro. Similarly Romila Thapar has studied the formation of state in Ganga-Yamuna valley and argued along this line.  

By contrast, Fried (1967, 1975) disputed the evolutionary existence of such bounded groups, arguing instead that tribes arose from interactions with existing states. Despite their differences, all three agreed that boundedness of tribes was a result of external conflict, or WAR.

 

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