The Anthropology of Development

Introduction

Development is a matter of life and death. It is both an urgent global challenge and a vibrant
theoretical field. Even when anthropologists do not take development as their subject, they
often surreptitiously slip assumptions about it into their ethnographies. But named or un-
named, development questions lie at the discipline’s theoretical and ethno- graphic core. An
anthropologist with an eye on interdisciplinary development studies (which are usually
dominated by political science and economics) might lament this wider field’s neglect or
oversimplification of culture. Yet a scholar contemplating anthro- pology itself may be struck
(as the editors are) by a torrent of works on modernity, development, and globalization in
which culture is on proud display while historical political economy and economic and
financial globalization are largely absent. Rather than encourage continued separation of
these analytical tracks, we need new intellectual hybrids: adventurous combinations of
culture, economy, discourse, power, institutions, and history. We must imagine other paths as
well: new modes of economic organization, moral aesthetics, and forms of social creativity.
In the 21st century, the anthropology of development and globalization demands nothing less.

What is development?

‘‘Development’’ is an unstable term. Is it an ideal, an imagined future towards which

institutions and individuals strive? Or is it a destructive myth, an insidious, failed chapter in
the history of Western modernity (Escobar 1995)? Conventionally ‘‘development’’ may
connote improvements in well-being, living standards, and opportunities. It may also refer to
historical processes of commodification, industrialization, modernization, or globaliza- tion.
It can be a legitimizing strategy for states, and its ambiguity lends itself to discourses of
citizen entitlement as well as state control (Cooper and Packard 1997). A vision of
development as improved well-being, especially in former colonies, has gradually replaced
the unidimensional economistic measures that neoclassical economists favor, such as GDP
growth or economic rates of return to particular projects. Influenced by scholars such as
Amartya Sen, the United Nations Development Program created a Human Development
Index that combines indicators of health, life expectancy, literacy, formal education, political
participation, and access to resources (UNDP 2001:14). During roughly the same period, a
growing coterie of scholars and grassroots activists, some of them influenced by Michel
Foucault’s understandings of power, has rejected outright the desir- ability of
‘‘development,’’ which they see as a destructive and self-serving discourse propa- gated by
bureaucrats and aid professionals that permanently entraps the poor in a vicious circle of
passivity and misery.

Some scholars and activists in the latter category imagine a ‘‘post-development’’ era in
which community and ‘‘indigenous’’ knowledge become a reservoir of creative alternatives
to development (e.g., Esteva 1988; Escobar 1995; Rahnema 1997; Sachs 1992). The
alternatives-to-development or ‘‘alternative development’’ position entails ‘‘the abandon-
ment of the whole epistemological and political field of postwar development’’ (Escobar
1991:675), as discussed below. Others focus on development alternatives (alternatives in
rather than to development) and favor reforms within the existing development apparatus (see
Crewe and Harrison 1998; Little and Painter 1995; Nolan 2002). Some scholars in both
camps celebrate the ‘‘local’’ and the ‘‘indigenous’’ – an inclination that figures in larger
pendulum shifts during the past fifty to sixty years, notably in the differing views of
community and ‘‘traditional’’ culture, with these alternately romanticized or demonized in
development thought. Nearly all analysts agree that most development projects fail.
Nonetheless, a faith in progress (an assumed capacity to improve the conditions of exist-
ence)6 continues amongst some supporters of all three positions – ‘‘development,’’ develop-
ment alternatives, and post-development alike.

What types of faith in progress motivate development theories and practices? The underlying
historical teleologies include a presumed shift from kinship to contract, agriculture to
industry, personalized to rational or bureaucratic rule, subsistence to capital accumulation and
mass consumption, tradition to modernity, and poverty to wealth. As we explore writers such
as Adam Smith, Max Weber, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others, we note explanatory
shortcomings of views of human history in which the end or the process itself is made to fit a
pre-existing design. Much debate about development in the 20th and 21st centuries, for
example, explores whether all or most societies follow the same trajec- tory toward greater
accumulation and well-being or, alternatively, whether wealth in some places or among
certain social groups is causally related to poverty in other places or among other groups.
Similarly, the notion of a single development trajectory implies that history, rather than
reflecting the outcome of struggles between contending social groups – including at times
very localized struggles – is simply a deus ex machina, in which culture and political
processes play no role.

Whether analysts focus on ‘‘development’’ as discourse, as policy or project blueprint, as

historical process, or as self-propelled evolutionary process, the concept has become
increasingly contentious, and it has attracted attention from an astonishing array of scholars.
Mostly gone are musty oppositions between ‘‘applied’’ and ‘‘mainstream’’ or ‘‘academic’’
anthropology. The topic of development is no less theory-worthy or theory- laden than any
other in anthropology. The related term ‘‘applied anthropology’’ was coined well over a
century ago, and ‘‘[d]ebates over practical anthropology and development anthropology have
pervaded the history of the profession’’ (Vincent 1990:431; see also Firth 1981; Malinowski
1929, 1930; Rappaport 1993).7 More fundamentally, however, the discipline itself was
historically constituted as the ‘‘science of ‘less developed’ peoples,’’ and although the social
evolutionist underpinnings of this conception have eroded during the 20th century, 8 it
remains relevant to anthropology’s place in the academic division of labor (Ferguson, this
volume). Anthropological discomfort with development, Ferguson argues, does not signal the
discipline’s critical distance from it but rather its uncomfortable intimacy with development.

The boundary between the ‘‘anthropology of development’’ and other modes of anthro-
pology – like most boundaries – is permeable and at times nearly indiscernible. How such
boundaries are made and unmade – and debated or ignored – is more revealing than any
attempt to pin down a category definition. In the case of anthropology and development, then,
our task is to explore the diverse ways anthropologists have intervened in and been
influenced by debates about development.

This introductory essay outlines historical benchmarks in development theory and practice,
and major 20th- and 21st-century theoretical debates about development and globalization.
Classical precursors are discussed in detail elsewhere (in the editors’ intro- duction to Part I).
This essay first addresses the clash of radical and mainstream paradigms such as 20th-century
theories of imperialism, modernization, and dependency; and the rise in the 1980s of
economic neoliberalism. It then explores how anthropology absorbed the seismic changes of
the new free-market regime, partly by culturalizing and de-historicizing globalization, and by
downplaying its political, economic, and legal dimensions. A central aim of this volume is to
make these historical and political-economic dimensions visible again, and to illustrate how
integral they are to the cultural themes emphasized by many anthropologists of development,
globalization, cultural hybridity and post-modernity. With that aim in mind, we review
briefly anthropological connections between develop- ment and the following topics: NGOs,
civil society, gender, population, culture, consump- tion, environment, and city and
countryside. Next we examine the work of anthropologists in development agencies, issues
that distinguish development anthropology from the anthropology of development, and
reasons why that boundary has blurred. Finally, we consider the post-development position:
the choice between development alternatives and alternatives to development. In a world
where nearly one-half of the population subsists on two dollars a day or less, the search for
alternatives to the exhausted paradigms of the past and the harsh realities of the present is
more timely than ever.

Trends, Theories, Debates

Development: Three historical phases

Any periodization of economic or intellectual history is useful primarily as a heuristic tool.

Thus we sketch here three historical phases simply to signal some benchmarks in thinking
about development. In addressing both historical trends and theories – broad global changes
and paradigm shifts – we emphasize the latter, with brief suggestions about how historical
trends and theories influence one another.

Notions of development can be traced back at least to the late-18th-century rise of industrial
capitalism, which ‘‘for the first time allowed productive forces to make a spectacular
advance,’’ thus permitting people to imagine dramatic material progress (Larraı ́n 1989:1).
Development in late-18th- and 19th-century Europe ‘‘was meant to construct order out of the
social disorders of rapid urban migration, poverty and un- employment’’ (Cowen and
Shenton 1996:5). Our first phase of development thought thus includes attempts to
understand the rise of capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the startling changes
associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century. These
transformations helped to inspire the teleologies noted earlier, together with conceptions of a
‘‘universal history,’’ including Enlightenment, Hegelian, Marxian, and other notions of
progress. Indeed, development was seen by some (such as Comte) in the late 19th century as
reducing the ‘‘disordered faults of progress’’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996:7), though for many
in that era ‘‘the idea of development provided a way of narrating world history, but not
necessarily a rationale for acting upon that history’’ (Cooper and Packard 1997:7).

The 18th- and 19th-century intellectual traditions of the first phase of development thought
were seldom acknowledged in most of the second period, which saw the emergence of a
much narrower development theory in the 1950s to deal with ‘‘how the economies of the
colonies of Britain, France, Portugal and other European powers, col- onies comprising some
28% of the world’s population, might be transformed and made more productive as
decolonisation approached’’ (Leys 1996:5). Both the terms ‘‘develop- ment’’ and
‘‘underdevelopment’’ were invented well before World War II (though their visibility waxed
and waned and their precise meanings changed), and neither was origin- ally seen as ‘‘part of
a new imperial project for the colonial and post-colonial ‘Third World’’’ (Cowen and
Shenton 1996:7, 366).

A key precursor to this second period was the 1944 establishment of the Bretton Woods
financial institutions (International Monetary Fund and World Bank), together with a system
of fixed currency exchange rates, limitations on capital movements across national
boundaries, and the institutionalizing of national economic planning to promote growth. The
idea of development here was strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes, the chief British
delegate to the Bretton Woods Conference and an advocate of public spending as an engine
of growth and source of employment. This approach to development underlined the centrality
of state sovereignty, as national governments – initially in war-ravaged Europe and soon after
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – pledged to improve the material circumstances of their
citizens. The supranational finance and governance institutions (World Bank, IMF, UN) were
to assist nation-states in the development quest. While after 1980 the IMF and World Bank
became forceful proponents of trade and financial liberalization, before then their stance was
distinctly unliberal, at least as regards finance and the role of the public sector (Helleiner
1994:164–165). This pre-1980 position took for granted and indeed encouraged extensive
state intervention in the economy, whether this meant controlling exchange rates, subsidizing
investment and consumption, or building infrastructural mega-projects such as hydroelectric
and irrigation schemes, highways or modern port facilities.

Development took on new visibility as an effort to reduce world poverty after the 1944
Bretton Woods Conference and the end of World War II, and especially after Harry Tru-
man’s 1949 inaugural address, which proposed using US scientific and technological
expertise to stimulate growth and raise living standards in ‘‘underdeveloped areas.’’ Policy
theorists and planners rethought unequal relationships between rich and poor nations, and the
development dream ‘‘colonized reality’’ (Escobar 1995:5). Or as Hart (1992:215) put it,
‘‘The protagonists of the cold war designated the poor remainder of humanity ‘the Third
World’ and gave the name ‘development’ to their economic predica- ment.’’ A new
generation of technocrats increasingly viewed poverty alleviation not as an outcome of ‘‘self-
regulating processes of economic growth or social change’’ but of concerted action by both
rich and poor nations working in cooperation with new inter- national aid agencies and
financial institutions (Cooper and Packard 1997:1). In a later path-breaking study,
anthropologist James Ferguson (1990) portrayed these development institutions as an ‘‘anti-
politics machine’’ that could only cast development problems in apolitical, ahistorical,
techno-managerial terms – disguising the profound political ques- tions at stake in common
interventions in agricultural, health or education programs.

A third development phase begins in the 1970s with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods
controls on capital movements (and a consequent weakening of states’ capacities to promote
national development), the 1971 termination of currency exchange rates fixed to a gold value
through the US dollar, and – in the late 1970s and 1980s – a series of policy changes that
were known (outside the United States) as economic neoliberalism. (Inside the United States,
the new economic status quo was so taken for granted – so naturalized by institutions of
power – that it was seldom labelled or debated at all [Korten 2001:78]). What the rest of the
world terms ‘‘neoliberalism’’ or ‘‘liberalism’’ – that is, doctrines or policies that accord the
market rather than the state the main role in resolving economic and other problems – is
typically considered ‘‘conservative’’ in the United States. Or put another way, in the United
States neoliberalism is a blend of neoclassical economics and political conservatism.
In the 1970s, the World Bank, under Robert McNamara’s leadership, shifted its focus from
economic growth per se to poverty and equity issues. At the same time the US Agency for
International Development began to emphasize poverty, basic human needs, and the equitable
distribution of the gains from economic growth. However, skyrocketing petrol- eum prices,
rising interest rates, and slowing economic growth forced many poorer countries, particularly
in Latin America, to assume greater debt burdens. The 1980s debt crisis was accompanied by
diverging economic growth rates among Third World states and the emergence of the newly
industrialized countries (NICs) – most notably the ‘‘Asian tigers’’ of Taiwan, South Korea,
Singapore, and Hong Kong – as success stories. Rapid growth among the NICs (sometimes
termed ‘‘NIEs’’ or ‘‘newly industrializing economies’’) was originally attributed to free-
market policies, and occasionally to ‘‘Confucian culture,’’ but later was recognized as the
outcome of state subsidies and protectionism, radical agrarian reforms that contributed to
building prosperous rural middle classes, and US concessions motivated by geo-political
concerns (Castells 2000:256–299). The NICs re- ceived few loans from international
financial institutions and only modest amounts of foreign aid.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund pro- moted in
poorer nations a key set of reforms known as structural adjustment. In contrast to these
institutions’ stance during their first three decades of existence, these programs sought to
reduce the state role in the economy, and called for reductions in state expend- itures on
social services such as education and health care, introduction of user fees for such services,
trade liberalization, currency devaluation, selling off of state-owned enterprises, and financial
and labor market deregulation. The rationale for such policies is set forth particularly clearly
in the highly visible 1981 World Bank publication known as the ‘‘Berg report’’ on African
development (World Bank 1981).

By the mid-1990s, however, the World Bank was modifying these structural adjustment
policies. Continuing debt problems prompted the Bank to develop social investment
programs targeted at poor sectors hit hard by adjustment policies, as well as conditioned debt
relief programs for a subset of nations it termed ‘‘heavily indebted poor countries’’ (HIPC),
most of which were in Africa. The latter shift reflected in part the beginning of a breakdown
of the ‘‘Washington Consensus’’ (see below), the neoliberal orthodoxy that had held sway in
the international financial institutions and in many developing-country governments. The
1996 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative taken by the G-7 countries in the face of
heavy pressure from the Jubilee 2000 debt-forgiveness movement, the 1997 Asian financial
crisis, and growing evidence of the shortcomings of orthodox neoliberalism all contributed to
this unravelling. The intellectual hegemony of the ‘‘Washington Consensus’’ crumbled in the
mid- to late-1990s as several of its prominent architects – including a former World Bank
vice-president – launched scathing criticisms of the impact of structural adjustment policies
on the economies and living standards of the poorer countries (Stiglitz 2002; Sachs 1999;
Soros 2002).

