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Discuss the following statement “Development and anthropology have totally different methods of evaluation and thus are hard to compare”

   Currently in the 21st century, there is a more intellectual climate, which is more receptive to an analysis of development within theoretical frameworks and the dynamics of cross-cultural practices, meanings and discourses. New approaches to development and local/global relationships underline the importance of analyzing how knowledge and power are constituted and reconfigured. This has brought out the usual anthropological problem of how to engage with and represent other cultures, whilst trying to understand and move away from its own historical roots in Western rationality and the commitment to 'progress'. (Marcus and Fischer 1986)[2] This has created tension in the existence of anthropology as an academic discipline and the practice of anthropology in the field. Since colonial times anthropology has been used for 'progress' projects, and it is arguable that the word 'progress' has been replaced by 'development' projects - a less conspicuous term, but which may carry the same connotations. However, the debate over the 'good' and 'ugly' sides of development help us to understand the complex intercultural and now increasingly global scales of contemporary change, development and their counter-tendencies. The 20th century global project, illustrates a set of complex, shifting relations which exist between the academic social sciences and various kinds of knowledge and theory that circulate within the world of development. The nature of these relations between the academic and non-academic sites for the production of both knowledge and theory have been complex and multi-directional.

   The dominant conception from the origins of anthropology as a discipline was the idea of social evolution. Thus the project at the time was to trace the different stages of progression and use the observations of 'savage' and 'barbarian' peoples as evidence that would fill in the earlier stages of what human history had been, thus creating a vision of a kind of human unity. Furthermore it was a device of differentiating and ranking different contemporary society according to their level of evolution, since, "other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress." (Morgan: 1877:vi)[3] This provided an extraordinary powerful narrative for those who told of a single, unified and meaningful story of 'Mankind'.

   The idea of 'development' was central to this race of progress. The development theory of the 19th century based on evolutionist anthropology, reflected basic cultural and philosophical themes with a long and deep history in Western thought and possessed a specificity beyond ideas of 'progress'. If other peoples differed from the western standard, it was only because the has been, 'left behind in the race of progress', and thus they remained one of the prior development levels through which the West had already passed.[4] This had enormous consequence both in anthropology and the wider world. This metaphor for 'development' invited a fusing of the ideas of evolutionary advance with the developmental maturation of an organism or person, thus facilitating the persistent slippage between the contrasts primitive/ civilized and child/ adult that played a key role in ideologies of colonialism.[5]

   Anthropological academic theories of 'functioning systems' and 'social equilibrium' have guided both the practice of applied anthropologists  in colonial Africa, and the formulation of certain official ideas and policies pertaining to 'colonial development'. Nevertheless, applied research initiatives taken up in 1940s/50s by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute helped to shape the theoretical agenda of British academic anthropology, therefore illustrating relations were important and complex. The nature of such relations between academic forms of theory and knowledge and those used in development settings, varies in time across both disciplines. For anthropology the relation between doing development and plain anthropology understood to involve a distinction between the pure and the applied. Although anthropology was the initial discipline, later development arose and anthropology had to suffer division in its subject, objectives and content form. That is 'academic' or 'theoretical' anthropology against 'development' or 'applied' anthropology.

   Anthropologists asking for funding provided scientific advice on such processes, and appeals to practical application were the key to the establishment of British Anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, as the discipline's emphasis turned away from 'salvage anthropology'. The subject of 'development studies' arose as a distinctive field of study
in 1945 as a direct result of this, when western experts became concerned with the modernization of the colonial territories and newly emerging independent countries. Many academic anthropologist became interested in using their knowledge for practical purposes and this branch of anthropology became known as 'applied anthropology' and many collaborated formally and informally with professionals engaged in public administration, social work and agriculture. One of the main areas in which these 'applied' anthropologists have long been active is that of development, and some of the earliest applied work was carried out for the British colonial administrations in Africa, where anthropologists undertook research into areas of specific interest to administrators and provided information or advice to officials or participated in the training of government servants. Anthropology was seen at this time as a tool which gave administrators or business people an ability to understand, and therefore to some extent control, the behaviour of the people with whom they were dealing, whether they were 'natives', employees or consumers in the market place. The gradual professionalism and institutionalism of development after the Second World War led to the creation of formal opportunites for applied anthropologists to work in development agencies or as private development consultants.

   Early anthropologists were engaged in debating two major sets of theoretical issues which bore directly on the practical application of anthropological knowledge. The first of these was the notion of change itself. Within anthropology, social change was initially debated between diffusionists - who saw change as gradually spreading across cultures from a common point, and evolutionists - whose ideas rested on the assumption that all societies, if left alone, would evolve through broadly similar stages. In time the diffusionist arguments, which recognised that cultures interact with each other and are thereby altered, gradually replaced those of the evolutionists. With the growth of functionalism, anthropology began to concern itself more with the means through which societies maintained themselves than with the ways in which they changed.

