Differentiating Development Beyond an Anthropology of Critique [Hardcover]

Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of development as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a timely intervention in anthropological debates about development, moving beyond the critical stance to focus on development as a mode of engagement that, like anthropology, attempts to understand, represent and work within a complex world. By setting out to elucidate both the similarities and differences between these epistemological endeavors, the book demonstrates how the ethnographic study of development challenges anthropology to rethink its own assumptions and methods. In particular, contributors focus on the important but often overlooked relationship between acting and understanding, in ways that speak to debates about the role of anthropologists and academics in the wider world. The case studies presented are from a diverse range of geographical and ethnographic contexts, from Melanesia to Africa and Latin America, and ethnographic research is combined with commentary and reflection from the foremost scholars in the field.

The themes and styles are refreshingly diverse but all the contributors remind us that what many development scholars and policy-makers downgrade as context  history, ways of making meaning, political disputes  are often central to explaining development practice&[This book] not only implies the need for a classificatory rethink, which has been widely recognized for decades, but also gives us the ethnographic material to see how fruitful a more concerted anthropology of development in Europe could be.???Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

&offers an interesting and important read in making sense of what seems to have become a somewhat uneasy relationship between anthropology and development... [The volume] should blCž