Anthropology and Development: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Hardcover

Gardner, Katy; Lewis, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745333656 ISBN 13: 9780745333656

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2015

Synopsis

Western aid is in decline. Non-traditional development actors from the developing countries and elsewhere are in the ascendant. A new set of global economic and political processes are shaping the twenty-first century.

Anthropology and Development is a completely rewritten new edition of the best-selling and critically acclaimed Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge (1996). It will serve as both an innovative reformulation of the field, and as a textbook for many undergraduate and graduate courses at leading universities in Europe and North America.

The authors Katy Gardner and David Lewis engage with nearly two decades of continuity and change in the development industry. In particular, they argue that while the world of international development has expanded since the 1990s, it has become more rigidly technocratic. Anthropology and Development therefore insists on a focus upon the core anthropological issues surrounding poverty and inequality, and thus redefines what are perceived as problems in the field.

About this title

Review

'Ameliorates the despair which students of development often feel once they come to understand the complexity, and the vested interests, of the aid industry' (LSE Magazine)

An authoritative and up to date overview that combines accurate and insightful overviews of the major contributions in the field with their own original and illuminating arguments. (Professor James Ferguson, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)

In our transforming, turbulent, multi-polar era, ‘development’ has definitively expanded beyond the discourses and practices of an aid industry to encompass far wider capitalist processes – as well as struggles against them. In this welcome new version of their acclaimed earlier book, Gardner and Lewis carve anthropology’s place in this brave new development world – charting and navigating change, questioning its social basis and morality, posing essential questions about who gains, who loses and why, and empowering alternatives. Essential reading for all involved with anthropology or development – and essential proof that they should engage their perspectives with each other more deeply and more often. (Professor Melissa Leach, Anthropologist and Director, Institute of Development Studies)

This new edition of a classical book on anthropology of development and anthropology in development combines the quality of the original with fresh and up-to-date analysis. The already impressive state of arts of the first book has been extended to most of the rapidly expanding literature of the last twenty years. This book is essential for anyone interested by debates concerning the relation between anthropology and development. (Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseilles)

As the ‘post-modern challenge’ to development and social theory came and went, what happened to its insights and perhaps even its excesses? One thing is certain: Development continues to be a powerful cultural imaginary and set of practices, a space of power. By subjecting the “really existing worlds of development” to an acutely perceptive anthropological lens, this carefully reworked volume by two of development’s most accomplished scholars re-invigorates, like no other treatise in the field, the connection between research, critique, and action in inspired and practical ways. Their deeply constructive approach to development results in a compelling Anthropology of Engagement that unveils the tactics of power while at the same time illuminating paths towards less unequal and more livable worlds. (Arturo Escobar, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

About the Author

Katy Gardner is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and is the author of several books including Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh (1995) and Discordant Development (Pluto, 2012).

Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0745333656
• ISBN 13: 9780745333656
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 240