Anthropology and Development: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

Anthropology and Development

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:

Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University

and

Professor Christina Garsten, Stockholm University

Recent titles:

Becoming Arab in London:

Performativity and the Undoing of Identity

RAMY M.K. ALY

Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality

VERED AMIT AND NIGEL RAPPORT

Home Spaces, Street Styles:

Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City

LESLIE J. BANK

In Foreign Fields:

The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration

THOMAS F. CARTER

Dream Zones:

Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

JAMIE CROSS

A World of Insecurity:

Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security

EDITED BY THOMAS ERIKSEN,

ELLEN BAL AND OSCAR SALEMINK

A History of Anthropology

Second Edition

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

AND FINN SIVERT NIELSEN

Ethnicity and Nationalism:

Anthropological Perspectives

Third Edition

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Small Places, Large Issues:

An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

Third Edition

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Discordant Development:

Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh

KATY GARDNER

Organisational Anthropology:

Doing Ethnography in and Among Complex Organisations

EDITED BY

CHRISTINA GARSTEN

AND ANETTE NYQVIST

Border Watch:

Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control

ALEXANDRA HALL

Anthropology’s World:

Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline

ULF HANNERZ

Humans and Other Animals Cross-cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions

SAMANTHA HURN

Flip-Flop:

A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads

CAROLINE KNOWLES

The Anthropology of Security:

Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control

EDITED BY MARK MAGUIRE,

CATARINA FROIS

AND NILS ZURAWSKI

The Gloss of Harmony:

The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organisations

EDITED BY BIRGIT MÜLLER

Contesting Publics:

Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

LYNNE PHILLIPS

AND SALLY COLE

Food For Change:

The Politics and Values of Social Movements

JEFF PRATT AND

PETER LUETCHFORD

Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque:

A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace

JONATHAN SPENCER,

JONATHAN GOODHAND,

SHAHUL HASBULLAH,

BART KLEM, BENEDIKT KORF

AND KALINGA TUDOR SILVA

Race and Ethnicity in Latin America Second Edition

PETER WADE

Race and Sex in Latin America

PETER WADE

The Capability of Places:

Methods for Modelling Community Response to Intrusion and Change

SANDRA WALLMAN

The Making of an African Working Class:

Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana

PNINA WERBNER

Anthropology and

Development

Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

Katy Gardner and David Lewis

First published 2015 by Pluto Press

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www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Katy Gardner and David Lewis 2015

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Contents

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

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 interdisciplinary 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 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, we believed that anthropologists and development practitioners might have something to learn from each other, in order that better futures may be imagined and, perhaps, brought into being. We have not changed our views on these issues.

In returning to this book almost two decades after we originally started work on the first version, we were faced with some difficult choices. Should we simply update each chapter to take account of the new anthropological work that has emerged since 1996 or, given the myriad ways in which both ourselves and the world have changed, completely rewrite the book? In the end we decided to substantially rewrite around three-quarters of the text. Some sections from the earlier book are retained but lightly edited, but most of the book is new and the title has been changed. We leave readers to decide whether this is a second edition or a new book.

Katy Gardner and David Lewis

September 2014

Note: In writing about some of these experiences as ethnography we have, for obvious reasons, disguised some particulars in our accounts in terms of places and organisations, in keeping with the anthropological tradition of preserving the anonymity of informants.

Acknowledgements

First time around we thanked Eric Worby, Dina Siddiqi, Ben Crow, Sushila Zeitlyn, B.K. Jahangir, S.M. Nurul Alam, Sue Phillips and Emma Crewe for their stimulating discussions about many of these issues and for their encouragement during the long period of writing. We were very grateful to Richard Wilson for commissioning the book and for providing useful editorial comments and support, to James Fairhead for reading the original manuscript and providing valuable insights, and to Hamish Arnott for help with proofreading. We dedicated the book to the memory of Jonathan Zeitlyn, whose open mind, personal warmth and commitment to working towards a fairer world continues to inspire both of us.

Second time around we are once again incredibly grateful to James Fairhead for reading and providing very useful comments on our draft. We’d also like to thank David Castle at Pluto for his faith in the book and for persuading us to prepare a new edition.