In just three decades, the official aims of world development efforts had been dramatic- ally
lowered – from the 1960s notion, associated with W. W. Rostow (see below), of catching up
to the consumption levels of industrialized countries, to the more modest early 1970s aim of
redistribution with growth, then the late-1970s program designed to meet the basic needs of
the poor (with no expectation of equity with wealthier nations), and finally by the 1980s,
fiscal austerity under structural adjustment programs that often sacrificed the basic needs of
the poor (Leys 1996:26). By the late 1980s, Leys (1996:26, 24) argues, the recently expanded
powers of global capital markets over national econ- omies, together with other world
economic changes, signalled that ‘‘‘development theory’ was in deep trouble’’; indeed, ‘‘the
only development policy that was officially approved was not to have one – to leave it to the
market to allocate resources, not the state.’’ The latter position of free-market universalism,
once held only by a dissenting minority, had become predominant in much of the world by
the late 1980s.

When fractures appeared in this dominant ‘‘free-market’’ approach, some mainstream

economists distanced themselves from its more extreme versions. Thus John Williamson,
who invented the term ‘‘Washington Consensus’’ in 1989, later attempted to refine the
paradigm, subtly separating the original set of policies addressed by Washington-based
institutions such as the World Bank and IMF on the one hand, and neoliberal or market
fundamentalist policies on the other (Williamson 2002). Williamson (2002:252) distin-
guishes the so-called Washington Consensus policies from state minimalism or ‘‘an extreme
and dogmatic commitment to the belief that markets can handle everything.’’ He rejects the
idea that the latter approach is effective for reducing poverty (especially for the poorest
countries), and he notes that by the early 21st century, the World Bank endorsed a ‘‘wider
array of antipoverty instruments than was able to command a consensus in 1989’’
(Williamson 2002:259).

Innovative economists such as Ilene Grabel and Ha-Joon Chang (2004), on the other hand,
argue that it is misleading to think that the architects of the Washington Consensus have
moved to a post-neoliberal position. Instead, Grabel and Chang suggest, mainstream
economists such as Williamson attempt to save the Washington Consensus by modifying a
few key policy prescriptions (for example, recognizing that liberalization of capital flows can
lead to financial crisis). Grabel and Chang’s book Reclaiming Development refutes myths
about neoliberal development such as the claim that it promotes economic growth, that it
accounts for the historical success of today’s wealthy nations, that the latter nations converge
on a single economic model, and that the Anglo-American policy model is universally
applicable but the successful East Asian model cannot be replicated. In contrast to the
revisionist architects of the Washington Consensus, Grabel and Chang (2004) aim to be part
of a dialogue about real post-neoliberalism, and thus offer a range of alternatives to such
policies (see also DeMartino 2000 and ILO 2004).

How have the world’s poor fared during the past several decades of official development
efforts? Positive indicators include an increase in world GNP from $1.3 trillion in 1960 to
nearly $30 trillion by the late 1990s, and during the same period a 50 percent increase in the
rate of school enrolment, a rise of 17 years in life expectancy in poor countries, and a 50
percent drop in child mortality worldwide (Nolan 2002:223). Nonetheless, at the end of the
20th century, over 840 million people were undernourished, and nearly 1.3 billion lived on
the equivalent of less than one dollar per day (FAO 2003:6; UNDP 1999:22, 28). A half-
century after the emergence of the narrow version of economic development theory that was
to lift decolonizing nations out of poverty, and four decades after colonial rule ended in much
of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific, ‘‘developing’’ nations accounted for some four-
fifths of the world’s population (Leys 1996:5). Between 1950 and 1990, as the world’s
population doubled, so too did the number of people living in poverty (Nolan 2002:223).

Global economic inequality increased dramatically between 1960 and 1990: in 1960, the
wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population received 30 times the income of the poorest
20 percent; in 1997, the richest 20 percent received 74 times as much (UNDP 1999:36). By
the late 20th century, the world’s 200 wealthiest individuals had assets equal to more than the
combined income of 41 percent of the world’s population; the assets of the three richest
people were more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries (UNDP 1999:38).
Debt levels as a percentage of export earnings in poor nations doubled between 1970 and
1986, and by 1986 more money flowed to the West in debt repayments than went to the Third
World in loans and investments (Nolan 2002:54). In the late 1990s, Tanzania, for example,
was spending one-third of its national budget on debt repayment – four times what it spent on
primary education (Nolan 2002:56). Nicaragua’s 1991 foreign debt was more than five times
its GDP and its annual debt service more than twice its export earnings. Fully 43 percent of
the foreign aid it received went for payments on the debt (Robinson 1997:34-35). Numerous
other ‘‘developing’’ countries found themselves in a similar economic straightjacket. By the
late 1980s, such trends led to pronouncements that the development process had been
reversed (Portes and Kincaid 1989:489), and survival rather than development had become
the ‘‘economic imperative of the day’’ (Hart 1992:219).

The British news weekly the Economist offers a counter-narrative to this picture of growing
global poverty and worsening economic inequality. That publication highlights several
difficulties in assessing economic inequality trends: how to measure what people in poor
nations actually consume (i.e., living standards), how to value consumption in a way that
allows meaningful comparisons across countries and over time, and how to define an
appropriate basis of comparison (this is what economists often call adjusting per capita GDP
for ‘‘purchasing power parity’’ or PPP). The Economist (2004:70) cites statistical studies
based on national-accounts data, which it says show declining poverty in the 1980s and
1990s. By contrast, the more widely cited estimates (used by the UN and World Bank, for
example) are based on direct surveys of households and show little or no decline in poverty in
recent decades. Economists find combining the national-accounts and house- hold-survey
data to be technically challenging, and hope eventually to produce more accurate figures.

Yet any statistics lend themselves to alternative manipulations and interpretations. For
example, both the time period under analysis and the figure taken as the poverty baseline
make a big difference, as World Bank functionary Martin Ravallion notes in his reply in a
subsequent issue of the Economist. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance, conditions
worsened for the world’s poor. But if a two-decade window and the frugal $1- a-day standard
are used, the World Bank estimates that ‘‘the world poverty rate fell from 33% in 1981
(about 1.5 billion people) to 18% in 2001 (1.1 billion).’’ On the other hand, when judged by
the $2-a-day standard, the Bank estimates that the number of people living in poverty
increased from 2.4 billion to 2.7 billion between 1981 and 2001. And of course those who
managed to move beyond the $1-a-day standard remain poor ‘‘even by the standards of
middle-income developing countries’’ (Ravallion 2004:65). Furthermore, all of these figures
show sharp regional differences in poverty trends. Although the number of people living on
less than $1 a day in Asia has fallen during the last two decades, the number in that category
in Africa has roughly doubled. During the early 1980s, ‘‘one in ten of the world’s poorest
lived in Africa’’; two decades later the figure was about one in three (Ravallion 2004:65).
Few would deny the challenges of collecting reliable global economic data, and it is clear that
statistics can be manipulated to support a variety of positions. Yet visible poverty is
widespread and solutions – not just better statistics – are urgently needed.

Official foreign cooperation (termed ‘‘aid’’ in the United States) declined worldwide during
the 1990s, dropping from about $60 billion in the early 1990s to about $55 billion in 1999
(Nolan 2002:225). The US contribution to these amounts fell sharply – from over 60 percent
of the total in the mid-1950s to 17 percent by 1998 (Nolan 2002:228). In 1947, at the start of
the post-World War II Marshall Plan, US foreign aid as a percentage of GDP was nearly 3
percent, while by the late 1990s it was a mere 0.1 percent – the lowest of any major
industrialized nation (Soros 2002:17).23 Among bilateral aid donors, only Japan has
substantially increased its development aid during the past two decades. While official aid
flows have diminished, private direct investment in developing countries has increased, rising
to more than three times the dollar amount of official aid by 1997 (Nolan 2002:231). Such
private investment is very unevenly distributed, with much of it going to Asia and most
African countries receiving little.

Whatever the practical ambitions of the last fifty years of development theory, poverty
remains widespread and remedies are still elusive. In the late 20th century, this stark reality
contributed to widespread disillusionment with those agents (such as the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, bilateral aid agencies, and national governments) to which the
responsibility for development was entrusted (Cowen and Shenton 1996:4). Yet none of the
alternative trustees, such as NGOs, communities, or grassroots social movements, have
proven to be effective substitute agents for humanizing markets, alleviating poverty, or
ensuring equity and social justice. But before we consider this dilemma, let us review some
20th-century development debates.

From imperialism to dependency and the world-system

This section outlines the convergence of early-20th-century theories of imperialism with the
radical analyses of dependency and underdevelopment that became influential in
anthropology in the 1970s. It also examines how these radical understandings of depend-
ency engaged mainstream paradigms, especially ‘‘modernization’’ approaches, and how
dependency in turn became a target for the critiques of orthodox Marxist and historically
minded anthropological theorists.

Max Weber’s concern with ‘‘traditionalism’’ as an impediment to development, first

articulated at the dawn of the 20th century (see Part I), combined an Enlightenment notion of
progress with a modern understanding of the history of capitalism. Apart from briefly
discussing speculation in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries (Weber 1950), Weber
accorded little attention to capitalist crises, an issue that had engaged Marx and that animated
development debates in the first half of the 20th century. The frequent booms and busts in
European and North American economies, as well as the sudden imperial expansion of the
major European states after 1870 and of the United States following the 1898 Spanish-
American War, led to closer scholarly scrutiny of a system that increasingly appeared to
contain both extraordinary dynamism and immense destruc- tive powers.

The approach that had the most impact in the capitalist West, particularly during the 1930s
depression in the United States, was John Maynard Keynes’s ‘‘pump-priming’’ economic
policy, which sought to temper the business cycle through government measures to stimulate
demand and increase employment (see Heilbroner 1972:261-272). But while demand-side
policies might alleviate the worst effects of a major slump, they did little to explain
imperialism or uneven development. In the late 19th century, ‘‘imperialism’’ referred
specifically to the colonialism of the great maritime powers – to the extension of political
sovereignty overseas, first by Portugal and Spain, then by Britain, France and other European
countries, and finally by the United States and Japan (B. J. Cohen 1973:10). In 1902, an
English liberal and advocate of free trade, John A. Hobson, noting that the term was ‘‘on
everybody’s lips,’’ published a work that virtually single-handedly reshaped in economic
terms popular and academic under- standings of imperialism (Hobson 1965:xvii). Arguing
that the ‘‘taproot of Imperialism’’ was the persistent tendency to produce more goods than
could be sold at a profit and to accumulate more capital than could be profitably invested, he
suggested that ‘‘manufactur- ers, merchants, and financiers . . . are tempted more and more to
use their Governments in order to secure for their particular use some distant undeveloped
country by annexation and protection’’ (Hobson 1965:80-81). While Hobson influenced
radical socialist oppon- ents of capitalism, notably V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (Lenin
1965; Luxemburg 1972), he nonetheless believed that increasing workers’ purchasing power
and taxing excess capital could obviate the ‘‘need to fight for foreign markets or foreign areas
of investment’’ (Hobson 1965:86). Often ignored by those who accepted Lenin’s character-
ization of Hobson as a social reformer and pacifist (Lenin 1965:11) are the unabashedly
social Darwinist dimensions of his work, such as the assertion that ‘‘civilized Govern-
ments’’ ought to ‘‘undertake the political and economic control of lower races’’ if this were
done to ‘‘secure the safety and progress of the civilization of the world and not the special
interest of the interfering nation’’ (Hobson 1965:232).

The various Marxist theories shared the view that imperialism grew out of capitalist crises,
even though they differed on the importance of underdeveloped regions as sources of cheap
or strategic raw materials, markets for manufactured goods, outlets for excess capital, and
places where super-profits could be derived from super-exploitation of poorly paid workers
(Barratt Brown 1972; Bleaney 1976; B. J. Cohen 1973). In Latin America, and particularly in
Peru, as Cristo ́ bal Kay (1991) has argued, heated polemics during the 1920s and 1930s
between heterodox Marxist revolutionaries, such as Jose ́ Carlos Mar- ia ́ tegui, and anti-
imperialist reformist populists, such as V ́ıctor Rau ́ l Haya de la Torre, set the stage for
debates in the 1960s between proponents of radical and ‘‘structuralist’’ versions of
dependency theory. Both strands of theory – in the 1920s and in the 1960s – viewed
underdevelopment and development as products of a single, worldwide process of
accumulation that continually reproduced both outcomes. Perhaps the central innovation of
these theorists, many of them grouped around the independent US socialist magazine
Monthly Review, derived from the observation that – contrary to the predictions of Hobson
and Lenin – capital flows from underdeveloped to developed areas generally exceeded
developed-country exports of surplus capital. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy concluded,

foreign investment, far from being an outlet for domestically generated surplus, is a most
efficient device for transferring surplus generated abroad to the investing country. Under
these circumstances, it is of course obvious that foreign investment aggravates rather than
helps to solve the surplus absorption problem (Baran and Sweezy 1966:107–108).

This inversion of the classical theories of imperialism, which had seen developed countries’
need to export excess capital as one of the principal dynamics or ‘‘laws’’ impelling imperial
expansion, became the germ of the circulationist or market-based approaches to depend-
ency, underdevelopment, and the world-system that strongly influenced anthropology and
sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Latin America. But while the intellec- tual
genealogy of dependency theory can be traced back to a radical lineage associated with
Monthly Review (which published an influential Spanish-language edition), it also originated
in the work of individuals and institutions that were in the mainstream of economic policy-
making in Latin America.
Founded in 1948, and directed after 1950 by Argentine economist Rau ́l Prebisch, the United
Nations Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) initiated an ‘‘intellectual
revolution’’ in Latin America that had a profound impact on development policy in the
hemisphere and beyond, as well as on a generation of social scientists (Bulmer-Thomas
1994:234; Sikkink 1988). ECLA doctrine held that Latin American countries which relied on
primary product exports were negatively affected by the long-term decline in terms of trade;
in other words, over time a larger quantity of exports (say, bags of coffee or tons of bauxite)
was required to purchase the same volume of imports (for example, jeeps or machine tools).
This process occurred primarily because of the monopoly and monopsony powers in what
Prebisch called the ‘‘center’’ of the world economy that facilitated the extraction through
international trade of surplus from the ‘‘periphery.’’ Export-led development thus entailed
chronic foreign exchange shortages and vulnerabilities to market fluctuations – many Latin
American countries in the mid-20th century earned half or more of their export earnings from
one or a handful of commodities. ECLA, under Prebisch’s direction, promoted a
‘‘structuralist’’ approach to economics and an inward-looking, rather than export-oriented,
development model based on import substi- tution industrialization (ISI) and dynamizing
domestic markets.

