Critique

of Anthropology
http://coa.sagepub.com/

Development and Anthropology: A View from Inside the Agency

Rosalind Eyben
Critique of Anthropology 2000 20: 7
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X0002000102
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://coa.sagepub.com/content/20/1/7

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Critique of Anthropology can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://coa.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/20/1/7.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Mar 1, 2000

What is This?

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 7

Development and Anthropolog y:

A View from Inside the Agency1
Rosalind Eyben
Department for International Development, UK

Abstract n Insights from postmodernist anthropology can inform development

practice by encouraging eclecticism and challenging orthodoxy, although they
can work against a practical agenda. The most useful insights for development
organizations in recent years have come from the study of transnational coporations, rather than from anthropology. Organizations able to effect change in the
global environment need to be flexible, adaptable and responsive. In the current
context of globalization, interdisciplinarity and pragmatism are more useful to
practitioners seeking implementable policy solutions than a single discipline.
Keywords n anthropology n development policy n globalization

When I first commented on Katy Gardner and David Lewiss book, Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge (1997), I agreed with their
point that those working within development and those studying development discourse may have a lot to say to each other (Eyben, 1997). I also
felt that the voice of anthropologists working within development agencies
had not really been heard in their own book. I wondered whether they
could suggest a framework for a conversation between us. Their response
was gratifying. They invited me to write this piece and suggested I considered how postmodernist approaches might be fed into a practical
agenda, including a consideration of future relations between development anthropology and the practice of development, the potential pitfalls
of anthropologists working for development organizations and whether
the crisis in development, felt acutely by many researchers analysing
development as a discourse, is also experienced by those working in more
practical fields.

The framework for a dialogue

Before considering these issues, let me reflect upon the framework for our
dialogue. Academics and civil servants both rely heavily on the written word
to express their ideas but we do it in rather different ways. I have agreed to
write today in a rather different context from that familiar to me as a
bureaucrat. In my job most of what I write is for internal consumption. My
Vol 20(1) 714 [0308-275X(200003)20:1; 714;011456]
Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 8

8
Critique of Anthropology 20(1)

aim is to influence a non-anthropologist readership. I am paid to use my

personal authority as an expert to shape policy and spending decisions.
My success depends, first, on whether others believe my ideas and arguments are legitimate and credible and, second, whether they can understand what I am writing.
I also write for an external readership but in this case it is very rare for
me to write as a person. In a parliamentary democracy it is right that civil
servants do not become personalities. Most of what I write is never ascribed
to me. Even when my writing is published under my own name, as in this
case, and is accompanied by a disclaimer that the contents reflect my own
views and do not in any way represent official policy, even then I cannot
avoid writing as a member of an organization and my words are carefully
chosen. Academics, including anthropologists, are individuals. You fully
own what you write. This is for me a rare event and I trust I do not speak
with a too uncertain voice.

How postmodernism might be fed into a practical agenda

I regret I was not present at the ASA decennial on the Uses of Knowledge.
I have very much enjoyed reading the series of books resulting from this
conference. According to Peter Harries-Jones (1996), the dominant voice
of the conference was theoretical, descriptive and individualistic in orientation. The counter-voice, on the other hand, presumed there was an intimate linkage between social purposes and anthropology which required
activism. I believe that postmodernist thinking can help that activist
counter-voice in a number of interesting ways. Ever since I was in the sixth
form and decided I wanted to study anthropology at university, the discipline has been for me a means of achieving social purposes. However,
because it was so conservative at that time, anthropology in the 1960s was
much less amenable to our practical agenda than it is today. The fragmentary, ironic and non-universalizing characteristics of postmodernist
thought provide much more room for manoeuvre while letting us move
beyond the dualism of theory and practice.
The assumptions associated with postmodernism which I most value
and which are most relevant for my discussion are:

models and theories on which any one of us bases our understanding are
partial representations of reality, not to be confused with reality itself;
the validity of an idea in an organization is connected to the relative power of
the proponent of the idea and ideas cannot be detached from the person
holding those ideas;
reflexivity and self-consciousness can help individuals and organizations adapt
and respond to external changes and to communicate more easily with others.