Katy Gardner and David Lewis

Glossary

Development jargon

accountability – making development interventions more responsive to the people they seek to assist; also used by donors to mean making sure that money is used for the purpose for which it was intended

applied anthropology – the application of anthropological research to solving practical problems in development, public health, administration, industry, etc.

appropriate technology – the idea of viewing technology in the context of people’s needs, drawn originally from the work of E.F. Schumacher in the 1970s, in reaction to ‘hi-tech’ solutions to problems of poverty

basic needs – a development strategy devised in the 1970s by governments and UN agencies in reaction to disillusionment with ‘trickle down’

beneficiaries – those people whom a development project is intended to assist

bottom-up – interventions which come from the grassroots as opposed to government planners or development agencies

civil society – a political science concept with a long and complex history, essentially referring to the idea of independent organised citizen action as complementing, opposing, or forming a counterweight to the power of the state and the market

community development – the attempt to strengthen the institutions of local communities in order that they will sustain the gains brought about by a development project

conditionality – the imposition of terms by an aid giver upon a government or an organisation receiving the assistance (e.g. a bilateral donor gives a loan to an NGO provided it is used to support particular activities)

donor – usually refers to government agencies such as the UK Overseas Development Administration (ODA) or United States Agency for International Development (USAID), or to multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, but also includes NGOs such as Oxfam who fund partner organisations in the countries where they work

empowerment – the transformative potential of people to achieve positive changes in their lives by asserting their rights as women, citizens, etc., usually by group action, and thereby gaining greater power to solve problems

evaluation – the task of assessing whether or not a development intervention has been successful in meeting its objectives

green revolution – the introduction of new agricultural technologies including high yielding hybrid seeds, mechanised irrigation equipment and chemical fertiliser that began in the 1960s

non-governmental organisation (NGO) – there are many types: international, national and local; large and small; specialised (e.g. health, agriculture) or general (combining many sectors of activity); membership or non-membership. NGOs are not-for-profit development organisations, many of which depend on donations from members, the public or development agencies. Many are contractors with governments. In the US, NGOs are often known as private voluntary organisations (PVOs)

the North – along with ‘the South’, the term originated recently as less pejorative alternatives to ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’. But both terms continue to cause problems by insisting that poverty can be geographically specified

participation – used to describe greater involvement by ‘beneficiaries’ in deciding the type of development projects they need, and how they are run. The degree of this involvement can, however, vary greatly

project – an intervention aimed at promoting social change usually by, or with the support of, an outside agency for a finite period (anything from a few years to several decades)

social development – a new term used in the UK to describe the ‘softer’ elements of the development process as distinct from economic and technical issues – education, health-care, human rights, etc.

social movements – loosely organised groups around the world taking issue-based action in a variety of areas (human rights, environment, access to land, gender rights, peace, etc.) usually local, without outside assistance at least in the first instance

the South – see entry for ‘the North’

structural adjustment – policies which became common during the 1980s, introduced by the World Bank, as conditionality on loans, aimed at improving efficiency by reducing public spending, cutting state subsidies and rationalising bureaucracy

sustainability – the desire by planners and agencies to avoid creating projects which depend on their continued support for success; also used in its environmental sense to ensure renewal of natural resources

targeting – the attempt to ensure that the benefits of a project reach a particular section of the population – women, farmers with no land, squatters, etc.

Third World – those countries that were seen as neither part of the capitalist First World nor the communist Second World in the period after the Second World War

top-down – interventions imposed on local people by those in authority – the opposite of bottom-up

trickle down – the assumption, which comes from neo-classical economics, that if economic growth is achieved then benefits will eventually ‘trickle down’ from the ‘wealth producers’ to the poorer sections of the population

Anthropological jargon

acculturation – originally used to refer to changes in cultures as they came into contact with each other, the term later became synonymous among US anthropologists with the idea that non-Western or ‘indigenous’ cultures went into decline after contact with industrialised ones

applied anthropology – the application of anthropological knowledge and research methodologies to practical issues, born out of anthropologists’ involvement in colonial administration and development policy in the 1930s and 1940s

cultural relativism – derived from the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942), this concept encouraged anthropologists to understand each culture on its own terms, instead of making evolutionary or ethnocentric generalisations

diffusionism – a term associated with E.B. Tylor (1832–1917), used to explain the transmission of cultural traits across space, through culture contact or migration

discourse – based on the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926–84), discourse theory refers to the idea that the terms in which we speak, write and think about the world are a reflection of wider relations of power and, since they are also linked to practice, are themselves important in maintaining that power structure

ethnocentricity – the idea that a tendency exists to interpret other cultures according to the values of one’s own, a term first used by William Sumner (1840–1910)

ethnography – a term which means both the study of a community or ethnic group at close quarters and the text (usually known as a monograph) which results

evolutionism – in contrast to diffusionists (see above), evolutionists believe that universal human psychological characteristics eventually produce similar cultural traits all over the world, although these evolve at different rates in different places

functionalism – a theory which tries to explain social and cultural institutions and relations in terms of the functions they perform within the system; heavily criticised because it fails to take account of historical factors such as change, conflict and disintegration

