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practices would 'die out' or be 'bred out' of a people, as non-Western
peoples would eventually adopt the cultural values of Western Europe
and North America (Schech and Haggis, 2000: 19).
Alongside such ethnocentric, destructive approaches to culture,
anthropological accounts were perhaps more positive, in that they rec-
ognized the plurality and diversity of cultures around the world.
However, non-Western cultures were romanticized and constructed as
'Other' to Western cultures. Culture was seen primarily in terms of
'exotic authenticity', as anthropologists strove to document the mean-
ings, values, social practices and ways of life of particular 'tribes'
(Schech and Haggis, 2000). This led to exoticized, stereotypical repre-
sentations of non-Europeans and their 'traditional' ways of life, such as
the idea of the 'noble savage' who was perceived as being closer to
nature and existing outside modernity.
Within both of these dominant perspectives, culture was viewed as a
discrete, bounded entity and non-Western people were constructed as
inferior and 'Other' in relation to the Western norm. Since the 1990s,
however, post-colonial and post-development critiques of modernization
and neoliberal development paradigms have deconstructed the cultural
assumptions and values that underpin development (Escobar, 1995;
Kothari, 2006). Such perspectives have revealed that the notion of
progress implicit within development discourses was based on an eth-
nocentric world view of modernity. 'Development' is understood to oper-
ate as a discourse of power/knowledge within which the relations
between the First and Third Worlds are constructed, imagined and
operationalized (Said, 1978; Hall, 2002; Schech and Haggis, 2000;
McEwan, 2001).
Such developments within post-colonial and post-development theo-
ries have been accompanied by a wider 'cultural turn' in the social sci-
ences from the 1970s onwards, which has led to more dynamic
understandings of 'culture'. The importance of culture to the production
of knowledge has been increasingly recognized by cultural studies pro-
ponents and post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault. These
perspectives challenge the view of culture as a static, single entity, but
rather regard culture as being shaped by multiple flows, exchanges and
interactions. Processes of globalization challenge binary models of
'modernity/tradition', 'core/periphery' and the dominant values under-
lying modernization and Marxist development theories. From this per-
spective, culture can be defined as 'a network of representations - texts,
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