In addition to Prebisch, several influential Latin American social scientists were associated
with ECLA during the 1960s and early 1970s, including economist Celso Furtado and
sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso co-authored with Enzo Faletto one of the
most widely read treatises on dependency and development (Cardoso and Faletto 1969). In
1994 Cardoso would be elected president of Brazil on a neoliberal platform. Cardoso and
Faletto’s ‘‘historical structuralist’’ study of dependency noted that the larger Latin American
countries had begun to industrialize during the 1930s, when developed-country demand for
their traditional primary-product exports contracted. This incipient industrialization brought
to the fore a new national, urban-industrial bourgeoisie that formed a ‘‘developmentalist
alliance’’ with the expanding working class. This alliance wrested power from traditional
oligarchies and established populist political experiments and a development style that relied
increasingly on foreign rather than national, capital. Populist class pacts were typically
fragile, however, and their rupture often led to authoritarian political outcomes, a conclusion
Cardoso and Faletto based on the Brazilian experience after 1964, but which would soon be
confirmed with the military coups in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the 1970s (Cardoso
and Faletto 1969:160).

A second influential strain of dependency analysis arose among radical theorists en- thused
by the 1959 Cuban revolution. The best known of these writers in the English- speaking
world was the prolific and peripatetic German-American economist Andre Gunder Frank,
although he was but one figure in a large, transdisciplinary intellectual- political nexus that
spanned Latin America. Frank (and others in this group) sought to demolish the ‘‘dual
society’’ thesis, which was rooted in Weberian and Parsonian sociology and in the works of
anthropologist Robert Redfield (1953) and economist W. A. Lewis (1955). The ‘‘dual
society’’ argument held that Latin America (and by extension other poor regions) included a
dynamic capitalist sector and a stagnant ‘‘traditional’’ or ‘‘feudal’’ one, which could only be
modernized through assimilation or incorporation into the ‘‘ad- vanced’’ sector. Instead of
‘‘dualism,’’ Frank, Mexican anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenha- gen (1969), and others
proposed a model of ‘‘internal colonialism’’ that saw urban zones as beneficiaries of
surpluses extracted from rural areas. This pattern mirrored the ‘‘metropo- lis-satellite’’ (or
what Prebisch had termed ‘‘center-periphery’’) relations that linked developed and
underdeveloped regions as outcomes of a single historical process and which Frank defined
as ‘‘capitalist’’ since the 16th century (Frank 1969:9).

The claim that development and underdevelopment were the results of the same ‘‘capit-
alist’’ historical process had implications for development policy and for those seeking
radical political change. Marxists – and particularly the pro-Soviet Communist Parties – had
long argued that Latin American societies were significantly ‘‘feudal.’’ This character-
ization was based primarily on the widespread existence in the countryside of coerced, non-
waged labor relations and vast, extensively exploited properties owned by seemingly
traditional elites whose aspirations and sumptuary practices (such as elaborate displays of
wealth in dwellings, luxury goods consumption and political influence buying) were said to
resemble those of medieval European nobles. Progress, according to this analysis, based on
Stalin’s (1940) simplification of Marx, could only occur if ‘‘feudalism’’ were overthrown
and replaced by capitalism, as had occurred in Europe; the Left and working class ought,
therefore, to align with the ‘‘progressive bourgeoisie’’ to break the back of the traditional
landed oligarchy. If, however, as Frank maintained, Latin America had always been
‘‘capitalist,’’ it followed that there was not really a ‘‘progressive bourgeoisie’’ opposed to a
‘‘feudal’’ oligarchy; the upper class was, in his view, thoroughly ‘‘capitalist,’’ with a strong
interest in preserving the existing social order. In the absence of a ‘‘progressive bourgeoisie’’
the political task for radicals was to topple the entire capitalist class through revolutionary
struggle (Frank 1969:371-72). Structuralist Marxist critics dodged these pressing issues of
strategy, but nonetheless castigated Frank for ‘‘conceptual imprecision’’ and for failing to
distinguish the ‘‘capitalist mode of production,’’ characterized in classical Marxism by wage-
labor relations, from the ‘‘capitalist system’’ of market-based commodity exchange, in which
wage labor might be present or absent (Laclau 1971:24).

Although Frank was trained in the orthodox neoclassical economics department at the
University of Chicago, he had early sympathies for Keynesianism and the heterodox,
visionary economics of Kenneth Boulding. Even at Chicago, as he later reported in an
intellectual autobiography, he ‘‘spent more and more . . . time studying and associating with
the anthropologists,’’ largely because they – like him – assumed ‘‘that the determinant factors
in economic development were really social’’ (Frank 1991:17, original emphasis). As early as
1959, he participated with Margaret Mead in a session at the American Anthropological
Association meetings and, in the early 1960s, Darcy Ribeiro invited him to teach
anthropology at the new University of Brasilia (a position followed by a prolonged sojourn in
Chile, Mexico, and Germany). In 1968, he issued a passionate call for ‘‘liber- ation
anthropology’’ in Current Anthropology and, in another paper, lambasted both ‘‘formalist’’
and ‘‘substantivist’’ economic anthropologists for ignoring the effects of colonialism and
imperialism on underdevelopment (Frank 1969:137-45; 1991:38-39). Later he wrote
appreciatively of Kathleen Gough, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Eric Wolf, and June Nash, as well
as of Clifford Geertz, whose Agricultural Involution (1966) he con- sidered an incisive
refutation of the ‘‘dualism’’ thesis (Frank 1991).

While Frank remarked that dependency theory ‘‘succumbed to the [1973] coup in Chile,’’
the approach took on a second life in 1974 with the appearance of US sociologist Immanuel
Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System, the first volume of a planned multi- volume work
on the history of the world economy (Frank 1991:36; Wallerstein 1974). Wallerstein drew
inspiration from Fernand Braudel’s 1972 magnum opus on the 16th- century Mediterranean,
European debates about the transition from feudalism to capital- ism (see Hilton 1976), and
an extraordinarily wide and insightful reading of the history of world regions and of
development-related theory, ranging from Eric Wolf and Barrington Moore to Pierre Chaunu
and R. H. Tawney. Wallerstein sought to explain the emergence in ‘‘the long sixteenth
century’’ of a single world economy, larger than any empire, and its functional division into
what he called – in an unacknowledged reworking and expansion of Prebisch’s categories –
‘‘core,’’ ‘‘semiperipheral’’ and ‘‘peripheral’’ regions, characterized respectively by the
prevalence of wage labor, tenant farming and sharecropping, and coerced labor.

Many of the arguments of world-system theory are, as Alejandro Portes and Douglas Kincaid
point out (1989:482), ‘‘at least implicit in dependency theory, and many analysts do not
regard them as distinct approaches....Nevertheless, in one essential point the world-system
approach . . . goes beyond dependency: the concept of national development is subsumed into
that of a higher level social system, the capitalist world economy’’ (Portes and Kincaid
1989:482). In addition, dependency theorists tended to view the hierarchy of nations as fairly
stable, while world-system theorists posited national movements up or down the hierarchy
without fundamentally changing the functioning of the system as a whole.

Despite its erudite commentary on a vast literature of secondary sources, Wallerstein’s work,
like that of the dependency group, was not fundamentally historical in the sense of
understanding uneven development, labor arrangements, stratification patterns, or pol- itical
systems as outcomes of struggles between contending social groups located in concrete social
formations. Some critics took him to task for not distinguishing sufficiently between relations
of production and relations of exchange and for according the latter explanatory priority in
accounting for the shape of the world-system (Brenner 1977). Others, notably Mintz (1977),
maintained that even the history of the world-system had to be understood from the bottom
up, not just as an expanding sphere of exchange but as an outcome of diverse local initiatives
and local responses, themselves the outcomes of social struggles that sought varying
relationships with international and other markets.

This critique of world-system theory contributed, particularly in the works of Wolf (1982)
and Mintz (1985), to solidifying the position of historically-oriented political economy within
US anthropology. In Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, debates between and among
Marxists and world-system theorists produced vigorous, heterodox development-studies
traditions and had more influence on mainstream development theory than the critique of
world-system theory did in the United States. Marxist and world-system theory debates
affected agrarian studies (Roseberry 1995) and, eventually, those strains of post-colonial
studies that sought to root changing identities in historical processes of nation-state formation
and transitions to new kinds of global spaces and governmentality (Gupta 1998). Thus by the
1970s, a new critical anthropology emerged as the discipline was profoundly reshaped by
outside influences, especially dependency theory, world-system theory, and neo-Marxist
critiques of both modernization theory (see below) and traditional functionalist anthropology.
‘‘[H]istory, political economy, and colonialism began to gain new legitimacy as bona-fide
anthropological topics’’ that were central to disciplinary theory (Ferguson 1997:162), rather
than consigned to the ‘‘applied’’ slot. In that sense ‘‘development’’ – or rather
‘‘underdevelopment’’ – had become a hot topic in the discipline’s mainstream. Now the
notion of development itself was critiqued, particularly its presumed equation with moral and
economic progress, and its understanding of the world as a set of individual societies moving
independently through history (Ferguson 1997:163; Wolf 1982).

In a parallel change, the 1970s move beyond narrowly economistic indicators of devel-
opment helped to create new employment opportunities for anthropologists in develop- ment
agencies, and contributed to the emergence of a new subfield of development anthropology
(Hobart 1993; Hoben 1982; Escobar 1991; Little and Painter 1995; Fergu- son 1997; Nolan
2002). Many of these development anthropologists straddled (sometimes uneasily) the worlds
of academe and development agencies, and brought the discipline’s new critical perspectives
on development to the very institutions and organizations charged with implementing the
policies that they critiqued.

From modernization to neoliberalism, development to globalization

The modernization paradigm that the dependency theorists attacked had antecedents in
Weber and attracted followers in sociology, particularly Talcott Parsons (1937), Edward Shils
(1957), and Bert Hoselitz (1952); in psychology, where David McClelland (1961) designed a
‘‘need for achievement’’ or ‘‘NAch’’ scale that purportedly measured an essential attitudinal
component of development; and in the work of anthropologists such as Man- ning Nash
(1966) and Robert Redfield (1941), whose ‘‘folk society’’ category – juxtaposed to ‘‘urban
society’’ or ‘‘civilization’’ – was in effect an early articulation of the dualism or dual society
thesis. Parsons claimed that his concern with moral codes (or ‘‘pattern variables’’) as the key
factors structuring social action derived from Weber’s principle that modernization involved
a transition from particularistic, collectivity-oriented prac- tices and beliefs to universalistic
and self-oriented ones.

The Chicago-based journal Economic Development and Cultural Change, launched in 1952,
became a significant venue for the work of anthropologists and sociologists interested in
development issues, most of whom backed some version of the modernization para- digm. In
its first issue, Hoselitz lamented ‘‘the obstinacy with which people hold to traditional values,
even in the face of a rapidly changing technology and economic organiza- tion’’ (1952:9).
However, he also indicated that ‘‘value systems’’ would adjust when economic conditions
improved and lambasted the ‘‘naive . . . opinion that economic devel- opment will result
essentially in a repetition of the American experience,’’ as well as the ‘‘dangerous [and] . . .
false’’ doctrine that development was necessarily tied to a particular form of government or
ideology (1952:19).

Much of Clifford Geertz’s early work directly engaged the central questions of modern-
ization theory and a Weberian preoccupation with the relation between religion and
development. In a series of works, the first of which appeared in Economic Development and
Cultural Change, he compared a Javanese and a Balinese town, dominated respectively by
Islamic and Hindu elites, with a view to explaining contrasting patterns of economic activity
and attitudes toward accumulation (Geertz 1956, 1962, 1963). The traders in the Javanese
bazaar were, according to Geertz, heirs to an early-20th-century reform move- ment in Islam
that created ‘‘a genuinely bourgeois ethic,’’ akin to the Protestant ethic that Weber saw as
propelling the rise of European capitalism (1963:49). The largely agrarian Hindu aristocrats
in Bali, on the other hand, eschewed the individualism of the Javanese bazaar merchants in
favor of employing non-economic, cross-class ties to mobilize labor and intra-class ties to
amass capital in large, firm-like enterprises. In the opening sentence of Peddlers and Princes
(1963), Geertz hailed the notion of ‘‘take-off’’ elaborated in economist Walt Whitman
Rostow’s recently published The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) and proposed that
Indonesia was in ‘‘a pre-takeoff period’’ (although he also criticized the assumption of
Indonesian social homogeneity that national planners typically articulated when discussing
the impending ‘‘take-off’’) (Geertz 1963:1-3, 153–155).
As Geertz’s invocation of Rostow indicates, The Stages of Economic Growth became a basic
reference point for all subsequent discussions of the modernization paradigm. Ros- tow saw
his work, subtitled ‘‘A Non-Communist Manifesto,’’ as ‘‘an alternative to Karl Marx’s
theory of human history’’ (rather as Weber and Parsons earlier had viewed their own) and to
Soviet hubris about the superiority of socialism (Rostow 1960:2, 134).

Rostow played major foreign policy roles in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,
including service as one of the main architects of US policy in Vietnam (his brother, named
for US socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, held important foreign policy posts in the
Johnson and Reagan administrations).