   The tendency to study societies as if they were static remained strong in the period up to the Second World War, but was challenged by anthropologists interested in what was termed 'culture contact' in the colonial territories.[6] Gradually anthropological work began to take into account the historical context of communities and explanations of social and political change. Increasingly, change came to be seen as inseperable from society itself, and the realisation and acceptance of this by anthropologists and development. The second obstacle which stood in the way of developing an applied anthropology was the issue of cultural relativism, which raised the problem of the ethics of intervention by anthropologists in the communities in which they work - one which has not been resolved and is still debated today. 

   The strategic idea of modernity was organised around attitudes and policies based on a sense of the superiority of those nations that had successfully modernised themselves. Thus, the emulation of 'civilisation' over designated 'barbarism' constituted the construction of a notion of 'time' which posited and differentiated the so-called 'backward' or 'underdeveloped' countries, as representing an earlier stage of technological inferiority and ignorance, as a result of their lack of scientific knowledge and modern legal-rational institutions.[7] The words civilisation and time can easily be exchanged with modernity and modern, which were the goal of the modernisation projects, and sought to identify and eradicate the various traditional, cultural and institutional obstacles that were assumed to block progress. 

   'Development' projects were seen as the answer to the crisis of colonial empires. France and Britain had strong doctrines of colonial self-sufficiency, in the name of which long-term initiatives to improve the colonial infrastructure were repeatedly rejected. However, the concept of development became a framing device bringing together a range of interventionist policies and metropolitan finance with the explicit goal of bringing forward, and modernising the colonies, and essentially 'development' became apart of the colonial project. The development framework was an effort to reinvigorate and relegitimise empire as it was being challenged by nationalist movements, labour militance, and increased questioning of colonial rule. In the end, the colonial development effort had a different effect. It provided a means by which imperial powers could reconcile themselves to their loss of power, while maintaining a connection with their ex-colonies and a continued sense of their mission in shaping their future. The decolonisation period, changed the world order toward different nation states, beyond its previous diverse sorts of political entities. Furthermore, it brought former colonies into relationship with the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and numerous multilateral organisations, which took development out of the colonial realm and made it a basic part of international politics and the internationalisation and politicisation of development. 

   This created a large demand for new kinds of knowledge from specialist to the scientific, and created a demand for training more relevent to the conditions of poor societies in the tropics, where anthropologists led the way. Furthermore, it created a market amongst the newly emerging nation states to accept the advice and scientific 'expertise' in the name of development as it brought financial investment under the banner of development aid. This modernist disposition inspired a narrative concerning the way to achieve rapid economic development in Third World countries, which relates back to the social evolutionary theories of the late 19th century in anthropology which were revived in some forms during the post-war optimism, despite the strong cultural relativist debate, which saw the evolutionism theory as empirically flawed and ethnocentric. 

   Arce and Long have highlighted, that in a paradoxical twist, the transfer to the Third World of European and American fabricated modernities meant they were even more abstract and removed from local social and political realities that its parent varieties and consequently, the policies and beliefs in the power of science and technology were seldom questioned.[8] Any idea of there having existed specific types of modernity linked to the past in these countries before the arrival of colonial rule and development aid was denied, the history of modernity before colonialism now did not exist. In their models, the disciplines in the development field conceived ahistorical and reified traditional societies, whose exoticism revealed to the west the need for these backward societies to strive for development and cultural modernity.

   Despite this, as decolonisation proceeded, the social sciences became more and more concerned with the problems of development of new nations, and in the process, the anthropological concern with social and cultural change became increasingly linked with the idea of development and with modernisation theory was elaborated in other disciplines. Social change now meant development and the evolutionist connotations of the old 19th century was newly appropriated to the mood of the times.  Theoretically, ideas of social evolution became respectable again in American anthropology. This was apart of the optimistic evolutionism inherent to modernisation and became dominant theoretical narrative of West in 1950s/1960s. This is enscapulated in W.W. Rostow's theory of 'evolutionary taxonomy' of five stages through which countries have to pass in order to reach the modern condition.[9] Rostow's works illustrate the forms of economic growth already experienced in the North which are taken as a model for the rest of the world. Economies are situated at different stages of development, all are assumed to be moving in the same direction. Traditional society is poor, irrational and rural. The 'take-off' stage requires a leap forward, based on technology and high levels of investment; preconditions for this are the development of infrastructure, manufacturing and effective government. After this societies reach a stage of self-sustaining growth; in its 'mature' stage, technology pervades the whole economy, leading to 'the age of high mass consumption', high productivity and high levels of urbanisation. Thus 'development' had become 'applied' - and the issue of 'application' has a historical setting.

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