Development anthropology refers to the application of anthropological perspectives to the

multidisciplinary Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...

branch of

development studies Development studies is an interdisciplinary branch of social science. Development studies is offered as a specialized master's degree in a number of reputed universities around the world. It has grown in popularity as a subject of study since the e ...

. It takes international development and international

aid In international relations, aid (also known as international aid, overseas aid, foreign aid, economic aid or foreign assistance) is – from the perspective of governments – a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another. Ai ...

as primary objects. In this branch of

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

, the term ''development'' refers to the social action made by different agents (e.g. institutions, businesses, states, or independent

volunteer Volunteering is a voluntary act of an individual or group freely giving time and labor for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve ...

s) who are trying to modify the

economic An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...

, technical, political, or/and social life of a given place in the world, especially in

impoverished Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little

income

, formerly colonized regions. Development anthropologists share a commitment to simultaneously critique and contribute to projects and institutions that create and administer

Western Western may refer to: Places *Western, Nebraska, a village in the US *Western, New York, a town in the US *Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western world, countries that id ...

projects that seek to improve the economic well-being of the most marginalized, and to eliminate poverty. While some theorists distinguish between the

anthropology of development The anthropology of development is a term applied to a body of anthropological work which views development from a ''critical'' perspective. The kind of issues addressed, and implications for the approach typically adopted can be gleaned from a l ...

(in which development is the object of study) and development anthropology (as an applied practice), this distinction is increasingly thought of as obsolete. With researches on the field, the anthropologist can describe, analyze, and understand the different actions of development that took and take place in a given place. The various impacts on the local population, environment, society, and economy are to be examined.

History

In 1971, Glynn Cochrane proposed development anthropology as a new field for practitioners interested in a career outside academia. Given the growing complexity of development assistance, Cochrane suggested that graduates needed to prepare themselves to work in interdisciplinary settings. In 1973, Cochrane was invited by the

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...

to make recommendations for the use of anthropology, and his report (which stressed the need for the systematic treatment of social issues) laid a foundation for future use of the discipline in the

World Bank Group The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and best-known development bank in the world and an observer at the United Nations Development Gr ...

. Around ninety anthropologists are now employed by the World Bank Group in various roles. In 1974, Bob Berg—of the

United States Agency for International Development The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 b ...

(USAID)—and Cochrane worked together, and, as a result, USAID introduced "social soundness analysis" as a project preparation requirement. This innovation led to the employment of more than seventy anthropologists. Social soundness analysis has now been in USAID use for over forty years. USAID ran an in-house development studies course in the 1970s, through which several hundred field personnel eventually passed. In addition to anthropology, the course covered development

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...

, regional and national planning, and institution building. In the late 1970s, Thayer Scudder, Michael Horowitz, and David Brokensha established an Institute for Development Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. This institute has played an influential role in the continuing expansion of this branch of the discipline. By the 1980s and 1990s, development anthropology began to be more widely used in the private sector. Corporate social responsibility and issues ranging from resettlement and

human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

to micro-enterprise are now routinely addressed by systematic social assessment as an integral part of investment appraisal.

Development criticism

Criticism of Western development became an important goal in the late 1980s, after the wake of severe economic crisis brought disease, poverty, and starvation to countries and sectors that were the focus of large Western structural adjustment development projects throughout

Latin America Latin America or * french: Amérique Latine, link=no * ht, Amerik Latin, link=no * pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

, and other parts of the former colonial world. Despite the failure of many of these development projects, and some 40 years of post

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

funding from the US and Europe, scholars know{{citation needed, date=October 2014 that development has been the key way that Western post-industrialized countries intervene in non-Western society. Development criticism seeks to discover why, given the funds and best intentions of volunteers and policy makers, do the majority of development projects continue to fail to (1) redistribute economic power and resources in a way that helps the poorest sectors of society, and (2) to create economic growth that is sustainable in the country. Anthropologists who study development projects themselves have criticized the fundamental structure of Western development projects coming from such institutions as USAID and bilateral lenders such as the World Bank. Because they are often working from the perspective of the objects of development in the non-Western world, rather than from within the aid institutions, anthropologists encountering such projects have a unique perspective from which to see the problems. Anthropologists write with concern about the ways that non-Western objects of aid have been left out of the widespread drive to develop after World War II, especially in the ways that such projects limit solutions to poverty in the form of narrow Western

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...

