SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The direct involvement of anthropologists in international development ebbs and flows, while ethnographic researchers consistently offer a critique of aid, especially the damage it causes. Anthropologists' navigation of the ethics, pressures, and contradictions of aid has in common with all development professionals an increasing preoccupation with managerialism and a focus on representation, funding, planning, and audit. They stand with fewer allies in their aim to amplify the diverse voices of those on the periphery. The pessimism and critical mode of anthropological research on international development is explained through ethnographic examples organized around key development themes of poverty, technology, rights, governance, security, and empowerment. Anthropologists continue to offer a distinctive perspective: wary of reductive generalization and attentive to specific context (time and place); empirical, historical, and reflexive; and interweaving attention to method with theory in their interpretations. The institutional exigencies and power hierarchies that they understand intimately, but struggle to overturn, limit their impact.