Discourses of Development

Anthropological Perspectives

R. D. Grillo, R. L. Stirrat, R. D. Grillo, R. L. Stirrat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000324211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Development' is clearly a contentious concept. It is common knowledge that there is frequently a troubling divide between what Western developers think development entails and how those people affected understand the ensuing processes. By treating development as problematic, this book seeks to generate new insights into the relationships between the various parties involved and to enhance understanding of the ways in which particular 'discourses of development' are generated. Authors raise provocative questions about the relationship of politics, power, ideology and rhetoric to the institutional practice of development. These hegemonic considerations are shown to have a profound effect on the 'culture of aid' and the interface between development personnel and those whom development is supposed to benefit.

Chapter 1
Discourses of Development: The View from Anthropology

R.D. Grillo

The Social Anthropology of Development

After many years in which work on development, indeed on anything which smacked of 'applied' anthropology, was neglected or marginalized by the mainstream, in the 1980s there was a turn towards this area of the discipline (Escobar 1991; Gabriel 1991; Grillo 1985, 1994; Turton 1988). Croll and Parkin record that by the early 1990s many anthropologists had come to accept that 'to some degree, development is as much a fact of everyday life for most peoples of the world as the other kinds of overarching frameworks of assumption and action' (1992a: 8). This would seem inevitable in a country like, say, Nepal (Pigg 1992) or Sri Lanka, where, as Woost writes in this volume: 'Exposure to development discourse is a fact of everyday life. Merely walking through the cities, towns, villages and junctions, one is subjected to a cacophony of signs and symbols related to development' (pp. 235-6).

The attention paid to development since the early 1980s seems ironic in that during the same period, anthropology in Britain and the United States became increasingly self-absorbed with postmodernism and reflexivity. Several themes come together in postmodernist anthropology in ways which, on the face of it, make it an unlikely bed-fellow for 'applied' work: an assumption that anthropologists 'construct' their data, and that what is to be investigated is the process of construction itself; a focus on the 'how' of gathering what become 'data' (i.e. fieldwork) and the placing of it in the public domain (i.e. ethnography); an emphasis on the anthropologist as 'author', on her or his 'authority' and on the relationship between anthropologist and 'subject'. Nonetheless the two strands converge, if not in 'development anthropology', then in the ideas and practices constituting the 'anthropology of development' (Escobar 1995: 15 ff,; Gardner and Lewis 1996; Johannsen 1992 and the papers by Fairhead and Leach, by Gardner and by Pottier in this volume).

A distinction between development anthropology and an anthropology of development (attributable to Charsley 1982), is not universally accepted: Pathy (1987), for instance, confounds the two. Nor is it always defined in the same way: Gabriel glosses it as the difference between studies which deal with 'what ought to exist in future' and those which deal with 'what exists at present'(1991: 37), This is some distance from the more usual, and useful contrast between two kinds of anthropological practice, one engaged directly in application (for example, evaluating a project or offering policy advice), the other primarily concerned with the socio-scientific analysis of development as a cultural, economic and political process. The authors of the papers included here are, on this occasion, contributing to an 'anthropology of development', though in other situations some would undoubtedly wish to describe themselves as practising 'development anthropology.'

The 'development' investigated by social anthropologists generally involves directed social and economic change in a contemporary context, especially in the 'Third World', and indeed, that is the context within which all the papers in this volume are set. Since 1980 there has been a number of significant contributions by scholars in North America, Europe (especially Britain, Holland, France and Scandinavia) and Asia (especially India) to this field of social anthropology. In Britain, for example, there appeared during the early 1990s a series of volumes which emerged from conferences and workshops sponsored by the European Inter-University Development Opportunities Study-Group (EIDOS), created in 1985 to bring together anthropologists from Britain and certain other countries, notably Holland and Germany The EIDOS volumes included Croll and Parkin (eds) 1992, which explored anthropological contributions to our understanding of the interconnection between culture, development and the environment, stressing in particular: 'The anthropological emphasis on people's local knowledge and use of their environments, based often on years of painstaking observation carried out in the people's language, provides a perspective that few other disciplines can match' (Croll and Parkin 1992a: 3-4). The papers by Drinkwater (1992), Leach (1992) and Pottier and Nkundabashaka (1992), each of which deal in different ways with the multiplicity of voices present in the development process, have been especially important from the point of view of themes discussed in the present volume.

