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).
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:
- The social and cultural effects of economic change
- 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:
- 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. - 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