Let me look at each of these in turn.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 9

9
Eyben: Development and Anthropology

Any model or theory offers only a partial explanation. The particular

utility of postmodernist anthropology in my own job is summed up by Marilyn
Strathern: If we think we have something to share, we shall share nothing
by claiming to have produced universal insight; each and everyone has his
or her own vision of what is of universal importance (1995a: 170). While
not claiming universal insight, I still need principles to guide my practical
agenda. These continue to be:
1.
2.
3.

People in society from the local to the global can help themselves and help
each other to improve their well-being, as they define it; this is what I mean by
development.
All individuals have equal rights and freedoms to promote their own and
others development, irrespective of age, physical ability, gender and ethnicity.
Sustained and sustainable development is dependent on the practice of
science, that is, knowledge based on the discovery of what is objectively real.

I appreciate that for many social anthropologists these principles

reflect a long-gone historical era of applied social science an era which
they had thought dead and buried by postmodernist undertakers. I believe
postmodernist thought in social anthropology has been very helpful
because deconstruction and reflexivity has made us conscious of what we
are about. So I hold my principles not because I know no better but because
they are what I have freely chosen to believe. I prefer to believe the world is
constructed this way because my belief might help it become so. This does
not mean signing up to what Keith Hart refers to as the ossified 17thcentury epistemology practised by (some) economists. As he says, a modern
science must incorporate notions of history, reflexivity, relativity, linguistic
and logical traps and much else. But he comments further that we must not
forget what science is supposed to be for to be so wrapped up in the ability
to know or communicate anything that the priorities determining what
needs to be known are lost. We must not lose the connection between the
social purposes of knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake
(Hart, 1989). It is no coincidence that social anthropology became a mainstream discipline in development practice during the 1980s. Fieldwork
experience contributes to appreciating multiple perspectives and is an antidote to donor-driven blueprints and models. Reflexivity (to which I return
below) means that we recognize the development professional not as a deus
ex machina but as a social actor with his or her own values and belief systems.
Finally, a postmodernist concern with change and process complements
the traditional development focus on quantifiable outputs. In summary,
social anthropology deconstructs the homogenizing and generalizing
models produced by the established development discourse.
In 1987 I heard a World Bank economist remark that poverty was a
market failure and knew that in one sense he was right, and in another
sense he was wrong. Traditional development economists have made policy
recommendations on the unquestioned (to themselves) assumption that
these are based on a universal and rational insight. It is challenging, yet

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 10

10
Critique of Anthropology 20(1)

stimulating, to deconstruct that universal insight and disconcerting for

them when we refuse to replace one universal explanatory model with
another as a matter of fundamental principle. I believe in creative tension. If
there is a dominant paradigm in an organization, then that paradigm
should be challenged and partial, alternative ways of thinking and doing
offered instead. It is highly likely that we will both be (partially) wrong, or
perhaps both (partially) right. All that anyone can do is offer the best possible explanation and recommendation they can make with the knowledge
and understanding which is available to them.
Offering the best available explanation encourages eclecticism,
another very useful postmodernist characteristic for those with a practical
agenda. Most of the social development specialists working for the UKs
Department for International Development (DFID) have been trained as
social anthropologists but many, including myself, probably rarely think of
ourselves as members of that discipline. To pursue a practical agenda we
will happily borrow other peoples clothes and sleep with strange bedfellows in the social sciences.
Ideas and organizations are intimately interconnected. It can be argued
that ideas only change the world if they are promoted by an organization
(which then sometimes betrays them). Anthropologists committed to
social purposes can take advantage of the ethnographic method to explore
the relationship between ideas and organizations and, with this knowledge, help achieve the outcomes they desire. I am puzzled that anthropologists do not always exploit this advantage. Postmodernist thinking
provides a significant opportunity both to change the development discourse and the organizations promoting development, both of which have
long been dominated by orthodox economics. In contrast to postmodernist anthropology and sociology, economics is, of course, modernist, par excellence. As still generally practised in development agencies, it
is concerned with rational behaviour in a mechanical, linear world of
equilibrium (Ormerod, 1994). Its attachment to universal and reductionist explanations fits neatly with organizational theories based on concepts
of rationality and objective order. Uncertainty and messiness, and the
expression of values and emotions, were unacceptable both in theories of
development and in the explicit structures of organizations promoting
these theories.
As orthodox development discourse loses its dominant position, so we
can take advantage of recent postmodernist organizational theory which
has been developed in business management faculties to explain the
success of certain transnational corporations (TNCs). These TNCs
have developed certain characteristics to enable them to survive and
prosper in a complex, if not chaotic, world. They have to achieve simultaneously global efficiency and impact, national responsiveness and worldwide learning. This means managing contrary tendencies and welcoming
creative tension. They are reflexive and polyphonic (have many voices),

