Some describe the anthropological critique of development as one that pits
modernization and an eradication of the indigenous
culture, but this is too reductive and not the case with the majority of scholarly work. In fact, most anthropologists who work in impoverished areas desire the same economic relief for the people they study as policymakers, however they are wary about the assumptions and models on which development interventions are based. Anthropologists and others who critique development projects instead view Western development itself as a product of Western culture that must be refined in order to better help those it claims to aid. The problem therefore is not that of markets driving out culture, but of the fundamental blind-spots of Western developmental culture itself. Criticism often focuses therefore on the cultural bias and blind-spots of Western development institutions, or modernization models that: systematically represent non-Western societies as more deficient than the West; erroneously assume that Western modes of production and historical processes are repeatable in all contexts; or that do not take into account hundreds of years of colonial exploitation by the West that has tended to destroy the resources of former colonial society. Most critically, anthropologists argue that
sustainable development requires at the very least more inclusion of the people who the project aims to target to be involved in the creation, management and decision-making process in the project creation in order to improve development.
Pre-WWII: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute The British government established the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1937 to conduct social science research in British Central Africa. It was part of the colonial establishment, although its head, anthropologist
Max Gluckman, was a critic of colonial rule. Gluckman refused to describe colonialism as a simple case of "culture contact" since it was not a case of cultures mutually influencing each other, but of the forced incorporation of Africans into a foreign social, political and economic system. The anthropologists of the Institute were core members of what came to be known as the "
Manchester school" of anthropology noted for looking at issues of social justice such as apartheid and class conflict.
Culture of poverty The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first prominent appearance in the ethnography
Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist
Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by
poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass. In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to abandon cultural justifications and negative descriptions of poverty, fearing such analysis may be read as "
blaming-the-victim."
Modernization Theory and its critics The most influential modernization theorist in development was
Walt Rostow, whose
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) concentrates on the
economic side of the modernization, and especially the factors needed for a country to reach
"take-off" to self-sustaining growth. He argued that today's underdeveloped areas are in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that therefore the task in helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market. Rostow's unilineal evolutionist model hypothesized all societies would progress through the same stages to a modernity defined by the West. The model postulates that economic growth occurs in five basic stages, of varying length: • Traditional society • Preconditions for take-off • Take-off • Drive to maturity • Age of High mass consumption As should be clear from the subtitle of his book, Rostow sought to provide a capitalist rebuttal to the unilinear Marxist growth models being pursued in the newly independent communist regimes in the second and third world; an effort that would lead to the "
Green revolution" to combat the "
Red revolution".
George Dalton and the substantivists George Dalton applied the substantivist economic ideas of
Karl Polanyi to economic anthropology, and to development issues. The substantivist approach demonstrated the ways in which economic activities in non-market societies were
embedded in other, non-economic social institutions such as kinship, religion and political relations. He therefore critiqued the formalist economic modelling of Rostow. He was the author of "Growth without development: An economic survey of Liberia" (1966, with
Robert W. Clower) and "Economic Anthropology and Development: Essays on Tribal and Peasant Economies" (1971).
Dependency theory Dependency theory arose as a theory in Latin America in reaction to
modernization theory. It argues that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "
World-system" and hence poor countries will not follow Rostow's predicted path of modernization. Dependency theory rejected Rostow's view, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and
structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy and hence unable to change the system. Immanuel Wallerstein's "world-systems theory" was the version of Dependency theory that most North American anthropologists engaged with. His theories are similar to Dependency theory, although he placed more emphasis on the system as system, and focused on the developments of the core rather than periphery. Wallerstein also provided an historical account of the development of capitalism which had been missing from Dependency theory. This book presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." Drawing on Boserup, the WID theorists pointed out that the division of labour in agriculture is frequently gendered, and that in societies practicing
shifting cultivation, it is women who conduct most of the agricultural work. Development projects, however, were skewed towards men on the assumption they were "heads of households." ==Development discourse and the creation of the 'underdeveloped' world==