Development is a key concept in Western culture and philosophy (cf. Nisbet 1969; Williams 1985) that figures in anthropology in two different ways. In its broadest sense, the idea of ‘development’ was central to nineteenth-century social evolutionism, which pictured human history as a unilinear developmental progression from ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ levels of social evolution toward the ‘civilized’ status represented by the modern West. From the mid-twentieth century, the term has mostly referred to a more specifically economic process, generally understood to involve the expansion of production and consumption and/or rising standards of living, especially in the poor countries of the ‘Third World’. In this second sense, the term is especially associated with the international projects of planned social change set in motion in the years surrounding World War II, which gave birth to ‘development agencies’, ‘development projects’, and, ultimately, to ‘development studies’ and ‘development anthropology’. The two usages of the term are normally treated separately, but an understanding of how the concept of development has functioned in anthropology requires that the two be considered together, in their historical relation.
Development and evolution
The origins of anthropology as a discipline are conventionally traced to the late nineteenth century, and to such ‘founding father’ figures as Lewis Henry Morgan in the USA, and E.B. Tylor in Britain. The dominant conception that such thinkers elaborated, and the key idea that gave to anthropology its early conceptual coherence as a discipline, was the idea of social evolution. Against the common nineteenth-century assumptions that ‘savages’ such as the Australian Aborigines or Native Americans were either essentially different kinds of creature than ‘civilized’ Europeans (the racist supposition), or examples of degeneration, showing just how far from God and original perfection it was possible for miserable sinners to fall (a theological interpretation dating back to the Middle Ages), the social evolutionists insisted that ‘savages’ and ‘civilized men [sic]‘ were fundamentally the same type of creature, and that if ‘higher’ forms existed, it was because they had managed to evolve out of the ‘lower’ ones (rather than vice-versa, as degeneration theory had it). As Morgan put it in the closing lines of Ancient •Society (1877: 554):
We owe our present condition, with its multiplied means of safety and of happiness, to the struggles, the sufferings, the heroic exertions and the patient toil of our barbarous, and more remotely, of our savage ancestors. Their labors, their trials and their successes were a part of the plan of the Supreme Intelligence to develop a barbarian out of a savage, and a civilized man out of this barbarian.
The project this implied for the new field of anthropology was to trace the different stages of this development, and to use observations of ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ peoples as evidence that would fill in what the earlier stages of human history had been. Thus did non-Western peoples end up construed as living fossils, lingering in early developmental stages through which the West had long ago passed. This was a vision of a kind of human unity. But it was also a device of differentiating and ranking different contemporary societies according to their level of evolutionary development, since (in spite of the best laid plans of the Supreme Intelligence) ‘other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress’ (Morgan 1877: vi). The metaphor of ‘development’ invited, too, a fusing of the idea of evolutionary advance with the developmental maturation of an organism or person, thus facilitating the persistent slippage between the contrast ‘primitive’/'civilized’ and ‘child’/ ‘adult’ that played a key role in ideologies of colonialism.
There are three underlying premises embedded in nineteenth-century social evolutionism that are worth emphasizing. First, there is the central idea that different societies are to be understood as discrete individuals, with each society making its way through the evolutionary process at its own pace, independently of the others. Second is the insistence that although each society is in some sense on its own, all societies are ultimately heading toward the same destination; human history is one story, not many. Finally, the social evolutionary schemes posited that differences between human societies were to be interpreted as differences in their level of development. If other peoples differed from the Western standard, it was only because, ‘left behind in the race of progress’, they remained at one of the prior developmental levels through which the West had already passed. Taken together, these three principles frame a formidable and durable vision of human history and human difference, ‘a vast, entrenched political cosmology’ (Fabian 1983: 159) that has been of enormous consequence both in anthropology and in the wider world.
Anti-evolutionism and relativism
Within anthropology, the evolutionary schemes of nineteenth-century theorists like Morgan and Tylor are generally taken to have been definitively refuted in the early twentieth century, most of all by the criticisms developed by Boas and his historically oriented school in American anthropology and by the functionalist school in British anthropology, led by Malinowski. In the wake of their devastating criticisms of the empirical adequacy of the nineteenth-century evolutionary schemes, the emphasis on sorting societies according to their level of evolutionary development largely dropped out of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. Both in the USA and Britain, though in different ways, a critique of speculative evolutionism was followed by moves toward relativism in conceptions of progress and development. From whose point of view could one society be seen as ‘higher’ than another, after all? Evolutionism came to be seen not only as empirically flawed, but as ethnocentric as well. The task, instead, came to be seen as one of understanding each unique society ‘in its own terms’, as one of many possible ways of meeting human social and psychological needs (Malinowski), or as one ‘pattern of culture’ (Benedict), one ‘design for living’ (Kluckhohn) among others.
