Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.
Table of Content
List of Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Anthropology of Expertise and Professionals in International Development
David Mosse
Chapter 2. Calculating Compassion: Accounting for Some Categorical Practices in International Development
Maia Green
Chapter 3. Rendering Society Technical: Government Through Community and the Ethnographic Turn at the World Bank in Indonesia
Tania Murray Li
Chapter 4. Social Analysis as Corporate Product: Non-Economists/Anthropologists at Work at the World Bank in Washington DC
David Mosse
Chapter 5. The World Bank’s Expertise: Observant Participation in the World Development Report 2006, Equity and Development
Desmond Mc Neill and Asun Lera St.Clair
Chapter 6. World Health and Nepal: Producing Internationals, Healthy Citizenship and the Cosmopolitan
Ian Harper
Chapter 7. The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence
Rosalind Eyben
Chapter 8. Parochial Cosmopolitanism and the Power of Nostalgia
Dinah Rajak and Jock Stirrat
Chapter 9. Tidy Concepts, Messy Lives: Defining Tensions in the Domestic and Overseas Careers of UK Non-governmental Professionals
David Lewis
Chapter 10. Coda: Alice in Aidland, A Seriously Satirical Allegory
Raymond Apthorpe
Bibliography
Index
About the author
David Mosse is Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has also worked for Oxfam in south India, as a social development adviser for DFID, and as a consultant for various international development agencies. Recent books include Cultivating Development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice (2005); The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International development (2005, ed. with D. Lewis); and Development Translators and Brokers (2006, ed. with D. Lewis).
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