Rostow is most frequently cited for his claim that all countries eventually pass through the
same stages:

1. (1) ‘‘traditional society,’’ characterized by ‘‘pre-Newtonian’’ technology, little or no

social mobility, a fatalistic ethos, and strong family- or kin-based ties that limit
investment and circumscribe economically rational decision making;
2. (2) a pre-take-off period in which consolidated nation-states emerge and traditional
institutions and values begin to break down and coexist alongside ideas of progress
and new types of enterprises;
3. (3) ‘‘take-off,’’ when traditional impediments to economic growth are overcome,
agri- culture modernizes, industry expands, and investment rates rise;
4. (4) ‘‘the drive to maturity,’’ marked by technological innovation and enlargement
and specialization of the industrial base; and
5. (5) ‘‘the age of high mass-consumption,’’ a period of widespread affluence, growing
urbanization, service-sector expansion, and ubiquitous consumer durables, such as
automobiles and refrigerators.

Modernization theory – and Rostow in particular – was much criticized for emphasizing
economistic measures of progress, such as GNP growth, as well as for a ‘‘culturalist’’
preoccupation with ‘‘traditional’’ values and institutions and a corresponding neglect of
structures of exploitation, and for assuming that all societies traveled the same historical
trajectory, albeit at different paces. While such objections are largely valid, critics rarely
acknowledge that one of the main criteria of development for most modernization theorists
was not so much economic growth per se, but rather increasing structural complexity in the
economy (a notion with clear origins in Durkheimian sociology). Moreover, from the vantage
point of the early 21st century, several other dimensions of Rostow’s work – and of the
modernization paradigm in general – stand out as the antithesis of the neoliberal version of
free-market fundamentalism. First, Rostow stressed the central role of the state in economic
development, as a provider of the ‘‘social overhead capital’’ (ports, railways, roads, and so
on) necessary for growth and, especially in the stage of ‘‘mass consumption,’’ as a guarantor
of social welfare and security. Second, he not only considered the state a central agent of
development, but saw the nation as the geographical and political space in which progress
along the five-stage trajectory would be made or arrested. This focus on individual countries
– which some in recent years have condemned as an obsolete ‘‘meth- odological
nationalism’’ (Beck 2003) – was entirely consonant with how the world econ- omy was then
organized and with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s vision of the
development of national economies, each with its particular resource endow- ments and
forms of national protectionism (Helleiner 1994). Finally, Rostow considered that one feature
of the ‘‘drive to maturity’’ stage would be the production at home of goods formerly acquired
abroad, an affirmation consistent with those of protectionist advocates of import substitution
industrialization, such as his ‘‘structuralist’’ critics in ECLA.

It should hardly be surprising that modernization theory, derided by its critics as a

legitimating ideology for capitalism, had a statist dimension. From the end of World War II
until the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls and fixed exchange rates in
the early 1970s, the intimate links between state and market were part of the prevailing
common sense of the economics profession and policy-makers. Economic historian Karl
Polanyi’s work on reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange, which became the charter for the
‘‘substantivist’’ school of economic anthropology in the 1960s (see Polanyi 1958; Neale and
Mayhew 1983), reflected the consensus of mid-1940s intellectuals when he declared that the
‘‘self-regulating market’’ was a 19th-century ‘‘utopian experiment’’ that had failed and that

economic history reveals that the emergence of national markets was in no way the result of
the gradual and spontaneous emancipation of the economic sphere from governmental
control. On the contrary, the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent
intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organization on society for
non-economic ends (Polanyi 1957:250).

In the post-World War II era in most wealthy nations (and in many ‘‘semiperipheral’’
countries as well), this view underlay the rise of welfare state institutions. In western Europe,
in particular, where the welfare state derived from social democratic pacts between labor and
capital, development theory was more open to influences from Marxism and more heterodox
than in the United States, where modernization theory had originated in a cold war
confrontation with Soviet-style socialism. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement that
established the International Monetary Fund created a liberalized trade regime but, influenced
by Keynes and his disciples, was distinctly nonliberal in the financial arena, endorsing the use
of national controls on capital movements. By the early 1970s, a combination of market
pressures (expanding demand for international financial services, ‘‘stagflation,’’ OPEC
states’ accumulation of petrodollars), technological changes (tele- communications and
computer revolutions), and calculated actions by key state actors (deregulation of US
financial markets) contributed to scuttling the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates
and controls on capital and to encouraging speculative financial movements that complicated
any national defense of the Keynesian welfare state (Helleiner 1994; P. [Link] 1993).

The demise of the Bretton Woods controls was, according to Philip McMichael, the
‘‘beginning of the end of the [national as opposed to global] development project:’’ national
sovereignty diminished with the loss of government currency controls; under the new form of
globalization ‘‘money became increasingly stateless,’’ offshore money markets expanded,
and debt management was globalized (2000:115, 113–114). Neoliberal econo- mists such as
Friedrich von Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom appeared in 1944 (the same year as Polanyi’s
Great Transformation), had been widely viewed as outlandish extremist zealots. But in the
recession, stagflation and fiscal crises of 1974, their ideas began to gain support, part of an
epochal shift that helped lay the ideological and policy groundwork for the neoliberal
globalization era. The elections on neoliberal platforms of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in
1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980 initiated the political ascendance of a
new free-market regime that made rapid inroads there and in much of the rest of the world.

In short, development in recent decades has come to overlap with globalization in the
following sense: institutional changes in the global economy and financial system (de-
scribed above) accompanied a gradual redefinition of ‘‘development’’ itself in the 1970s,
with large institutions such as the World Bank shifting their focus from economic special-
ization within a national framework to specialization in a world economy; thus, for the Bank,
development became ‘‘participation in the world market’’ (as stated in the World Bank’s
World Development Report 1980, quoted in McMichael 2000:111, 113). In addition, ‘‘the
debt crisis shifted the terms of development from a national to a global concern. States still
pursue development goals, but these goals have more to do with global positioning than with
management of the national ‘household’’’ (McMichael 2000:150).

The seismic economic and political changes associated with neoliberal globalization
coincided with anthropology’s turn away from macro-narratives, grand theory, and realist
ethnography.

Toward a new political economy

To repudiate one’s theoretical ancestors has been an anthropological tradition since Franz
Boas’s renunciation of 19th-century evolutionism.33 Yet the precursor paradigms some-
times become caricatures or straw men in contemporary academic turf battles. Such appears
to be the case with certain traditions of grand narrative that can be misleadingly equated with
political economy broadly defined. Moreover, as Miller notes in his chapter below, ‘‘one of
the main targets of criticism has become not so much political economy, but the way it had
been developed by Marx, in particular through his use of Hegel.’’ Carrier and Miller’s 1998
volume signals a departure from earlier traditions in its subtitle ‘‘A New Political Economy.’’
Similarly, many other contemporary approaches that might carry the political economy label
do not actually embody the projected ghosts of naı ̈ ve empiricism, Western teleologies,
economic reductionism, or rigid structuralism. To discard political economy carelessly, on
the basis of outdated or misleading stereotypes, would be a costly move. This section
suggests why that is the case, illustrating the remarkable potential of fresh political economy
approaches and new syntheses in the contemporary anthropology of development and
globalization.

In the 1970s, anthropologists influenced by dependency and world-system theories, peasant

studies, and feminism often placed the culture-political economy relation at the center of their
investigations. By the mid-1980s, an important shift had occurred in some quarters, where
anthropologists increasingly avoided systematic analyses of political econ- omy and the new
economic neoliberalism in favor of fragmentary attacks on economic reductionism and
cultural essentialism. Political economy continued to flourish in other quarters, however, as
feminist scholars such as Micaela di Leonardo and linguist Susan Gal (among others)
articulated important theoretical shifts in political-economic work away from the ahistorical
verities propounded by the more mechanistic varieties of Marxism.

In the 1990s, few anthropologists explicitly challenged neoliberal claims that most economic
decision-making should be left to free markets rather than governments. On the other hand,
neither did many explicitly address the opposite claim: that most economic decision-making
should be left to states rather than markets. Yet, as Cooper (2001), Graeber (2002), Tsing
(2000), and others suggest, anthropological analyses often appeared to take neoliberalism’s
premises for granted as they celebrated global ‘‘flows,’’ fragmenta- tion, the ‘‘indigenous,’’
grassroots organizations, and cultural difference. Instead anthro- pologists would be well
placed to explore how markets and the corporations and state and supra-national institutions
that influence and administer them actually work. Such ana- lyses could demonstrate why
contemporary economic globalization is not natural or inevitable but rather the outcome of
contingent historical processes. A late-20th-century preference for focusing on flux and
fragmentation rather than powerful economic actors perhaps reflected anthropology’s
traditional focus on small-scale phenomena. Did it also mirror the very market ideology
(‘‘freedom as choice’’) that had become so pervasive? We would argue, following Graeber,
that the concern with ‘‘choice’’ and micro-phenom- ena, as well as the determination to reject
grand narratives, distracts ‘‘attention away from the current attempt to impose the largest and
most totalising framework in world history – the market – on just about everything’’ (Graeber
2002:1224).

Nearly lost from view is variation in the state’s role in contemporary capitalist econ- omies,
as well as historical oscillations (even on the political Right) in faith in states or markets as
agents of economic prosperity, democracy, and social justice. Before World War II the
political Right favored strong states and was skeptical of the market. In the 1980s and 1990s,
a new Right, claiming roots in classical liberalism (in the European sense of that term),
celebrated the freedoms of the market and labelled the state a potential agent of tyranny. Now
it is rarely recalled, as suggested above, that the most radical proponents of free-market
solutions to social problems – Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, for example, –
were, until the late 1970s, widely seen as eccentric extremists. Faith in the state’s capacity to
propel progressive social change, on the other hand, in the late 20th century was construed as
a trait of the political Left. In early postwar development thought, a general consensus existed
(which included socialists and capitalists alike) that it was necessary for the state to intervene
in economies – whether to recover from the 1930s world depression, to rebuild Europe after
the war, or to speed economic growth in Latin America.

When the postwar economic boom ended in the 1970s, the limitations of state-led
development suddenly appeared obvious and a reanimated Right, invoking neoclassical
economic theory, pushed for reducing the role of the public sector. Much as Polanyi had
described 19th-century history as shaped by the tension between movement toward unregu-
lated markets and a ‘‘countermovement’’ to ‘‘re-embed’’ the market in society (1957:130),
the polarization between pro- and anti-market forces intensified in the late 20th century. By
then the Left had been politically weakened while the Right had shifted to the offensive,
attacking government safety nets, unions, and state regulation of airlines, energy, environ-
ment, air traffic control, railroads, and financial services. By the beginning of the 21st
century, however, new security threats, economic crises, poor nations’ debt burdens, and
corporate scandals invited re-consideration of neoliberal market fundamentalism. It was no
longer only those on the political Left who saw an urgent need for, among other things, more
extensive government oversight and regulation of corporate accounting and pension fund
management, or for debt relief for poorer nations, or new programs to mitigate the effects of
two decades of IMF/World Bank-mandated structural adjustment in the Third World. Nor
was it only those on the Left who believed that privatization of US airport security contrib-
uted to the security lapses that enable terrorist attacks, or that energy deregulation might
contribute to unreliable power supplies, or that privatization of military procurement services
made US forces in Iraq vulnerable to food and water shortages. Others, of course, in the spirit
of Hayek and Friedman, believed such lapses signal the incompleteness rather than the failure
of market de-regulation. For them, the neoclassical economic models had to be correct and,
despite the tragic human costs of such experiments, getting prices and other market signals
‘‘right’’ was not only possible but desirable. Thus neoliberal economists believed the world
should be made to test the models even if it meant rising economic inequality globally and
within nations, accelerated environmental devastation, and erosion or removal of public-
sector safety nets that once protected access to health care, food, and education for the
citizenry, and particularly for the less well off. Polarizing rhetoric of market triumphalism
leaves little political space for thoughtful debate of such issues.

To make development theory useful and interesting again, it must, as Leys argues in the
chapter below, explore ways to subordinate markets to the social goals of the communities
that markets serve. Expanding the practical ambitions of development theory in turn means
revisiting and re-invigorating the agenda of classical political economy.

Anthropologists’ rejection of grand narratives, however, unwittingly accedes to the

constriction of contemporary intellectual debate, and points to an urgent need, as Miller
(1998:188) puts it, to ‘‘clarify connections between features of our world that too often seem
like isolated fragments whose simultaneous existence is no more than fortuitous.’’ (See also
Jonathan Friedman’s chapter below, in Part III of this volume.) Daniel Miller offers an
example of how to resurrect grand narrative through his analysis of consumption, in ‘‘A
Theory of Virtualism’’. Among his targets is the outsized influence of a particular paradigm
within the discipline of economics, and the power of academic modellers to define economic
policy through widely imposed programs such as the World Bank’s and International
Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment reforms for developing nations during the 1980s and
1990s.

The anthropology of development, like the rest of sociocultural anthropology, some- times
appears to fundamentally reject the re-combination of historical analysis with political
engagement in the following sense: ‘‘The danger is that many...invok[e] power in the form of
‘capitalism,’ ‘colonialism,’ or ‘the state’ without actually analyzing its forms, relations,
structures, histories, or effects. History as process . . . is actively rejected’’ (Rose- berry
1996:91).

There are notable exceptions, such as the ‘‘regional modernities’’ approach of Agrawal and
Sivaramakrishnan (2003), which retains a strong historical and ethnographic focus in the
study of development, and which is informed as well by post-structuralism and post-
colonialism. Roseberry (1996:89-90) suggests that in spite of its political claims, contem-
porary anthropology risks losing ‘‘the very attempt to analyze and understand the relations
and structures of power in, through, and against which people live.’’ Such an anthropology,
he notes, requires histories of colonialism or capitalism, class analysis, processual analysis,
ethnographic analysis, and grand narratives – none of which is sufficient on its own, but all of
which (and more) are key elements in critical new theorizing. Silencing many of these
approaches to power, history, and ethnography, Roseberry suggests, can only produce
‘‘anthropology-lite.’’