At one level, such shifts did mark a clear break with evolutionist ideas of ‘development’: non-Western cultures, in the new view, were no longer to be understood as ‘living fossils’ trapped in evolutionary stages through which the West itself had already passed. Different societies now really were different, not just the same society at a different stage of development. Yet the break with evolutionism was less complete than it is often made to appear. It is significant, for instance, that mid-twentieth-century relativist approaches (whether Boasian in the USA or functionalist in Britain) preserved the old evolutionist idea (which an earlier emphasis on diffusion had challenged) that different societies were to be conceived of as so many separate individuals. Even more striking, perhaps, is the way that post-evolutionist approaches preserved the grand binary distinction between primitive and modern societies, and accepted that anthropology’s specialization would remain the study of primitive societies. No longer would different primitive societies be placed on a ladder and ranked against each other; all were now equally valid, forming whole culture patterns (USA) or functioning systems (Britain) worth studying in their own right. But they were still seen as a distinctive class set apart from, and in some sense prior to, ‘modern’, ‘Western’, ‘civilized’ society. It is telling that both the label, ‘primitive’ (or some close synonym), and the underlying category, were accepted by the leading anti-evolutionist anthropological theorists right up until the 1960s and 1970s (and even later, in some cases).
‘Practical anthropology’ and postwar modernization
A major geo-political restructuring, and with it a new burst of social engineering, reconfigured the political and institutional landscape of the social sciences in the years following World War II. Cooper (1998) has recently begun to excavate the origins of a global project of ‘development’ from within the postwar planning of the colonial empires. One important early finding of this work is that, in the process of decolonization, a strategically vague story about development came to provide an ambiguous charter both for retreating colonial bureaucrats and for ascendant nationalist rulers. This charter, a broad vision that came to be shared by a wide set of transnational elites, framed the ‘problems’ of the ‘new nations’ in the terms of a familiar (at least to those schooled in nineteenth-century anthropology) developmentalist story about nations (conceived, again, as individuals) moving along a predetermined track, out of ‘backwardness’ and into ‘modernity’ (Chatterjee 1986; cf. Ludden 1992).
It was within the terms of this narrative that a host of ‘development agencies’, programmes of ‘development aid’, and so forth, were conceived and put into place in the years following World War II (Escobar 1995). One of a number of consequences of this development was that funding and institutional positions became increasingly available for those with the sorts of expertise presumed necessary to bring about the great transformation. It is at this point that ‘development’ and anthropology began to come together in a new way.
In the years prior to World War II, ‘development’ had been a central, if often unacknowledged, theoretical concept in anthropology. For Morgan, of course, the question of how societies ‘developed’ from one evolutionary stage to the next was an explicit theoretical concern. Even for an arch-relativist like Benedict, the distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ societies was a theoretically motivated one. Yet with the new project of official modernization, issues of ‘development’ came increasingly to belong not to the academic world of theory (which remained largely devoted to comparing and generalizing about ‘primitive societies’) but to a domain of ‘applied’ work. The explicit coining of the term ‘development anthropology’ comes only later, in the 1970s. But already in the postwar years, the old domain of applied or policy-relevant work (often focused on such things as ‘culture contact’, ‘acculturation’, and ‘social change’) was beginning to become part of a larger, better funded configuration known as ‘development’.
As early as 1929, Malinowski had called for a ‘Practical Anthropology’, which would be an ‘anthropology of the changing Native’ and ‘would obviously be of the highest importance to the practical man in the colonies’ (1929: 36). But though Malinowski readily used his often grandiose claims for anthropology’s practical utility for colonialism to beat the drum for more funding, the actual status that such work enjoyed within the discipline is revealed by fLucy Mair’s recollection that ‘Malinowski sent me to study social change because, he said, I didn’t know enough anthropology for fieldwork of the standard type’ (in Grillo 1985: 4). After World War II, the status of applied work on social change (increasingly referred to in terms of ‘development’ or ‘modernization’ rather than ‘culture contact’ or ‘social change’) would significantly improve (though never fully escaping the stigma of the ‘applied’). In British anthropology, for instance, the fRhodes-Livingstone Institute conducted work that was at least ostensibly applied to practical ‘colonial development’ policy, while at the same time enjoying a very significant impact on anthropological theory (largely through the leadership of its one time director, fMax Gluckman, and the links between the Institute and a leading academic department at Manchester). In the USA, meanwhile, such a leading figure as fMargaret Mead championed the potential contribution of anthropology to a wide variety of development issues, especially the easing of the transition of ‘primitive’ peoples into the modern world.