models that promote exploitation and the destruction of household farms, or, more suspiciously, naturalise inequality between Western post-industrialized countries and former colonial subjects. Some describe the anthropological critique of development as one that pits modernization and an eradication of the indigenous culture, but this is too reductive and not the case with the majority of scholarly work. In fact, most anthropologists who work in impoverished areas desire the same economic relief for the people they study as policymakers; however, they are wary about the assumptions and models on which development interventions are based. Anthropologists and others who critique development projects instead view Western development itself as a product of Western culture that must be refined in order to better help those it claims to aid. The problem therefore is not that of markets driving out culture, but of the fundamental blind-spots of Western developmental culture itself. Criticism often focuses therefore on the cultural bias and blind-spots of Western development institutions, or modernization models that systematically represent non-Western societies as more deficient than the West; erroneously assume that Western modes of production and historical processes are repeatable in all contexts; or that do not take into account hundreds of years of colonial exploitation by the West that has tended to destroy the resources of former colonial society. Most critically, anthropologists argue that sustainable development requires at the very least more involvement of the people who the project aims to target in the project's creation, its management, and its decision-making processes. A major critique of development from anthropologists came from Arturo Escobar's seminal book '' Encountering Development'', which argued that Western development largely exploited non-Western peoples and enacted an Orientalism (see

Edward Said Edward Wadie Said (; , ; 1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian-American professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.Robert Young, ''Whit ...

). EscobarArturo Escobar, 1995, ''Encountering Development, the making and unmaking of the Third World'', Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.34. even sees international development as a means for the

Occident The Occident is a term for the West, traditionally comprising anything that belongs to the Western world. It is the antonym of ''Orient'', the Eastern world. In English, it has largely fallen into disuse. The term ''occidental'' is often used to ...

to keep control over the resources of former colonies. Escobar shows that, between 1945 and 1960, the former colonies were going through the

decolonization Decolonization or decolonisation is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. Some scholars of decolonization focus especially on separatism, in ...

era, and the development plan helped to maintain the third world's dependency on the old metropole. Development projects themselves flourished in the wake of World War II, and during the Cold War, when they were developed to (1) stop the spread of

communism Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

with the spread of capitalist markets, and (2) create more prosperity for the West and its products by creating a global consumer demand for finished Western products abroad. Some scholars blame the different agents for having only considered a small aspect of the local people's lives without analyzing broader consequences, while others like

dependency theory Dependency theory is the notion that resources flow from a " periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a " core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. A central contention of dependency theory is that poor ...

or Escobar argue that development projects are doomed to failure for the fundamental ways they privilege Western industry and corporations. Escobar's argument echos the earlier work of dependency theory and follows a larger critique more recently posed by Michel Foucault and other post-structuralists. More recent studies like James Ferguson's '' The Anti-Politics Machine'' argue that the ideas and institutional structure that support Western development projects are fundamentally flawed because of the way the West continues to represent the former colonial world. International development uses an "anti-politics" that ultimately produces failure, despite the best intentions. Finally, studies also point out how development efforts often attempt to de-politicize change by a focus on instrumental assistance (like a school building) but not on the objective conditions that led to the development failure (e.g., the state's neglect of rural children at the expense of urban elite), nor the content of what the school might or might not teach. In this sense, the critique of international development focuses on the insidious effects of projects that at the least offer band-aids that address symptoms but not causes, and that at the worst promote projects that systematically redirect economic resources and profit to the West.

Applied anthropology in development

While anthropological studies critique the Western assumptions and political context of development projects, anthropologists also consult on and work within aid institutions in the creation and implementation of development projects. While economists look at aggregate measures like gross national product and

per capita income Per capita income (PCI) or total income measures the average income earned per person in a given area (city, region, country, etc.) in a specified year. It is calculated by dividing the area's total income by its total population. Per capita i ...

, as well as measures of

income distribution In economics, income distribution covers how a country's total GDP is distributed amongst its population. Economic theory and economic policy have long seen income and its distribution as a central concern. Unequal distribution of income causes ec ...

and

economic inequality There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income (the amount of money people are paid) and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth (the amount of ...

in a society, anthropologists can provide a more fine-grained analysis of the qualitative information behind these numbers, such as the nature of the social groups involved and the social significance of the composition of income. Thus, development anthropologists often deal with assessing the important qualitative aspects of development sometimes ignored by an economic approach.

History

Development criticism

Applied anthropology in development

See also

References

Further reading