In sum, it is partly through the silencing of political economy (both classical and 20th-
century debates on the political economy of development) that anthropologists during the
1980s and 1990s rarely engaged directly economic neoliberalism’s central arguments.
Although development has captured the imaginations of anthropologists, as well as states and
others around the world, key economic landmarks in the recent development story – Bretton
Woods, GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO – are surprisingly invisible in much recent
anthropological work on development and globalization. The sometimes piecemeal cri- tiques
anthropologists have produced instead include innovative studies of cultural differ- ence,
transnationalism, gender, civil society, NGOs, political ecology, globalization, and
consumption (among other topics). Many have emphasized the politics of knowledge and
representation, culture as a site of class struggle, and the cultural shaping of relations of
economic and political domination. Anthropology, as noted earlier, has not always down-
played political economy, and the discipline may be due for another theoretical pendulum
swing back toward politics and economics and their inextricable historical connections to the
cultural issues that have received so much recent attention. Among those producing
innovative work along these lines is Sivaramakrishan, who observes:

For the anthropology of development – a field already animated by the anthropological

debates on nationalism, globalization, transnational flows, diasporic cultures, and most
importantly the cultural analysis of modernity, postmodernity, and postcoloniality – there is,
then, a doubly reinforced challenge to think beyond the study of discourse, representa- tion,
knowledge, narrative, and all other manners of cultural construction (2000:432- 433).

Anthropology offers powerful analytical tools for integrating culture, power, history, and
economy into one analytical framework. Many of the contemporary contributions re- printed
below signal the creative new possibilities of such approaches.

Additional under-explored questions more anthropologists might address include the

following:

. The changing and contested boundaries of the concept of ‘‘market’’ itself, which even in the
mid-19th century often referred to a specific physical location where particular types of
goods were stored and traded (Moreno Fraginals 1985:11) and which only later assumed the
metaphorical and deterritorialized qualities that increasingly adhere

to it (see also Mitchell 2002).

 . The persistence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of ‘‘moral economies,’’
com- parable to those described by E. P. Thompson (1971) and James Scott (1976),
which in country after country – and transnationally – have constituted a political
obstacle to the imposition and implementation of pro-corporate free-market policies,
whether a rise in bus fares, a privatization of a public utility company, or a global
agreement on intellectual property rights under WTO auspices. (See also Jane Collins’
chapter in Part V of this volume on erosion of moral economies under neoliberal
globalization.)
 . The invention and trading of new – and intangible – commodities such as
derivatives, pollution credits or carbon secuestration instruments. This focus would
complement innovative work on artefacts of cultural hybridity such as ‘‘world
music’’ or immi- grants’ videos of their countries of origin.
 . The efforts of grassroots groups, such as those anthropologists traditionally studied,
to develop innovative forms of non-corporate, vertically integrated economic
organiza- tion that permit retaining more of the wealth produced (or value-added) in
local communities or that otherwise constitute an alternative to an unfavorable and
perhaps exploitative insertion in a liberalized economy.

Promising anthropological territory can also be found in the innovative work of

political scientist Tim Mitchell (2002), who notes the limitations of viewing the
economy simply as a social construct or ‘‘an invention of the imagination.’’ Instead
he posits the economy ‘‘as a set of practices that puts in place a new politics of
 calculation’’ (2002:8); he calls attention to the transformation of the ‘‘processes of
exchange that economists had always studied

. . . into an object that had not previously existed . . . [which] made possible new
forms of value, new kinds of equivalence, new practices of calculation, new relations
between human agency and the nonhuman, and new distinctions between what was
real and the forms of its representation’’ (2002:5). Promising new anthropological
pathways also are opened in Graeber’s (2001) imaginative work on an
‘‘anthropological theory of value’’ that avoids the limitations of reductionist
economics paradigms and that links anthropology to social activism. These are only
illustrative examples of market-related issues that have received insufficient attention.
Institutional economists and historians have at times posed questions such as those
listed above, but by the early 21st century anthropologists had only begun to probe the
dominant faith in the magic of markets.

As market triumphalism came to dominate development thought during the 1980s and
1990s, globalization – especially in its non-economic guises – became an object of
anthro- pological fascination. The next section examines the resultant interplay of
anthropology, development, and globalization.

NGOs and civil society

Since the 1980s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played growing roles in
mainstream and alternative development projects, large and small. The reduction of the
neoliberal state’s social welfare programs, the sacking of intellectuals from downsized public
universities and government agencies, and the crucial participation of civil society
organizations in the democratization of countries in Africa, Latin America, and the formerly
socialist countries, all fueled the NGO boom. The astonishing proliferation of such
organizations, many of which are quasi-rather than non-governmental, and more transnational
than ‘‘local,’’ has had a rapid and profound impact on development theory and practice, as
well as on grassroots movements for social change.

As the importance of supra-national governance institutions grew in the late 1980s and 1990s,
NGOs and other civil society organizations became a constant presence at ‘‘parallel
summits’’ held outside meetings of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and the G7/G8 heads-of-
state, as well as the 1992 Rio environmental conference, the 1995 Beijing women’s
conference, the 1996 Rome food security conference, and other international gatherings
(Pianta 2001). US and European cooperation policies shifted toward an emphasis on funding
citizens’ groups that were often held up as scrupulous and efficient alternatives to the corrupt,
bloated and ineffective public sectors that previously absorbed most foreign aid.

Of course NGOs are not necessarily more dependable and often are not as separate from state
interests and personnel as the ideal type implies. Many European donor NGOs, for example,
obtain most of their funding from their respective national governments or the European
Union, which hardly makes them ‘‘non-governmental.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘even when NGOs
have not been part and parcel of the state in a new guise, they are not inherently preferable to
it. NGOs sometimes have been tied to local parochialisms, are not necessarily technically
qualified to assume tasks that have been foisted upon them, and often lack a national vision
of development’’ (Mueller 2004:3). They provide new avenues of economic mobility for
some, at times contributing to inequalities of power and wealth. Some are opportunists who
spuriously claim to represent the poor or people in a particular ethnic category, in order to
obtain foreign aid monies. NGOs have increasingly assumed responsibilities for delivery of
services ranging from healthcare to agricultural extension, and have also become conduits for
political demands initially articulated by social move- ments and other pressure groups.

Particular development strategies, such as the provision of micro-credit to community groups,

have become closely associated with NGOs, suggesting that at times the form itself may
drive the strategy (Robinson 2001). Historically situated studies such as Gill’s (2000) on
Bolivia show how neoliberalism changed the NGO landscape, with many such organ-
izations shifting from political opposition to accommodation during a time of dramatic
expansion in the number of NGOs. As international funding for NGOs increased in the mid-
and late-1980s, competition for such external resources intensified, and new neolib- eral
NGOs in Bolivia pioneered initiatives that ‘‘relied on indebtedness and unwaged female labor
to encourage entrepreneurialism, individualism, and competition’’ (Gill 2000:138).

Contrasting theoretical conceptions of how to bound ‘‘civil society’’ are often tied to distinct
development agendas and views of democratization. Many concur that ‘‘civil society’’ is the
associational realm between the household and the state, while others emphasize the
emergence of a global civil society and transnational advocacy networks. Beyond these
assumptions, however, two polar positions exist, separated by opposing views on whether to
include economic actors – specifically, markets and firms – within ‘‘civil society.’’ Those
who argue for considering markets and corporations as part of the category typically back a
neoliberal development agenda (an irony, given this position’s roots in Hegel and Marx)
which sees ‘‘civil society’’ as a domain outside of and morally superior to the state. They
posit choice and freedom of association as fundamental characteristics of both the market and
‘‘civil society,’’ making support for economic liberalization and ‘‘civil society’’ institutions
not only entirely compatible, but comple- mentary strategies for checking state power.
Neoliberal theorists of civil society – and policymakers in donor institutions such as the US
Agency for International Development – increasingly express reservations about many
NGOs’ unclear lines of accountability, which they contrast with the supposedly greater
transparency of ‘‘democratic’’ states and ‘‘share- holder-accountable’’ corporations.
Theorists who exclude the market and firms from ‘‘civil society,’’ on the other hand, usually
consider it a domain of associational life that attempts to defend autonomous collective
institutions from the encroachments of both the market and the state. In comparison with
neoliberal theorists, they tend to accord much greater analytical importance to how social
inequality structures or limits political representation.

During the past two decades, the struggle between these divergent conceptions has played out
in academia, bilateral and non-governmental funding agencies, supranational governance
institutions, and the countries of the South. Proponents of neoliberal develop- ment often
have favored strengthening legal institutions and elite lobbying groups as a way to facilitate
market-driven approaches to growth, and to resolve social problems. They also often back
compensatory programs targeted at population sectors or geographical regions that have
suffered most from economic liberalization. Targeted anti-poverty projects, while sometimes
helping to alleviate the most dramatic kinds of misery, usually have only limited political
support, and critics charge that under neoliberalism they substitute for earlier welfare-state
programs based on universal entitlements that enjoyed widespread backing. Supporters of
alternative development strategies, on the other hand, often back organizations with a dual
focus on income-generating projects for historically disadvan- taged sectors of the population
and on pressure-group tactics intended to create more profound structural change. The latter
line of attack, favored by many European donor NGOs and bilateral cooperation agencies,
has enabled grassroots organizations to reshape many development debates and policies.

Gender and population

Recent shifts in understanding the gendered dimensions of development are emblematic of

civil society’s growing influence on policymakers’ debates. The ‘‘Women in Development’’
(WID) approach that accompanied the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85) sought
to address ‘‘male bias’’ by increasing female access to and participation in develop- ment
programs (much as rural development programs had tried to compensate for ‘‘urban bias’’).
By the mid-1990s, however, at the insistence of an increasingly vocal international women’s
movement, mainstream development institutions recognized that the WID para- digm did
little to address key concerns, such as unequal inheritance and property rights for men and
women, domestic violence, men’s abandonment of their children, or family planning and
prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Addressing these issues not only required male
participation within a new ‘‘Gender and Development’’ framework (that largely superseded
WID), but also presupposed fundamental modifications of existing practices of masculinity
and femininity. Scholars such as Sylvia Chant and Matthew Gutmann, however, note that
recent Gender and Development policies have not fundamentally altered WID’s emphasis on
programs designed by and for women (see Chant and Gutmann’s chapter in Part V of this
volume). Thus Chant and Gutmann argue that development programs should incorporate
‘‘men as a gendered category in a feminist sense,’’ with attention to unequal relations
between men as well as between men and women.

These contemporary concerns should be viewed in relation to what was, not long ago, the
virtual invisibility of a gender dimension in development studies. In 1970, Esther Boserup’s
Women’s Role in Economic Development analyzed how European colonialism, changing
gendered divisions of domestic labor, population density, rural–urban migration,
technological innovations, and shifting labor markets affected women’s status. Distin-
guishing between male and female farming systems (the latter typical of sub-Saharan Africa
and parts of South and Southeast Asia), she suggested that women’s subordination worsened
as colonial administrations transferred land rights from women to men and encouraged
agricultural modernization, plough agriculture, and export-oriented produc- tion. While
Boserup was later criticized for equating modernization with industrialization and for overly
optimistic assumptions about the liberating potential of mechanizing family labor, her
pioneering effort to delineate the differential impacts of economic changes on men and
women constituted a point of departure for almost all subsequent studies of gender and
development.

Boserup’s demonstration of how population density in agrarian societies affected women’s

status was also an early effort to bring much needed rigor to discussions about the relation
between demographic change and economic development. Few themes related to
development have been more controversial. In explaining rural poverty, the relative weight
given to population pressure versus unequal distribution of resources such as land, the trade-
off between investing in family planning or greater agricultural productivity, the
consequences for fertility and child-rearing behavior of increasing women’s access to
education and participation in the labor force, and the role of improved health services in
changing demographic patterns have all been raised as crucial considerations for
development scholarship and policy-making.49 While neo-Malthusian doomsday ‘‘popu-
lation bomb’’ scenarios have long been considered simplistic and overly pessimistic, Pan-
glossian assumptions that demographic growth is ipso facto good for development or that
expanding productivity and output can keep pace with growing populations have ceased to
have much of a following, even among intellectuals and planners in developing countries
who earlier rejected neo-Malthusian approaches and family planning as ‘‘imperialist’’
impositions. Indeed, scholars and planners of diverse views now consider sustainable
population-resource balances and human capital investment as central features of any local or
national program of development.

The demographic transition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low
fertility is widely seen as a characteristic of the most successful cases of national
development (e.g., Taiwan in Asia and Costa Rica in Latin America). Improvements in
women’s educational levels, workforce participation and health have been both cause and
effect of the demographic transition. At the same time, falling fertility and aging popula-
tions – with below-replacement growth rates – represent a major challenge for the long- term
sustainability of pension and welfare-state programs in developed countries, particu- larly in
western Europe, where a rising proportion of elderly retired people will have to be supported
by a smaller proportion of younger employed workers. In such contexts, the extent to which
immigrants and their children are absorbed into society and are granted the full rights and
benefits of citizenship becomes a crucial factor not just in attenuating social tensions but in
preserving extensive systems of entitlements.

Culture

Is underdevelopment a state of mind, an artifact of culture or values? Few anthropologists

would agree, though many writings about development now reduce the spirit of capitalism to
ahistorical cultural essences – a move that divorces culture from politics and economy in
ways Weber and other classical theorists did not. During the 20th century, however,
specialization and atomization in the social sciences and humanities accompanied growing
divisions between approaches to social change based on economics and politics on the one
hand, and those based on cultural values and beliefs on the other (Knauft 2002:10; see also
Geertz’s chapter in Part IV of this volume). Some recent scholarship attempts to bring these
diverging strands together again, though of course how they are brought together (with what
relative weights, reductionisms and determinisms) is itself contentious.

Mostly outside of anthropology, devotees of Rostowian modernization theory still view

‘‘traditional’’ culture as an obstacle to change, while other theorists have attributed economic
dynamism – of the ‘‘Asian tigers,’’ for example – to either Confucian values or long-
established Asian forms of household organization. How culture is connected to the spread of
commodity exchange and cash is a theme with roots in classic works by scholars such as
Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen and is a central concern as well in early-21st- century
debates about globalization and the role of the imaginary in identity and social change.
Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (1990) first appeared in German in 1900, four years before
Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Simmel viewed money as the decisive psychological feature of his
time and as a force that supplanted emotionality and made rational calcula- tion pervasive in
social life (1990:444–445). Like Marx and Weber, he saw money as encouraging
individualism and anonymity and as destroying traditional forms of solidarity and
community, although unlike them he devoted little attention to the distinction between a
money economy and a capitalist one. Simmel’s concern with the subjective experience of
consumption and commodities – including the ‘‘extensive mental consumption’’ made
possible by increased exposure to mass media (1990:455) – mark him as an early theorist of
what later came to be called the imaginary. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1934) took
a different tack, analyzing the ‘‘pecuniary emulation’’ and ‘‘conspicuous consump- tion’’ of
Gilded Age elites who accumulated not for ‘‘want of subsistence or of physical comfort,’’ but
because they were competing in ‘‘a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious
comparison’’ (1934:32).