If, as fFabian has argued, anthropology’s earlier shift from evolutionism to relativism had resulted in the issue of developmentalist progressions being turned ‘from an explicit concern into an implicit theoretical assumption’ (1983: 39), the postwar era began to see a shift back to explicit concern. What had been a background theoretical assumption (a fundamental difference between primitive and modern societies) was abruptly shifted from the background to the foreground, and from the passive voice to the active. Increasingly, the question became: How do primitives become modern? And how could they be helped (or made) to make this transition? Significantly, this question was now linked less with theoretical speculation than with explicit programmes of directed social change. The grand project that Morgan had seen as reserved for ‘the Supreme Intelligence’ — ‘to develop … a civilized man out of this barbarian’ — was now understood to be a job for the merely mortal intelligence of anthropologists.
As the anthropological concern with social and cultural change became increasingly linked (especially in the USA) with ‘modernization theory’ as formulated in other disciplines (notably political science and sociology), ideas of linear developmental stages that would have been quite familiar to Morgan began to reappear in surprisingly explicit ways (e.g. Rostow 1960). Theoretically, ideas of social evolution began to become respectable again in American anthropology (starting with Leslie White in the 1940s, and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s, with figures like Service, fSahlins, and fHarris). But even anthropologists who kept their distance from the neo-evolutionist revival (e.g. Mead, cited above, or fClifford Geertz, in his early work on Java) began to bend their work in the direction of ‘modernization’. A parallel process seems to have allowed British functionalists, also sceptical by training of evolutionary narratives, to endorse and participate in both colonial development schemes, and later projects of state-led ‘modernization’ (Grillo 1985).
Yet while the nineteenth-century conception of evolutionary ‘stages’ was nothing if not a theoretical formula, which aimed at the explanation of both human history and human diversity, the mid-twentieth-century revival of a ‘stage’ theory of development was chiefly linked to applied work, and to the problem of contemporary economic transitions. Studying the development of ‘traditional’ peoples in modernizing societies was thought to be of mostly ‘practical’ or ‘policy’ significance, and the theoretical core of the discipline remained the description and comparison of societies and cultures as little contaminated by ‘development’ as possible.
Neo-Marxist critique
A major disruption of the received anthropological wisdom regarding ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ came with the rise of dependency theory and a set of neo-Marxist critiques of both modernization theory and traditional anthropology. The contributions of Marxist anthropology are discussed elsewhere (see Marxism and anthropology, world systems, political economy, mode of production); here it is useful simply to point out that the neo-Marxist critiques of the 1970s fundamentally challenged two key pillars of developmentalist thought in anthropology.
First, and perhaps most profoundly, the new critiques rejected the picture of the world as an array of individual societies, each moving through history independently of the others. This, as I suggested above, was a vision that was largely shared by the nineteenth-century evolutionists and their twentieth-century critics, who disagreed about whether the different tracks all headed in the same direction but accepted the idea of different and separate tracks. In place of this conception, anthropologists influenced by dependency theory, neo-Marxist modes of production theory, and world systems theory, began to insist that differences between societies had to be related to a common history of conquest, imperialism, and economic exploitation that systematically linked them. Supposedly ‘traditional’ practices and institutions, rather than being relics of a pre-capitalist past, might instead be interpreted as products of, or reactions to, processes of capitalist penetration, the articulation of modes of production, or world-system incorporation. And poverty, rather than an original condition, might be a result of such processes. Instead of being simply ‘undeveloped’ (an original state), the Third World now appeared as actively ‘underdeveloped’ by a first world that had ‘underdeveloped’ it.
