SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The impetus for this book came from a symposium that we organized at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in September 2011. The symposium was the fi rst in a series that we envisaged under the rubric of ‘Critical Conversations in Culture and Development’. While many claims have been made concerning the importance of culture in international development interventions, we were conscious that there was very little in the way of critical refl ection or evaluation of these claims. We were also conscious of the lack of understanding that often exists between the worlds of academic critique, policy making and development practice. Our objective, therefore, was to create a forum in which to bring together different stakeholders and interlocutors in an attempt to foster constructive dialogue and interchange. The challenges of bridging academic critique and theorization, on the one hand, and policy development and implementation, on the other, are well known, and it would be naïve of us to imagine that the meeting brought about any signifi cant breakthrough. We remain committed, however, to the idea that there is a need for such critical conversations: a need to explore, refl exively and dialogically, the relationships not only between different actors and their various perspectives but, even more so, the very concepts of culture and development.