Contemporary anthropology’s emphasis on culture as contested, flexible, fragmentary,

deterritorialized, and contingent is hard to reconcile with ‘‘culturalist’’ explanations of
underdevelopment or Confucian capitalism, which tend to assume that people mechanic- ally
enact norms. Thus anthropologists often clash with their development agency employ- ers, as
well as with some political scientists and economists, when analyzing cultural aspects of
development. Those political scientists and economists who incorporate culture into their
analytic frameworks are more likely than anthropologists to treat culture as bounded,
homogeneous, and coherent. They tend to quantify culture in the language of dependent and
independent variables, reducing culture to discrete or isolable traits that can be calculated and
compared with other factors. Without denying that norms influence behavior, many
anthropologists focus on what norms or symbols individuals invoke in particular situations to
justify or explain their actions – exploring the rich possibilities of contradictory or contested
cultural imperatives, and their situational contingency. Devel- opment practitioners, on the
other hand, demand simplifying models that travel well across national boundaries.

In the development industry, non-anthropologists often assume culture to be static unless

influenced by ‘‘modern society,’’ and in a stance that ‘‘echo(es) Malinowski’s claim that
anthropologists can help colonialists,’’ the development industry calls upon social scientists
to be ‘‘culture brokers’’ – ‘‘to understand and then handle cultural and social factors’’
(Crewe and Harrison 1998:43). Thus the anthropologist is called in to explain to expatriate
stove design specialists what supposed ‘‘cultural’’ barriers (whether presumed ignorance,
irrationality, or blind adherence to ‘‘tradition’’) prevent many rural Kenyans or Sri Lankans
from adopting a particular cookstove or chimney innovation (Crewe and Harrison 1998).
Interestingly, the ‘‘targets’’ or ‘‘beneficiaries’’ of such projects themselves may express
similar ideas about culture as a barrier, as they recycle or reformulate the developers’ strong
assumptions and prejudices about cultural rules driving practice. Savvy recipients of foreign
aid quickly learn the ‘‘culture’’ of expatriate donors and project personnel. As is well known,
foreign technologists often overlook or ignore local techno- logical innovation,
experimentation, and design successes. Instead outside engineers or designers assume that
they must fill a local knowledge gap, and then work with anthro- pologists to overcome the
presumed irrationality of local culture or tradition so that local people adopt the introduced
technology. This outdated approach lives on in much (not all!) of the development industry.
Why such assumptions and the old dichotomy between tradition and modernity survive is a
question Crewe and Harrison consider in chapter 16 of this volume.

Recognizing the limitations of common assumptions about culture in development

institutions, the World Bank in the early 2000s initiated a forum on culture and public action,
and sponsored a June 2002 conference, one of whose outcomes is an interdisciplin- ary book
(Rao and Walton 2004). The Bank commissioned papers on culture and development by
distinguished anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Mary Douglas, Stephen Gudeman,
and Keith Hart and invited comments from economists and others. This new World Bank
initiative acknowledges the need to move beyond the misleading but still influential ‘‘culture
of poverty’’ concept, or the notion that culture itself is an obstacle to economic development
and poverty reduction. Cultural conservatism, after all – as Elizabeth Colson (1985) noted in
her Malinowski Award lecture – ‘‘is more characteristic of bureaucracies than it is of people
who are trying to make a living from agriculture, fishing, or small industry’’ (1985:195).

It remains a challenge for development agencies to avoid using anthropologists simply to

enumerate existing cultural ideas and practices for planners, so that these may be mechan-
ically contrasted with the perspectives of development institutions, without addressing the
‘‘analytical limitations and political repercussions of this highly reified and static view of
culture’’ (Pigg 1997:263). As Pigg’s research in Nepal illustrates, development plans do not
simply ‘‘act on a stable field of indigenous understandings and practices,’’ but rather
development ideas enter social fields in which villagers ‘‘are already assuming and seeking
certain kinds of relationships to development’’ and are viewing the latter ‘‘as a kind of social
space to which programs give them access’’ (1997:281).

Supposed cultural conservatism or cultural difference maps onto ethnic identities and
hierarchies, and these too figure in representations, whether official or social scientific, of
putative differences in receptivity to development. Ethnic or cultural difference becomes an
easy alibi for histories of regional economic and social inequalities and deprivation, as in the
well-documented case of the San peoples of southern Africa (Sylvain 2002), or among
Chinese minorities (Schein 2002:67). Peoples such as those termed San in southern Africa
struggle for economic and social justice in a context where those struggles are often distorted
as demands for ‘‘cultural preservation’’ (Sylvain 2002). Indigenous and minority rights
movements complicate earlier assumptions about culture and development, individ- ual and
group rights, and what rights accompany indigenous or minority status. Success- ful claims to
local authenticity or indigenous identity in international arenas may confer significant
material advantages, and thus encourage people to strategically deploy or re- invent cultural,
ethnic, indigenous, or local identities. Thus ‘‘struggles over political and economic
resources . . . become struggles over cultural representations’’ (Dove 1999:232). Cultural
symbols are invoked as well by right-wing and conservative movements (such as anti-
immigrant movements in Europe or Islamic fundamentalism), though anthropologists have
been less likely to theorize movements that promote exclusivity, racism, or intolerance (see
Edelman 2001:301-303). In short, ethnographic studies of identity or cultural politics, what it
means to be ‘‘indigenous,’’ and when essentialism is strategic or romantic (see Brosius 1999)
place anthropologists at the center of development politics and practice – whether they claim
‘‘development’’ as their focus or not.

Consumption

Anthropology originally drew students to societies marked by the absence of modern

consumer goods that signal development (see Miller 1995; Ferguson 1997). Hence the
cartoons in ‘‘magazines such as The New Yorker and Punch (e.g., with stereotypical natives
shown in a panic, accompanied by captions such as ‘Put away the radio (or television or
refrigerator) – the anthropologists are coming’ ’’ (Miller 1995:142). Economic anthropolo-
gists traditionally analyzed production, consumption and distribution in such societies, but
accelerating consumerism during the 20th century had a powerful impact almost every-
where, whether in creating intense new desires or providing all sorts of novel paraphernalia to
erstwhile ‘‘primitives’’ and peasants. Ethnographic studies of consumption have ex- plored
both the symbolic and material significance of goods that consumers desire (and indeed the
symbolic/material opposition is itself problematic), and commodity as thing as well as
commodity as fetish. Scholars differ in their assumptions about the normative dimensions of
the spread of mass consumption and its effects on ‘‘local’’ cultures, and about processes of
homogenization and differentiation. One finds a split between those who see emancipatory
versus destructive forces in commodification and mass consump- tion, though
anthropologists studying these phenomena in the 1990s were moving beyond such
oppositions and instead exploring how processes of commodification differ from the
assumptions of modernization models (Miller 1995:14).

Anthropology imaginatively extends consumption analysis far beyond expenditure fig- ures,
avoids exclusive reliance on methodological individualism and narrow rational choice
assumptions, and re-inserts consumption in social processes and relationships. 57 Consumers
can use commodities to create individual and collective identities, with culture providing the
justification for (and indeed the very idiom for understanding) these social boundaries and
controls, as discussed by Douglas and Isherwood (1996:xxiv), among others. Commodities
are embedded in social relations in any economy, and analysts now often look beyond the
gift/commodity dichotomy and its attendant evolutionary assump- tions about a great divide
between ‘‘the West and the rest’’ (see Alexander and Alexander 1991; Appadurai 1986;
Carrier 1994, 1995; Miller 1997, among others). Much of the expanding ethnographic
analysis of consumption focuses on the cultural politics of iden- tity, desire, aesthetics, and
the subjective and normative aspects of consumption in daily life. Many emphasize the
agency, subjective experiences, and meanings attributed by consumers to commodities such
as sneakers, soft drinks, jeans, televisions, VCRs, perfume, or CDs. Another focus of much
recent anthropology is the ‘‘traffic in culture’’ through which objects produced for utilitarian,
aesthetic or spiritual reasons by indigenous peoples are transformed into commodified art,
then displayed and consumed in metropolitan centers by elites who seek to demonstrate their
cosmopolitan sensibilities (Garc ́ ıa Canclini 1990; Myers 2002; Nash 1993; Price 1991).
Scholars disagree about the extent to which consumers, especially those in poorer nations, are
coerced and manipulated into new wants and needs. Foreign goods have been a source of
fascination in diverse times and places, from the medieval European nobles who sought
exotic spices or cane sugar to the New Guinea groups who famously prayed that cargo would
fall from the sky. A few scholars have examined how a preference for imported goods,
especially among the affluent, may, in addition to its cultural impact, reduce investment and
exacerbate balance-of-payments problems (see Orlove and Bauer 1997). Yet such studies,
which integrate histories of consumption and macroeconomic effects, are rare. In much recent
anthropological work on consumption, historical political economy is often downplayed or
ignored – an ironic timing, given the increasing precariousness of consumption in many
poorer nations (Hansen 2000:14).

A recent striking exception to the elision of historical political economy is Hansen’s (2000)
study of Zambia’s second-hand clothing trade, which explores the ‘‘work of consumption’’
and the agency of the consumer in a ‘‘cultural economy of judgment and style’’ that entails
creative local appropriations of second-hand clothing that is donated by the West and then
sorted and introduced into commercial circuits that link North and South. Hansen’s analysis
ranges from the practices and meanings consumers bring to bear on commodities (showing
how Zambians work to ‘‘mak[e] the West’s clothing their own’’), and the effects of global
and national economic and political liberalization on Zambia’s garment trade – including
those entities rarely seen in anthropological works: GATT and WTO. Other innovative recent
work analyzes global and local dimensions of crafting meanings and markets for Oaxacan
wood carvings (Chibnik 2003), and connections between altered (often worsening) conditions
of production of commodities such as sugar or grapes in poorer nations and changing
consumption preferences in wealthier industrialized nations. For example, examining grape
production in northeastern Brazil, Collins (2000) uses the concept of commodity chains to
explore the feminization of labor to meet changing quality standards in globalizing markets in
‘‘luxury’’ edibles such as grapes. Moving beyond models of local communities connected to
abstract global forces, Collins’s approach instead sheds light on specific social relationships
that constitute the growing distance between points of production and consumption.
Environmentalists point out that globalization has lowered prices and stimulated
consumption, even as awareness grows that today’s developed-country over-consumption
pattern can only spread at great cost to the fragile ecology of the planet (Gardner et al. 2004).
Social justice advocates in turn call wealthy consumers’ attention to and sometimes organize
boycotts of commodities sponsored by corporations but produced in poorer nations’
sweatshops. That millions strive to acquire modern consumer goods ‘‘seals their participation
in labor markets, even at a cost of long-distance migration, the separation of families, and the
sense of earning less – for women, far less – than one’s worth’’ (Schneider 2002:75).

Although scholars have rejected many elements of 1960s modernization theory, that
paradigm’s traditional/modern binaries are very much alive in everyday language and culture,
especially in consumption practices, which can signal newly imagined futures, conformity,
creativity, rebellion, subversion, or strategic image-making, among other possibilities.
Consumer appearances, for example, have become so important that one finds so-called
impostors who talk on toy cellular telephones, parade in supermarkets with luxury-filled carts
they later abandon as they sneak out the door without buying anything, and people who suffer
extreme heat in their cars rather than roll down the windows and reveal that they have no air
conditioning (Galeano 2001). Capital has always denied to many the dream of consumption,
but in the era of neoliberal globalization the images that fuel the fantasy are ubiquitous, the
‘‘needs’’ more infinite, and the possibilities of realizing the dream still minimal or
nonexistent for a vast share of the world’s people.

Environment

The ‘‘ecological anthropology’’ and ‘‘cultural ecology’’ of the 1970s, which often rested on
functionalist and exaggeratedly localistic assumptions, have ceded ground to ‘‘historical
ecological’’ or ‘‘political ecology’’ approaches. The concerns of the latter often paralleled
those of new environmentalist movements and non-governmental organizations working for
‘‘sustainable development.’’ Political ecology links environment, development and social
movements, often drawing on post-structuralist theory as well as political economy critiques
of development (as in Peluso and Watts 2001). Central to contemporary political ecology is
how ‘‘cultural practices – whether science, or ‘traditional’ knowledge, or discourses, or risk,
or property rights – are contested, fought over, and negotiated’’ (Watts 2000:259). Some
politically disadvantaged groups, for example, appropriate state tools by turning to alternative
or ‘‘counter-mapping’’ to formalize their claims to key local resources and territories (Peluso,
chapter 20 in this volume; Hodgson and Schroeder 2002; Chapin and Threlkeld 2001).
Anthropologists such as Emilio Moran (1998) have employed satellite remote sensing data to
monitor changing land use practices in fragile environments, such as the Amazon; to develop
famine early-warning systems in Africa; and to improve understanding of environmental
history (see Leach and Fairhead’s chapter in Part VI of this volume). The new approaches
vary in method and focus, but usually eschew adaptation as a starting premise. Indeed,
maladaptive processes have become a key concern, while other analyses contain implicit
adaptationist assumptions discussed in an idiom of ‘‘sustainable development.’’ Would
environmental catastrophe result, for example, if five billion people in poor nations were to
consume at the level enjoyed by the one billion who live in the wealthiest societies (De
Rivero 2001:8)? In the early 21st century 12 percent of the world population living in North
America and Western Europe account for 60 percent of global private consumption, while the
one-third living in sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia account for a mere 3.2 percent
(Gardner et al. 2004:5–6). Per capita production of solid wastes, greenhouse gases and other
environmental contam- inants is vastly greater in affluent societies. Can markets recognize
costs – human or environmental – as well as they set prices (see Hawken 1993:75)? Is
‘‘sustainability’’ possible on a small or large scale, and what role does it imply for market
forces, whether local or global (see Barkin 2001)? How have differing interpretations of
‘‘sustainability’’ shaped struggles over development policy?