This brings us to the second pillar of devel-opmentalist thought that was brought into question in this period: the assumed identity of development with a process of moral and economic progress. Neo-Marxists insisted that what was called ‘development’ was really a process of capitalist development: the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production at the expense of existing pre-capitalist ones. And the outcome of such a process might not be ‘real development’, in the sense of a better life for people in the Third World, at all. ‘Development’ (really, capitalist development), then, might not be ‘progress’ in any simple way; indeed, for poor peasants, it was likely to make life much worse. The benign moral teleology of the ‘development’ story (a central feature of nineteenth-century anthropology and 1960s ‘modernization theory’ alike) was radically called into question.
These two breaks with anthropology’s devel-opmentalist heritage were of fundamental importance. Indeed, it could be suggested that any project for restructuring anthropology’s disciplinary relation to ‘development’ would do well to take them as a promising point of departure. However, it is also evident that for neo-Marxism, world history still had the character of a developmentalist evolution, with the march of the capitalist mode of production leading in a linear, teleological progression toward a future that would culminate (if only after a long process of struggle) in socialism. There remained, too, a tenacious attachment to the idea of ‘real development’ (in the name of which mal- or ‘under-’ development could be denounced). And if capitalism could not deliver the ‘real development’ goods, neo-Marxism was prepared to promise that socialism could — and even, all too often, to endorse the exploitation of peasant producers by radical Third World states in the name of ‘socialist development’ (cf. Phillips 1977; Williams 1978).
‘Development anthropology’
It is ironic, but probably true, that the very popularity within anthropology of the radical, neo-Marxist critiques of orthodox development and modernization theory in some ways set the stage for a new era of closer collaboration between anthropologists and the organizations and institutions of capitalist development policy. If nothing else, the radical critiques made it more legitimate, and more intellectually exciting, to study issues of ‘development’ in the context of an increasingly radicalized and politicized discipline. At a time when university-based scholarship was under pressure to demonstrate its relevance, and when anthropology was particularly challenged to show that it had something to say about change, not just stasis, and about the modern world, not just the ‘tribal’ one, a politically engaged and theoretically challenging approach to ‘development’ had considerable appeal.
At the same time, the wider institutional context was changing quite dramatically. Driven by an awareness of the failures of conventional development interventions, and mindful of the apparent successes of communist insurgencies in mobilizing poor peasants (especially in Asia and Latin America), mainstream development agencies began in the mid-1970s to place a new emphasis on the basic needs of the poor, and on the distinction between mere economic growth and ‘real development’, understood in terms of such measures of human welfare as infant mortality rates, nutrition, and literacy. The World Bank, under the leadership of Robert MacNa-mara, and later the US Agency for International Development (USAID), directed by Congressional mandate to focus its aid on the poor, began to pay more attention to the ‘soft’, ‘social’ side of development policy, and to turn more readily to social sciences other than economics. This conjunctural moment, fitting nicely with an employment crisis in academic anthropology, gave rise to a burst of anthropological interest in development, and a new, recognized subfield of anthropology, ‘development anthropology’. For reviews of this period see Hoben 1982; Escobar 1991.
The intellectual and political failings of this subfield have been analysed by ^Escobar (1991), who shows how anthropological work on ‘development’ came to be more and more adjusted to the bureaucratic demands of development agencies, at the expense of intellectual rigour and critical self-consciousness. In the process, the ambitious theoretical and political agenda that had characterized anthropological work on ‘development’ in the days of radical ‘under-development theory’ largely fell by the wayside, leaving behind a low-prestige, practice-oriented subfield of ‘development anthropology’, recognizably anthropological in its ‘grassroots’ focus and vaguely populist sympathies, but commonly understood to be ‘applied’, and to have little to do with academic anthropological theory. Academic anthropologists, meanwhile, have mostly kept their distance from ‘development’, although a few have begun to train an anthropological lens on the ‘development apparatus’ itself, taking as an ethnographic object the very ideas and institutions on which ‘development anthropology’ often uncritically relies (e.g. Robertson 1984; Ferguson 1990; Pigg 1992; Escobar 1995).
To make sense of the division between an applied, ‘development’ anthropology, and an academic, ‘theoretical’ sort, it is necessary to note that academic anthropology itself continues to be defined in disciplinary terms that are in some ways continuous with its nineteenth-century roots as the science of the less developed. In this sense, ‘development’ (or its absence), far from defining a mere subfield within the discipline, continues to be at the heart of the constitution of anthropology itself. In one sense, of course, anthropology’s old, developmentalist assumptions have been long overturned; anthropologists today do not seek out untouched primitives, but routinely deal with questions of history and transformation, with the way local communities are linked to a wider world, and with a host of non-traditional substantive questions. The extent to which the field has been able to leave its old developmentalist assumptions behind, however, has been limited by a number of factors.