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 11

11
Eyben: Development and Anthropology

communicating horizontally rather than hierarchically, embracing uncertainty and explicitly sharing values (Bartlett and Ghosal, 1991: 516). It is
satisfyingly ironic for social activists that perhaps the most interesting ideas
for understanding postmodern organizations have been developed by
those studying the corporations that rule the world. This work presents a
vision for the shape of organizations which would best promote and take
forward our social purpose agenda. It is a vision where metaphors of conflict and competition are complemented with those of communication and
collective action. Organizations do not seek to control the global environment in which they must survive but are, rather, ready to embrace chaos.
Strategy aims at building solidarity in relations between the people in the
organization and the organizations stakeholders, promoting reflexivity.
Reflexivity and self-consciousness have enormous potential for helping
social actors engage in conversations, rather than in competitions, with
each other. The concept of the peace process for example is a very postmodernist idea which embraces messiness and shifting identities. Last year
I was a guest at a conference in Jerusalem where representatives of Palestinian and Israeli womens organizations were seeking to negotiate a
common programme of cross-community based action as a contribution to
taking forward the peace process. There was a very high level of selfconsciousness and a common understanding about the complex and shifting identities being deployed by the participants. Gender, religion,
ethnicity, sexual orientation were explicit concepts deployed by individuals
to explain themselves and to talk to (or against) each other.
Reflexivity is equally important for organizations. In the last few years
anthropologists in development agencies have been encouraging our
organizations to perceive themselves as an integral part of decision-making
processes. The Overseas Development Administrations (ODA, 1995) Guidance Note on Enhancing Stakeholder Participation made (at that time) the
daring point that ODA was itself one of the stakeholders with its own perspective, culture and agenda. The concept of the stakeholder corporation
(cf. Wheeler and Sillanpaa, 1997) and the growing interest in social auditing is a means by which a development agency can change its relations from
one of donor and recipient to that of partnership. The issue of our own
behaviour then becomes more transparent, something which can perhaps
be discussed for the first time. INTRAC is currently conducting a commissioned study for DFID on Participatory Approaches to Learning (PALS)
and is encouraging our partners to hold up the mirror for us to look at
ourselves:
It was also significant that during interviews, Nepali officials stressed repeatedly
how important they found the inter-personal skills of the donor staff. . . . The
personal qualities particularly mentioned by Nepali officials as facilitating
greater partnership are fluency in Nepali, a good understanding of Nepali
society, time to spend with people and openness and willingness to learn.
(Loizos and Clayton, 1998)

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 12

12
Critique of Anthropology 20(1)

How will our organization change and what will we lose, as well as gain, if
we respond to this Nepali agenda?

Development disappears
Clearly, much of the development discourse was embedded in neo-colonial
thinking by neo-colonial practitioners working for neo-colonial organizations (including development anthropologists like myself). The ancestry
of the former Overseas Development Administration was in the Colonial
Office. The UKs first Overseas Development Act in 1965 was perceived and
drafted as the latest in a long line of Colonial Development and Welfare
Acts with the aim of promoting the development of former colonies or the
welfare of their people. Aid programmes were premised on the concept of
modernization. However, development as a respectable concept really
began to disappear with the collapse of communism and the subsequent
provision of aid to the former communist countries which could hardly be
described as developing. Aid organizations then began to perceive that
other, more traditional recipient countries were also not homogeneous. If
Russia was very different from Ghana, so was Vietnam from South Africa,
and Bangladesh from Bolivia. We, development practitioners, also began to
notice that many characteristics of developing countries were actually
present in the developed world. Oxfam started a programme in Britain;
Christian Aid sent a delegation from West Bengal to Glasgow to undertake
a poverty analysis. In 1996 DFIDs social development advisers spent their
annual conference visiting projects and programmes in the Midlands and
were struck by the commonality of approaches between community based
approaches to poverty reduction in what we are now calling North and
South.
Development as discourse has been replaced by globalization. Much of the
academic concern about what was wrong with classic development discourse
has been carried over into new thinking about globalization and the processes of exclusion. For others, it is a very postmodernist concept as understood for example by Giddens and Soros in their recent dialogue in the New
Statesman and Society on reflexivity and global money markets. The accent on
interconnectedness can be for good as well as bad. It revives an interest in
relationships and networks. Anyones view of the world (partially) depends
upon his or her spatial and temporal/historical position on the globe.
Because we are on the globe and not out in space our horizons are limited
our view of globalization is partial. How we interpret and respond to events
is an outcome of that partial view. Contrary to what one might have
expected, globalization as a concept has contributed to universal theories
going out of favour. We no longer assume and act as if we had a total and
impartial understanding of global events. Globalization itself has helped us
recognize our local perspective. It has led to an appreciation of diversity, of