The Croll-Parkin collection was followed by one edited by Pottier (1993), which examined the anthropological contribution to project appraisal and assessment (Fairhead 1993; Gatter 1993; Griffith 1993; Pottier 1993a, 1993b; Seddon 1993). A third, edited by Hobart (1993), studied the part played by Western scientific knowledge in development and development projects, arguing: 'Not only are indigenous knowledges ignored or dismissed, but the nature of the problem of underdevelopment and its solution are defined by reference to this world-ordering knowledge' (Hobart 1993:1). It included pertinent contributions by Burghart (1993), Croll (1993), Quarles van Ufford (1993), and van Beek (1993).

Other Dutch (and British) research on development was explored in an important collection edited by Long and Long (1992) covering work by scholars based mainly in the Development Sociology Department of Wageningen Agricultural University (see also van Donge and Long 1992). The Wageningen perspective emphasized the continuing value of 'actor-oriented' approaches to the study of development, arguing that 'an actor-oriented perspective entails recognizing the "multiple realities" and diverse social practices of various actors, and requires working out methodologically how to get to grips with these different and often incompatible worlds' (Long 1992:5). The Wageningen approach –not surprisingly, given Long's intellectual heritage – met Marcus's demand for 'strategically situated ethnography' (Marcus 1986: 172), which would integrate 'political economy and interpretative concerns' (ibid.: 84). As Marcus and Fischer (1986: 39) put it: 'Ethnography must be able to capture more accurately the historic context of its subjects, and to register the constitutive workings of impersonal international political and economic systems on the local level where fieldwork usually takes place'. Marcus found this in the so-called Manchester School of British Social Anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 56 ff.) with which Long had been associated: the papers by Arce and Long (1993) and de Vries (1992) admirably exemplify this heritage. Preston, who locates the perspective in a wider, European hermeneutic-critical tradition, praises it for 'getting at the detail of the processes of political life of agents in the Third World' (1994:184).

The anthropology of development is particularly strong in Britain and Holland, as these four volumes testify, but almost all countries in which the social anthropological tradition is established on the eastern side of the Atlantic have contributed to work in this field. A special issue of the journal Development Anthropology Network, published in 1992, contained numerous papers in which the very wide range of work encompassed by the anthropology of development in various European countries is described: see Brokensha's overview (1992). Among other things, the papers reveal that there are different European traditions within the anthropology of development. In Spain, for example, there has long been a connection between development anthropology and Catholic missionary activity (Gammella 1992) which has shaped work in that country. France, too, is, as always, another country, and Baré's edited volume (1995) pulls together a very valuable account of Francophone work in the anthropology of development, and indeed in applied anthropology generally: see especially the papers by Baré himself (1995a, 1995b), and inter alia those by Gruénais (1995) and Lenclud (1995). These volumes and others (for example, those discussed below, which have emanated from the United States) raise issues about national traditions of anthropology and its application which have yet to be explored.

Although often apparently speaking for, or at any rate claiming to speak for, 'local' people, the citizens of developing countries, or at least those to which development policies and practices have been applied, developing country anthropologists and other social scientists are notably absent from these volumes. In the several dozen papers in the six collections cited above, the only exceptions appear to be Nkundabashaka, with a paper on Rwanda written jointly with Pottier (Pottier and Nkundabashaka 1992), and Villareal (1992). Nkundabashaka was at the National University of Rwanda; Villareal, although at the time of writing based in Holland, had previously worked for a Mexican NGO (Long 1992: 14). This is an important omission as in South Asia in particular the anthropology of development has a long and important history which needs to be recognized by Western anthropologists (for India, see inter alia Kalla and Singh eds 1987; Mathur 1989,1991; Pathy 1987).