indigenous – used instead of the more pejorative ‘native’ to refer to the original inhabitants of an area which has been occupied by migrants; but still brings problems in many situations by implying that there are somehow ‘legitimate’ inhabitants of land with greater rights than newcomers

managerialism – the unwarranted and often ideological reliance on purely technical (as opposed to political) forms of problem solving

moral economy – a term associated with historian E.P. Thompson (1924–93) and used originally to refer to the idea that peasant political action was guided not just by economic hardship but sets of social, political and moral values and norms – subsequently the concept has been adapted and used beyond peasant studies

participant observation – the foundation of anthropological field research since the pioneering work of Malinowski (1884–1942), in which the anthropologist seeks to immerse herself as fully and as unobtrusively as possible in the life of a community under study

postmodernism – the wider cultural and epistemological rejection of modernity in favour of a broader pluri-cultural range of styles, techniques and voices, including the rejection of unitary theories of progress and scientific rationality. In anthropology in particular, postmodernism has led to the questioning of the authority of the ethnographic text and in part to a crisis of representation

structural-functionalism – a theoretical perspective associated with the British anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), which stressed the importance of social relations and institutions in forming the framework of society, while at the same time functioning to preserve society as a stable whole

structuralism – following from the work in linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) argued that that culture is a superficial manifestation of deeper structural principles, based on the universal human imperative to classify experience and phenomena

Acronyms

AAA – American Anthropology Association

BRAC – formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, now just used as an acronym

BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China

CSR – corporate social responsibility

DFID – Department for International Development (UK)

ECLA – Economic Commission of Latin America

FAO – Food and Agricultural Organisation

FSR – farming systems research

GAD – gender and development

IBRD – International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

IFAD – International Fund for Agricultural Development

ILO – International Labour Organization

IMF – International Monetary Fund

IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

ITDG – Intermediate Technology and Development Group

MDGs – Millennium Development Goals

NGO – non-governmental organisation

ODA – Overseas Development Administration

OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

PLA – participatory learning and action

PRA – participatory rural appraisal

PRSP – poverty reduction strategy paper

SAPs – structural adjustment policies

SDA – social development advisers

SDGs – sustainable development goals

SIDA – Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency

SWAP – sector-wide approach

UNDP – United Nations Development Programme

UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund

USAID – United States Agency for International Development

WID – women in development

WTO – World Trade Organization

Prelude: Development, Post-Development and More Development?

The idea of development stands like a ruin on the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work. (Sachs, 1992: 1)

Welcome to ‘Development World’. The pursuit of development has become a global concern and no one is unaffected. Aspiring to manage change in economic, political, social and cultural arenas, development is a world-shaping project. (Axelby and Crewe, 2013: ix)

Whatever happened to the anthropology of development and its ‘postmodern challenge’? When we published the first edition of this book in 1996 (entitled Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge) development was under sustained theoretical fire. Discredited for its evolutionary and Euro-American-centrism, and attacked by writers such as Wolfgang Sachs (1992) and Arturo Escobar (1995) for its role in the maintenance of postcolonial power relations, it seemed possible that in the next ten or twenty years development might expire altogether and that new framings of progressive change might arise. Even if reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, the era of ‘post-development’ thinking seemed to be upon us. Within anthropology postmodern critiques were also causing significant disquiet. Accused of creating exoticised representations of ‘the other’ and methodological techniques in which anthropologists subjugated and objectified the people they researched, the discipline seemed, for a while, in danger of losing its confidence, or even turning into a sub-field of literary critique, a direction suggested by Clifford and Marcus’s 1986 book Writing Culture.

Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge addressed these questions by arguing that the discipline should not balk at becoming directly involved with social problems. The book was a rallying cry for anthropological engagement in development, in all its varied meanings. In it, we argued that while the ‘post-modern’ attack on development was theoretically beguiling, it was in danger of contributing to an apolitical disengagement by anthropologists not wishing to dirty their hands with the dubious business of trying to change the world for the better. Indeed, we argued that Escobar’s analysis homogenised and simplified development, which by the 1990s involved a lot more than colonial-style planners pushing people around. Instead, we suggested that while they had previously been treated within the discipline as working in an inferior sub-field, anthropologists of and in development had much to offer. What they had to offer was not only useful to what Axelby and Crewe (2013) call ‘Development World’, for example in helping to formulate new policies and practices which prioritised issues of power, poverty and inequality rather than economic growth or modernisation, but these anthropologists also had an important role to play in bringing rich insights around the relationship between social relations and economic change to academic anthropology itself.

Tracing the links between ethnographic work and new, often (at the time) radical directions in development we argued that anthropology’s influence in shaping new formulations that moved far beyond the monolithic colonial discourse described by Sachs, Escobar and others was potentially huge. The questions of access, control and effects that anthropologists asked informed development work