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 13

13
Eyben: Development and Anthropology

a multitude of explanations, and possibly an equal number of incompatible

solutions. A polyphonic world view recognizes and appreciates this diversity
of explanations. It is an and-and approach (my voice and your voice), rather
than an either-or approach. An and-and approach is inclusive, rather than
exclusive. It encourages partnership, interdependence and stronger
relationships. It gives value to the other point of view. An and-and approach
values relationships; it recognizes the benefits which derive from the construction and maintenance of these relationships.
Positively, globalization can be seen as the process of creating a global
moral community where there is a commitment in practice, as well as in
principle, to listening to the voices of those unlike us. The United Nations
social conferences in the first half of the 1990s established the basic principles of this evolving community. The interpretation and implementation
of these principles will, however, necessarily be localized in terms of
peoples world view and self-identify; the global moral community is a
process of interdependence and relationship rather than a thing. Realistically, there will continue to be transfers of public resources between richer
and poorer countries for a whole multitude of complex reasons. How we
transfer those resources is key. Majid Rahnema (Rahnema and Bawtree,
1997) argues that the post-development era should not be focused on
merely operational or spectacular plans of action or strategies. It will represent a different age only if it is based on the cultivation of friendship and
self-knowledge: an age where friends recognize and appreciate differences.
If the development discourse was about GNP, then the post-development
discourse is about relations. As Marilyn Strathern (1995) has pointed out,
relationships are the bread and butter of anthropology: a concern with the
interconnectedness between the relations between ideas and the relations
between people. In a globalizing world development anthropology has a
bright future provided we do not replace one orthodoxy by another.

Note
1

The views presented here are the authors own and do not represent official
DFID policy.

References
Bartlett, C.A. and S. Ghosal (1991) Global Strategic Management: Impacts on the
New Frontiers of Strategic Research, Strategic Management Journal 12: 516.
Eyben, R. (1997) Review of Gardner and Lewis, Social Development Newsletter, London:
DFID.
Gardner, K. and D. Lewis (1997) Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern
Challenge. London: Pluto.
Harries-Jones, P. (1996) Affirmative Theory: Voice and Counter-Voice at the

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014

02 Eyben (jl/d)

5/1/00 3:04 pm

Page 14

14
Critique of Anthropology 20(1)
Oxford Decennial, in Henrietta L. Moore (ed.) The Future of Anthropological
Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Hart, K. (1989) For the Motion: Social Anthropology is a Generalising Science or
it is Nothing, pp. 216 in T. Ingold (ed.) Key Debates in Anthropological Theory.
London: Routledge.
Loizos, P. and A. Clayton (1998) The Participatory Attitudes to Learning Study:
Selected DFID Projects in Nepal. Draft report for INTRAC/DFID.
ODA (1995) Guidance Note on Enhancing Stakeholder Participation, London,
Overseas Development Administration.
Ormerod, P. (1994) The Death of Economics. London: Faber & Faber.
Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree (1997) The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed.
Strathern, M. (1995a) The Nice Thing about Culture is that Everyone Has It,
pp. 15376 in M. Strathern (ed.) Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Strathern, M. (1995b) The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale. Cambridge: Prickly
Pear Press.
Wheeler, D. and M. Sillanpaa (1997) The Stakeholder Corporation. London: Pitman.

n Rosalind Eyben was Chief Social Development Adviser in the Department for
International Development until early 2000. She is currently working for DFID in
Bolivia. Address: Department for International Development, 94 Victoria Street,
London SW1E 5JL, UK.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at UQ Library on August 14, 2014