This survey has omitted the considerable volume of work that has appeared in North America throughout the period, though important contributions by Escobar (1991, 1995) and Ferguson (1994) are discussed below. What emerges from the studies considered so far?

Emergent Trends

First, though not especially important in the context of this volume, is the continuing diffidence of anthropologists in the face of other social scientists working in the development field. There is an ongoing defensiveness about what their discipline can and cannot contribute to the theory and practice of development, and indeed to the theory and practice of anthropology (Grillo 1994). Consequently, anthropologists in development and other applied fields often still feel obliged to 'sell' anthropology (Charsley 1995: 20; Escobar 1991: 666-7; Nyamwaya in this volume). The British journal Anthropology in Action was partly created in order to provide a forum in which applied anthropologists could present their wares. Although it now offers much more than this, in important respects it remains precisely what it set out to be. Baré's account of applied anthropology in France (1995) is also inter alia intended to suggest why anthropology can be useful and should be used. Many 'mainstream' anthropologists, of course, remain extremely sceptical about the contribution that their discipline can supposedly make in the applied field (e.g. Grillo 1994; Lewis 1988), which partly accounts for the continuing defensiveness of those engaged in applied research or in the anthropology of application, Charsley's description (1995: 9) of the way in which anthropological material (and the anthropologist) were incorporated into thinking about the development of sericulture in India in the 1980s shows that such defensiveness may no longer be necessary (see also Gabriel 1991).

Secondly, and again demonstrating continuity, there are the claims that anthropology illuminates those aspects of development which other disciplines ignore. When describing the benefits of an applied anthropology, practitioners still emphasize the most general attributes of the subject, especially its methodology. This is a tune which anthropologists have played for many years, at least since the heyday of Malinowski in the 1920s (Grillo 1985). Nonetheless, there is now much greater sophistication in demonstrating what anthropologists can and do say about development, and the sense of what anthropologists can contribute has become more focused, even if still defined in terms of methodology in the broadest sense. Inevitably this focus is on ideas about the social and cultural components of change and transformation which in turn stem from anthropology's raison d'être as the science of culture. This point too has a lengthy history stretching back to the early years of the discipline. It was reiterated by Cochrane (1979), when he was concerned to inject a social and cultural dimension into the work of the World Bank. Wright (1994a) discusses a parallel movement in organizational and management studies towards a concern with 'culture'. Rew's paper in this volume constitutes an analysis of the way in which cultural and social factors appear (or do not appear) in documents concerned with project evaluation and appraisal, and examines 'how project planners and evaluation specialists themselves wrote about issues of cultural identity' (p. 88). He found a 'combination of the consciousness of culture and society with an arbitrary treatment of it' (p. 91). Usually, the conception of projects 'starts from an engineering or economistic discourse that makes issues of social agency and cultural identity only incidental to the project design and implementation' (p. 91). The justification of anthropology cannot and should not, of course, be confined to its methodology. For example, the great volume of work since 1970 concerned with gender, or more recently the environment, has not simply 'illuminated' the cultural dimensions of development, but transformed ways of thinking about social, economic and political relations (Leach's paper, 1992, which incorporates a concern with gender relations in environmental impact, brings several of these strands together). Nonetheless, it is now common practice for institutions concerned with evaluating development project proposals routinely to inquire about their gender implications and environmental impact, and anthropologists, along with many others, can claim some success for both their methodology and the substantive results of their research (though see Crewe's paper in this volume).

Thirdly, the stress on the social and cultural dimension of development is combined with an insistence on the importance of a subjective dimension and the need not just to 'take into account', but to ground analyses in a thoroughgoing incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Earlier I cited Croll and Parkin's remarking on 'the anthropological emphasis on people's local knowledge and use of their environments'. They go on to refer to 'an increasingly important body of work which draws attention to the management of ecosystems, especially agro-ecosystems, by those immediately dependent on their environmental resources and the disregard, devaluation or ignorance of this experience and local knowledge by those practising environmental management in the name of development' (1992a: 7). Throughout much of the anthropology of development one finds contrasts of a similar...