Whose Development?

Download or read book Whose Development? written by Emma Crewe and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an ethnography of development in practice. It builds on recent work in the anthropology of development in its examination of the evolution and persistence of a number of key ideas about gender, technology and race. It explores how these are rooted in both material practices and ideologies, notably the Enlightenment and colonialism, but goes beyond previous studies which have tended to focus mainly on the apparently monolithic power of the developers. The authors argue for a more nuanced account of power through analysis of the relationship between individual agency and structural constraint. Their fascinating study shows how a simple dichotomy between "us," the developers, and "them," the victims of development, misconstrues the nature of the proccesses involved.