Free-market enthusiasts challenge the notion of environmental crisis, sometimes ques-

tioning the scientific reality of global warming and ozone depletion, or simply suggesting that
market forces can resolve environmental problems. Less orthodox economists such as
Herman Daly (2001:267) emphasize that the economy cannot expand forever precisely
because it is part of a ‘‘finite and nongrowing ecosystem.’’ Daly proposes sustainable
development policies, which demand, for example, that we reject standard neoclassical
economic practices such as ‘‘counting the consumption of natural capital as income’’ (Daly
2001:268). He favors increasing taxation on ‘‘bads’’ such as resource throughput (‘‘the
matter-energy that goes into a system and eventually comes out’’) and decreasing it on
‘‘goods’’ such as labor and income, and urges a shift from a globalist to a nationalist
orientation to trade, capital mobility and export policies. Yet global financial institutions such
as the World Bank, though they claim to support ‘‘sustainable’’ development, have little time
for innovative economists such as Daly (who resigned from his World Bank position). By
contrast, for some NGOs, grassroots movements, and those pursuing ‘‘alter- natives to
development’’ – those who challenge modernist Western development – sustain- able
development is a serious pursuit (e.g., Shiva 1989; Escobar 1995). ‘‘Sustainable
development’’ was initially defined in Gro Harlem Brundtland’s UN-spon- sored report Our
Common Future as practices that satisfy the needs of our generation, without jeopardizing the
possibilities for future generations to satisfy their needs (WCED 1987). This approach had
become gospel by the time of the 1992 Rio Environment Conference. Yet ‘‘needs’’ – left
undefined – proved to be one of several contentious aspects of the new paradigm, which the
World Bank, multinational corporations and radical environmental movements all claim as
their own.

Some large corporations have coopted the notion of green development – a ploy that
prompted CorpWatch to give out bimonthly Greenwash Awards to large oil, nuclear,
biotechnology, and chemical ‘‘corporations that put more time and energy into slick PR
campaigns aimed at promoting their eco-friendly images, than they do to actually protect- ing
the environment.’’ In publicizing deceptive claims that might lead one to believe that ‘‘Shell
will reverse global warming’’ or that Monsanto is our ‘‘best hope to eliminate hunger,’’
CorpWatch’s aim in part is to discredit corporate promotion of self-policing or voluntary
measures as a substitute for legislation and regulation. These and other envir- onmentalists
have been a far more vocal lobbying group than social scientists, and the former now take on
sociocultural as well as ‘‘physical’’ issues, observes former World Bank sociologist Michael
Cernea (1995:344).

Anthropological studies of the environment and resource conservation focus less on

economic policies, everyday politics, or new forms of multilateral governance than on
indigenous rights, social constructions of nature, and debates between radical and main-
stream environmentalists. Environmental stresses and resource conflicts have become a
pressing post-cold war security issue, sometimes expressed as identity politics (Watts
2000:270–271). Yet political ecology until recently has been surprisingly silent about
geopolitical questions such as regional integration, transnational governance and environ-
mental security, and decentralized politics.

City and countryside

There are three principal reasons why theorists and policy–makers have historically
considered the urban and rural dimensions of development to pose distinct challenges. First,
terms of trade or the relative prices of industrial and agricultural goods constitute a source of
contention in every society no matter how its economy is organized. Second, the always
severe and now widening gap between urban and rural standards of living suggests that
different development policies may be appropriate in the city and in the countryside. And
third, rural poverty has – most notably in the post-World War II period – been a source of
insurgency and social unrest and thus of anxiety for policy-makers and planners and of
fascination for social scientists.

Since the advent of cities, no society has ever entirely resolved the tension over terms of trade
between urban and rural areas or between consumers and producers of agricultural products.
Is there to be cheap food and fiber for urbanites and manufacturers, or are farmers to receive
better prices for their harvests? This fundamental dilemma of all economic systems – whether
pre-capitalist, capitalist, socialist, or in-between – has been ‘‘resolved’’ in some times and
places through political compromises or stalemates and in others through draconian dictates
or powerful market forces. Its ubiquity and persistence speak to the continuing need to
consider the specificities and interrelationships of city and countryside – and different sectors
within each – in any vision of development.

Terms of trade were a principal issue in heated discussions over the Corn Laws in early-
19th-century Britain. Passed in 1815, the Corn Laws prohibited grain exports when prices
were high and encouraged them when prices were low. Cereals could only be imported when
domestic prices were high. These measures artificially benefited landowners and increased
the price of bread, which became a source of radical agitation. The 1846 repeal of the Corn
Laws marked the end of protectionism in British agriculture, a defeat for the landed
aristocracy and a victory for the rising class of industrialists, which had sought to reduce food
prices for urban workers and thus lower their wage bill and diminish social unrest. Indeed,
the campaign for repeal of the Corn Laws and, more broadly, for trade liberalization could be
said to have boosted the careers of the second generation of classical political economists,
particularly Ricardo and Malthus, both of whom sharpened their analytical and polemical
skills as opponents of the protectionist and pro-aristocratic premises of the Corn Laws.

In the decade following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the relations between cities and
countryside in the Soviet Union became a major source of strife and controversy, with terms
of trade one of the central axes of dispute. Soviet leaders shifted from violent grain
confiscations during the civil war that followed the revolution, to a ‘‘New Economic Policy’’
that provided peasants market incentives to produce food for the cities, to an expropriation
plan that forcibly converted smallholders into either collective-farm members or employees
of state farms. Bolshevik economist Evgenii Preobrazhensky for- mulated an influential
‘‘law’’ of ‘‘primitive socialist accumulation’’ that maintained that industrialization could
only occur in a backward country such as the Soviet Union through ‘‘an exchange of values
between large-scale [state-sector] and petty [peasant] production under which the latter gives
more to the former than it receives’’ (Preobrazhensky 1971:224). In practice ‘‘non-equivalent
exchange’’ meant the institutionalization of meas- ures to extract surplus from the
countryside to fuel rapid industrialization. As Stalin consolidated power in the late 1920s,
dissenting voices, such as that of Nikolai Bukharin, who argued against anti-peasant policies
and for generating demand for industrialization from an expanding consumer market, were
sidelined and then silenced – as was Preobraz- hensky himself, albeit ostensibly for different
reasons (S. Cohen 1980:160–212).

The long-term decline in terms of trade that Rau ́ l Prebisch viewed as undermining Latin
American development in the 1950s (see above) has continued to afflict rural dwellers in the
South. Producers of the main internationally traded agricultural commodities, in particular,
have been hard hit by developed-country protectionism and, especially, by market gluts
resulting from new highly productive technologies, shifts in US and European farm subsidy
policies (which once emphasized land set-asides and supply management, but which after
1996 encouraged excess production for export) and the breakdown of other supply
management mechanisms, such as the national export quotas established under the
International Coffee Agreement (which collapsed in 1989). A recent Oxfam report on the
impact of falling coffee prices asks, ‘‘How much coffee does it take to buy a Swiss Army
knife?’’ In 1980, it took 4.171 kilograms, in 1990 the ‘‘price’’ rose to 6.941 kilos, in 2000 it
reached 7.406 kilos, and in 2001 it jumped to a whopping 10.464 kilos (Gresser and Tickell
2002:13). The story is similar for most other farm products and for their relation to the jeeps,
tractors, machetes, chemicals, fuel, and other manufactured goods that farmers require.

The huge disparities of wealth and income between city and countryside are a second reason
why theorists and planners often conceive of development as having distinct urban and rural
components or even of being afflicted by ‘‘urban bias’’ (Lipton 1977). Three- quarters of the
1.2 billion people classified as ‘‘extremely poor’’ (surviving on less than $1 per day) live in
rural areas (IFAD 2001). Within most nations poverty rates are significantly higher in rural
zones. Clearly, successful poverty-reduction policies must focus on rural areas where access
to education, health care, technology, credit, and other services is most limited and where
additional disadvantages stemming from remoteness condemn the poor to a Hobson’s choice
between a hardscrabble existence in the countryside and migration to urban slums. Because
most societies are undergoing rapid urbanization, and rural areas frequently lose political
clout in the process, one of the most compelling arguments for rural development programs
of all kinds, apart from their possible intrinsic merits, is that they also help alleviate urban
poverty by reducing migration to the cities or by better equipping migrants to survive.
Nonetheless, national development plans often exacerbate historically unequal relations
between city and countryside, whether this is understood as ‘‘urban bias’’ or ‘‘internal
colonialism’’ (Lipton 1977; McMichael 2000:20–21; Stavenha- gen 1969).

Rural development also assumed increasing urgency in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as
nationalist and communist insurgencies spread and occasionally triumphed in various regions
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These ‘‘peasant wars’’ were hardly the prole- tarian
revolutions that traditional Marxists envisioned, but their insertion in cold-war geopolitical
competition and their roots in longstanding rural poverty made them particu- larly troubling
for Western policymakers. Vietnam, in particular, transformed elite thinking about rural
development, which in Indochina and elsewhere quickly became a pillar of
counterinsurgency strategy or a preventive bulwark against potential revolutions. Robert
McNamara, a key architect of US military strategy in Vietnam, went on in 1968 to spend
more than a decade directing the World Bank, where he articulated a new approach towards
poverty reduction aimed at ‘‘the poorest of the poor.’’ The Vietnam War, together with the
claims of Maoism about the revolutionary character of the peasantry, also contributed in the
1960s and 1970s to a new interest in ‘‘peasant studies’’ in the academy, both in Europe and
North America and in South Asia and Latin America (Bernstein and Byres 2001).

The concerns of peasant studies and development studies were inextricably linked, not just
because peasants were the majority of the population in most underdeveloped coun- tries, but
also because social scientists increasingly understood pre-existing agrarian struc- tures to be
causally related to political and development outcomes. While positing societal explanations
for political-economic phenomena was not new, it re-emerged in the 1960s and after as part
of the renewal of interest in non-sectarian Marxism and critical theory. Lenin, in The
Development of Capitalism in Russia (1972), had sketched two possible roads to capitalism
in agriculture: a ‘‘Junker’’ road, characteristic of Prussia and Poland, in which large capitalist
farms emerged from feudal estates with a concomitant proletarian- ization of the labor force;
and a ‘‘peasant’’ or ‘‘farmer’’ road, typical of western Europe, in which bourgeois
revolutions had undermined feudalism and permitted the emergence of a sector of small and
medium-size agricultural producers. The rediscovery and translation in the 1960s of the work
of one of Lenin’s arch-opponents, A.V. Chayanov (1986), stimulated a fresh wave of debate
over whether social differentiation in the countryside produced distinct classes of wealthy and
poor peasants or whether such differences resulted from the age and demographic
composition of peasant households, with younger units having more dependents and fewer
laborers and thus less wealth than older units. Barrington Moore (1966), in a sweeping
comparative study of England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, China, Japan, and
India, sought to explain the political-economic consequences of agrarian class relations – and
especially the fate of reactionary rural elites – for the bourgeois democratic, capitalist
authoritarian, and revolutionary socialist routes to mod- ernity. Robert Brenner (1976),
posing the problem of the absence of an ‘‘indigenous’’ transition to capitalism outside of
western Europe (although in terms entirely different than Weber’s), compared Europe east
and west of the Elbe, as well as France and England, and argued that class structures
(property relations and surplus-extraction relations), once established, imposed strict limits on
societies’ long-term economic development.

A cultural dimension was often missing from societal-based explanations for political-
economic phenomena mentioned above. Political scientist James Scott insistently re- inserted
this missing theme, which contributed to his substantial impact on anthropology in the
English-speaking world. In an early work, Scott proposed that agrarian revolutions occurred
not so much as a result of absolute immiseration but rather as a result of violations of the
‘‘moral economy’’ – peasant expectations developed over long historical time about ‘‘just
prices’’ and what states and elites may claim and in turn must also provide in times of
necessity (Scott 1976). Scott’s discussion of the rural poor’s understanding of justice implied
an economy that was embedded in society and the product not just of market forces but of
contention between antagonistic social groups. Later, in Weapons of the Weak (1985), he
examined the micro-politics of class conflict, arguing that small acts of resistance
(footdragging, gossip, petty theft), when taken together, significantly limited the types of
economic relations and the intensity of exploitation that elites were able to impose. In Seeing
Like a State (1998), Scott addressed the failures of grandiose, utopian, high-modernist
development schemes, in cities and countrysides, and the ways authoritarian experiments in
urban planning and rural development policies fail to under- stand and frequently obliterate
or homogenize diverse local practices.

Anthropologists contributed to many of these debates, enriching both agrarian studies and
understandings of development and, simultaneously, broadening the temporal, geo- graphical,
and intellectual scope of their traditional research practices. Belatedly, they brought the state
back into the analysis of local histories and cultures and also turned their lens on the state
itself, no longer understood as an undifferentiated monolithic actor, but rather one composed
of varied and sometimes competing actors and agencies with distinct bureaucratic interests
and agendas (Edelman 1999; Gupta 1998; Nugent 1997). They also offered insightful
analyses of urban informal economies and unofficial economic activities such as smuggling
(Hart 1992; MacGaffey 1991), of the instabilities and opportunities that arise from
interactions between formal and informal economies (Guyer 2004); and infor- mal credit and
cultural differences in conceptions of time, money, borrowing and lending (Shipton 1994,
1995). During the 1970s politicians and bureaucrats seized upon the informal economy as a
‘‘form of self-organized unemployment relief,’’ and then in the 1980s it was promoted as
‘‘an image of popular creative energies finding expression in an unregulated market’’ (Hart
1992:218). That is, the informal economy concept ‘‘swung with’’ shifts in Western
development ideologies. By the early 1990s, rampant economic informalization had moved
close to the centers of power and had become a global phenomenon,

embracing the international drugs traffic, bribery by multinational corporations, corrupt arms
deals, tax evasion, smuggling, embezzlement by bureaucrats, peculation by polit- icians,
offshore banking, ‘‘grey’’ markets, insider trading, the black market of communist regimes
and organised crime, as well as such legitimate activities as small business, own account
dealing and do-it-yourself (Hart 1992:218).

Finally, biotechnology occupies a central place in today’s agrarian debates. Observers

disagree, for example, about whether genetically modified crops are a solution to hunger and
demographic pressure or an agent of ‘‘de-peasantization,’’ privatization of germplasm, and
agricultural industrialization (see Osgood 2001; Stone 2002; Magdoff et al. 2000; Gupta
1998; Shiva 2000; Tripp 2001). This is an area where anthropology can help to move the
debate beyond the caricatures of agricultural systems put forward by both sides, and beyond
the tendency to treat biotechnology as a monolithic entity (Stone 2003:618).