Perhaps the most important such factor is the way that the anthropological specialization is shaped by the conventional division of academic labour between the social scientific disciplines. What distinguishes anthropology from sociology, political science, and other fields continues, in practice, to be largely a matter of the kinds of societies or settings that they study. Anthropologists, in practice (at least those who are trained and hired by ‘leading departments’), continue to work mostly in the ‘Third World’, and to specialize disproportionately in the study of small, rural, isolated, or marginal communities. Anthropologists today are expected, it is true, to address questions of the transformation of local communities, and of linkages with wider regional and global processes; but it remains the case that it is a particular kind of people that anthropologists are typically interested in seeing change, and a particular kind of local community that they seek to show is linked to that wider world.
The idea of ‘the local’, in fact, has come to assume a remarkably prominent place in anthropology’s disciplinary self-definitions. Where once anthropology studied ‘the savage’, ‘the primitive’, ‘the tribal’, ‘the native’, ‘the traditional’, today we are more likely to be told that anthropologists study ‘the local’. More and more, anthropology seems to be defined as a kind of attentiveness to ‘local knowledge’, or a field that specializes in the study of ‘local people’ in ‘local communities’ (thus, not incidentally, a sort of study that must be carried out ‘in the field’). Such a definition undoubtedly encompasses a wider range of phenomena than the older conception of ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ societies. But even if it is true that all social processes are in some sense ‘local’, it is also clear that, in normal anthropological practice, some problems, some research settings, even some people, seem to be more ‘local’ than others. Unsurprisingly, it is the least ‘developed’ who are generally understood to be the most ‘local’.
Insofar as a certain opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, continues to inform the constitution of anthropology as an academic discipline, the concept of ‘development’ must retain a special salience, sitting as it does astride this venerable binary opposition. For the kind of societies and settings that anthropologists typically study and the kind they do not are separated precisely by ‘development’ (those that haven’t experienced ‘development’ are most anthropological; those that are ‘developed’ are least; and those in between, ‘developing’, are in the middle of the spectrum of anthropological-ness). Indeed, it is clear not only that anthropologists have mostly studied in ‘less developed countries’, but also that they have tended to study ‘less developed’ categories of people within those countries (indigenous native peoples in Brazil, ‘tribal’ or ‘hill’ people in Southeast Asia, foragers in Southern Africa, and so on). Likewise, when anthropologists work in the ‘developed world’, they tend to study the poor, the marginal, the ‘ethnic’, in short, the Third World within. (Significantly, anthropologists in the West usually work in settings that might also make good sites for ‘community development programmes’.) In all these cases, too, those who lack ‘development’ are those who putatively possess such things as authenticity, tradition, culture: all the things that ‘development’ (as so many anthropologists have over the years agreed) places in peril.
We are left, then, with a curious dual organization binding anthropology to ‘development’: the field that fetishizes the local, the autonomous, the traditional, locked in a strange dance with its own negation, its own evil twin that would destroy locality, autonomy, and tradition in the name of progress. Anthropology resents its twin fiercely (hence the oft-noted distaste of mainstream anthropology for ‘development’ work), even as it must recognize a certain intimacy with it, and a disturbing, inverted resemblance. Like an unwanted ghost, or an uninvited relative, ‘development’ haunts the house of anthropology. Fundamentally disliked by a discipline that at heart loves all those things that development intends to destroy, anthropology’s evil twin remains too close a relative to be simply kicked out. Thus do we end up with an ‘applied’ subfield (‘development anthropology’) that conflicts with its own discipline’s most basic theoretical and political commitments (hence its ‘evil’); yet which is logically entailed in the very constitution of that field’s distinctive specialization (hence its status as ‘twin’ to a field that is always concerned with the ‘less’, the ‘under’, the ‘not-yet’ … developed).
To move beyond this impasse will require a recognition that the extraordinarily tenacious vision of a world divided into the more and less ‘developed’ has been, and in many ways continues to be, definitive of the anthropological domain of study. It may even be suggested that the idea of ‘development’ (and its lack) is so intimately intertwined with the idea of anthropology that to be critical of the concept of ‘development’ requires, at the same time, a critical re-evaluation of the constitution of the discipline of anthropology itself.