Most anthropologists no longer view urban and rural as separate ‘‘sectors’’ lodged in
unilinear evolutionary trajectories. Works such as Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity
(1999) illustrate how processes once assumed to be one-directional (urbanization, indus-
trialization) now look much more complex, unpredictable, and reversible – challenging both
academic and popular understandings of modernization. At least as significant as rural–urban
migration in his Zambian study are frequent moves between urban jobs and shifting forms of
economic and social connection between town-dwelling mineworkers and rural kin. Two
decades earlier Colin Murray’s (1981) landmark study in Lesotho innovatively analyzed the
impact of urban labor migration on rural families. In much of Africa people are on the move
between town and countryside, office job and farm, small business and outdoor market,
constantly adjusting to rapid economic and political shifts, and careful to diversify their
economic activities.

This mobility and economic diversification under conditions of economic uncertainty mean
that many urban Africans’ images of rural society are likely to be less removed from the
realities of life in the countryside than were images of rural life enjoyed under the classical
European processes of urbanization analyzed by Raymond Williams (1973). Ferguson (1992)
explores this theme in Zambian images of town and countryside. As urban dwellers return to
the Zambian countryside upon retirement or loss of employment, new tensions emerge
between earlier images of an idealized, idyllic countryside, and the stark rural realities return
migrants must confront. Ferguson (1992) remarks that some urban migrants forced by a weak
Zambian economy to relocate to their ‘‘homes’’ in the countryside find the latter a place of
impossible demands, treachery, witchcraft and selfishness. Macroeconomic shifts and cycles
that propel migrants to and from the city are connected to reversible changes in the balance of
power between cultural styles of cosmopolitanism and localism; thus the ‘‘golden hour’’ of
urban cosmopolitan style in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with an economic expansion that
enabled long-term urban settlement and attenuation of migrants’ ties to the Zambian
countryside (Ferguson 1999). In addition, as urban images of rural life become less rosy, the
failings of the urban economy, Ferguson suggests, then ‘‘come to appear as attributable not to
any external force, but to the internal moral faults of Zambian character’’ (Ferguson
1992:90). The latter theme resonates with colonial and post-colonial development ideologies
that link development with personhood, implying that development ‘‘works for some kinds of
people, and that, by implication, only personal transformations will make development
work’’ (Karp 1992:10). Urban economic decline then may be experienced or rhetorically
construed (by politicians, for example) as a matter of failed personal transformations. Such
work illustrates the distinctive contributions offered by anthropology in linking analysis of
culture, ideology, economy, subjectivity and personhood in studies of development and
globalization.

In sum, this section has illustrated the rich potential and accomplishments of an anthro-
pology of development and globalization that both contributes to and benefits from studies of
NGOs, civil society, gender, population, culture, consumption, environment, and rela- tions
between city and countryside. Next we consider what happens when anthropologists actually
work in development institutions. How are they received by their employers and by their
anthropological and other colleagues? What challenges does this specialty pose to the
discipline more broadly?

Anthropologists in Development Institutions

Can anthropologists speak truth to power and still earn a living in the era of market
liberalization? This question returns us to a distinction that invites fresh contemplation –
namely that between development anthropology and its critical cousin, the anthropology of
development. This section discusses the vanishing (but still disputed) boundary between these
two anthropological subtypes, development anthropology’s striking expansion since the
1970s, dilemmas of ethics and advocacy that development anthropology shares with the
discipline more broadly, why lack of ‘‘local’’ knowledge is not the principal cause of
development project failure, and how development anthropologists and anthropologists of
development put their knowledge to work. The challenges they face in doing so combine with
a larger disciplinary imperative to redefine anthropology’s role in the public sphere, a theme
taken up in the conclusion.

Development anthropology versus anthropology of development

Again, development anthropology, in contrast to the anthropology of development, has been

termed the work of practitioners who actually design, implement or evaluate pro- grams of
directed change, especially those intended to alleviate poverty in poor nations. The
anthropology of development, on the other hand, calls for a ‘‘radical critique of, and
distancing from, the development establishment’’ (Escobar 1997:498; but cf. Gardner and
Lewis 1996). Additional differences are as follows:

While development anthropologists focus on the project cycle, the use of knowledge to tailor
projects to beneficiaries’ cultures and situation, and the possibility of contributing to the
needs of the poor, the anthropologists of development centre their analysis on the institutional
apparatus, the links to power established by expert knowledge, the ethno- graphic analysis
and critique of modernist constructs, and the possibility of contributing to the political
projects of the subaltern (Escobar 1997:505).

Why are these distinctions disputed? Even Arturo Escobar – once one of development
anthropology’s strongest critics – by 1997 suggested that any boundary between the
anthropology of development and development anthropology is ‘‘newly problematic and
perhaps obsolete’’ (1997:498). For others, the divide has long been contested; for example,
Bronislaw Malinowski (1961, quoted in Cernea 1995:340) wrote ‘‘unfortu- nately, there is
still a strong but erroneous opinion in some circles that practical anthropol- ogy is
fundamentally different from theoretical or academic anthropology.’’ Furthermore, the
supposed boundary between anthropological theory and practice looks very different outside
the United States (see below). In short, these two anthropological subtypes are historically
contingent categories whose making and unmaking, as suggested earlier, may be more
revealing than attempts to pin down definitions.

Anthropology’s antinomies of realist epistemology and post-structuralism were some- times

mapped too readily onto the supposed contrasts between development anthropology and the
anthropology of development. Scholars in both camps now take seriously the role of language
and discourse in constituting – rather than simply reflecting – social reality. Few
anthropologists today would consider development to be a neutral language that describes
reality.

As an example of recent work that transcends what he earlier saw as a sharp boundary
between development anthropology and the anthropology of development, Arturo Esco- bar
(1997) calls attention to anthropologists such as Katy Gardner and David Lewis (see their
chapter in Part VIII of this volume). Gardner and Lewis, he notes, draw on both practical
development experience and a thorough understanding of the post-structuralist critique, and
they are ‘‘crafting an alternative practice’’ that addresses dilemmas of poverty, environmental
destruction, and globalization. Such work signals productive new engage- ments between
anthropology and development – and most important, a new set of challenges to the entire
discipline (see below). Norman Long (2001), similarly, has insisted on the need for both
theoretical models aimed at understanding social change and policy models intended to
promote development. He emphasizes as well the importance of transcending conventional
‘‘images’’ of intervention that are limited to discrete projects and isolated from evolving
relations between social actors, including state institutions and officials.

As conventionally defined, development anthropologists work with programs carried out by

multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, various United Nations
agencies, regional development banks, and the World Bank group’s International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association; bilateral
agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or Britain’s
Department of International Development (formerly the Overseas Development
Administration); nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or nonprofit organizations such as
Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision; and private consulting firms. Some academic
anthropologists work as part-time consultants for such agencies and others work for them
full-time. Thus there is a tripartite division among academics who do no work for
development agencies, those who do, and practicing anthropologists who have no university
positions.

During the 1940s and 1950s, US anthropologists were relatively prominent in public policy
circles and in the Truman administration’s foreign aid planning, then nearly disap- peared
from development programs by 1970, and returned to them in significant numbers in the mid-
1970s (Hoben 1982:351). Since the 1970s, as development agencies became more interested
in working directly with the poor and in addressing cultural and social (rather than simply
technological) change, and as these agencies also became more bur- eaucratized, many new
opportunities opened up for anthropologists interested in develop- ment work. The addition in
1975 of requirements for social soundness analyses in USAID project design78 contributed to
the growing demand for anthropological assistance in the development enterprise (Hoben
1982:358). USAID had just one full-time anthropologist in 1974, 22 by 1977, and 65 by the
early 1990s (Hoben 1982:359; Nolan 2002:72). Another one hundred or so anthropologists
worked for USAID on short-term contracts (Hoben 1982:359). The World Bank hired its first
anthropologist in the mid-1970s (while the World Health Organization did so in 1950) and by
the mid-1990s the Bank had about 50–60 social scientists practicing development
anthropology and sociology, with hundreds more hired as short-term consultants (Cernea
1995:341). A shrinking academic job market in the mid- and late 1970s propelled more
anthropologists into development work. Thus by 1985, there were more anthropologists
outside US academic institutions than within them, though by the mid-1990s the proportion
of anthropology graduates working outside the academy seemed to have stabilized at 30
percent (Nolan 2002:69–70).

Anthropological participation in development of course is not just market-driven. Such work

attracts individuals who believe they can help to alleviate human suffering or reduce the
negative impact of – and sometimes help to end – policies with which they disagree. Thus a
larger justification for development anthropology is that the discipline needs spokespersons
able to skillfully translate and mediate knowledge in public arenas. That implies moral
involvement in critical contemporary issues – a stance advocated decades ago by Boas and
Mead, and recently by scholars such as Scheper-Hughes (1995), as well as by senior
development anthropologists such as Michael Horowitz and others during the 1990s (see
Gow 2002:305; Bennett 1996; and chapters in this volume by Gardner and Lewis [chapter
27] and by Fox [chapter 23]). Thus some prominent development anthro- pologists such as
Thayer Scudder and Kathleen Gough, and sociologist Norman Long became interested in
development during their own ‘‘long-term field research that com- pelled them to take policy
stands that often were unpopular to the development establish- ment’’ (Little and Painter
1995:603; see also Colson 1985).

Anthropologists not only need to ‘‘study up’’ (as Laura Nader suggested years ago); they also
need to ‘‘move up’’ into more senior administrative and policy-making roles in development
institutions, argues development anthropologist Riall Nolan (2002:261). Indeed, in addition
to their familiar roles as culture brokers and data collectors, anthro- pologists have
increasingly taken on responsibilities as project managers, team leaders, and policy-makers
(Nolan 2002:247), though it remains more common for them to work on program assessment
rather than the making of policy. Many occupy administrative rather than social science
positions. USAID, for example, has ‘‘few – if any – career positions designated for
anthropologists or social scientists generally, although as many as 75 people with graduate
degrees in anthropology [were] employed by the agency’’ in the early 1990s (Little and
Painter 1995:603).

Boundaries between development anthropology and academe are more rigid in the United
States than in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands. 81 In the United
Kingdom, prestigious interdisciplinary development institutes have close ties to academic
anthropology departments as well as to Britain’s primary overseas development agency (the
Department of International Development). Such interdisciplinary development pro- grams
are rare in the United States, and some noted ones have closed (such as Harvard’s Institute
for International Development and Stanford’s Food Research Institute) or suffered serious
funding cutbacks. Britain’s Department of International Development sponsors a broader
range of social science research (including peer-reviewed work) and more directly engages
current theoretical scholarship than does its US counterpart, the Agency for International
Development. And more so than in the United States, tight budgets in British universities
encourage some scholars to pursue research topics that can be funded by development
agencies. In a number of British universities, interdisciplinary development studies, with
increasingly strong anthropological representation during the past decade or two, is a more
established and prestigious field than it tends to be in the United States. Many UK
universities now offer both MA and PhD programs in development studies. The institutional
connections between UK academe and practical development work, and the high quality of
these programs are reflected in stimulating publications by UK anthropolo- gists who draw
very effectively on both practical development experience and on contem- porary social
theory (see, for example, Cooke and Kothari 2001; Crewe and Harrison 1998 and their
chapter in Part IV of this volume; Gardner and Lewis 1996 and their chapter in Part VIII of
this volume; and Grillo and Stirrat 1997, among others).

Much more so than its British, Dutch, and Scandinavian counterparts, USAID blurs its
research programs with its operational or program units, so that what the Agency for
International Development funds as ‘‘research’’ is increasingly tied to its operational
program exigencies – leaving little space for long-term, autonomous social science research
and writing on large issues such as poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.
During the 1990s, USAID sharply reduced support for university-based social science
research and subsequently relied increasingly on social scientists in consulting firms or NGOs
(whose research agendas and professional credentials often differ sharply from those of
scholars in universities or research institutes). Although the United States lacks the strong
interdisciplinary development studies programs found in Europe, and although USAID less
directly engages or funds theoretical research than does its British counterpart, the United
States continues to produce many scholars of development.

The distinction between development anthropology and the rest of the discipline, or between
policy and academic institutions, is less sharp or even absent in some Latin American nations
and elsewhere than it is in the United States (Hewitt de Alca ́ntara 1984). Little (2000) notes
that ‘‘The polarization between theory and application, so evident in many US anthropology
departments, is viewed as a luxury in many regions of the world, where scholars are actively
engaged in policy debates and struggles regardless of their academic interests.’’

In the United States, the identity of development anthropology both shapes and is shaped by
professional networks and organizations, such as the Society of Professional Anthro-
pologists, the Washington Association of Practicing Anthropologists, and the National
Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA). NAPA, which had 716 members in
2002, formed as a subunit of the American Anthropological Association in 1984, defined its
own code of ethics, and has produced a monograph series, among other activities. Members
of these organizations conduct international development work as well as other types of
activities in corporations, government entities and other agencies in the United States and
elsewhere. Decades earlier (in 1941), the Society for Applied Anthropology was founded. It
publishes a journal (Human Organization) and offers an annual Malinowski award to a
distinguished practitioner.

In addition to these organizations, independent institutes and consulting firms in the United
States also provide anthropological (and other) experts to the development indus- try. An
example of the former is the nonprofit Institute for Development Studies, which was
established in the mid-1970s, in Binghamton, New York, under the leadership of
anthropologists David Brokensha, Michael Horowitz, and Thayer Scudder. 84 This institute
has attracted funding from a wide array of institutions, including the World Bank, FAO,
UNDP, USAID, the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, OECD, International
Fund for Agricultural Development, World Conservation Union, and Inter-American
Development Bank (Nolan 2002:257). The Institute for Development Anthropology not only
coordinates the provision of social science expertise to development agencies, but it also has
undertaken a broad range of research and training activities and has produced a large number
of monographs, working papers, and a newsletter that includes research reports. It manages to
be both critical of many development projects and determined to improve the capacities of
development agencies to carry out more beneficial and environ- mentally sound projects. It
has played a particularly strong role in training social scientists from poor nations and
involving them in the institute’s research programs.