In Development Anthropology: Putting Culture First, Hari Mohan Mathur highlights the role of culture—and anthropological work more broadly—in development outcomes. Anthropologists’ contributions in this area have traditionally received little attention, but this changed when the World Bank released the 2015 World Development Report. This report focused on the social, cultural, and psychological influences which affect the development process, and like Mathur, stressed the criticality of anthropological and other social sciences’ knowledge for the success of development efforts. A major contribution to development anthropology, this book will interest anthropologists, economists, sociologists, other social scientists, policy makers, planners, development practitioners, researchers and trainers, and will be particularly useful for graduate students planning their career in the field of development.

Essay explaining the potential contribution of social and cultural anthropology to economic and social development in developing countries - in the light of traditional family life style, and social structure of nomads and peasant farmers, discusses customary law governing land title, land reform, land improvement, and income generating activities of rural women; investigates roots of economic disparity, informal sector entrepreneurship, resettlement due to dam construction, slum clearance and urbanization, etc. Bibliography.

This book re-establishes the relevance of mainstream anthropological (and sociological) approaches to development processes and simultaneously recognizes that contemporary development ought to be anthropology‘s principal area of study. Professor de Sardan argues for a socio-anthropology of change and development that is a deeply empirical, multidimensional, diachronic study of social groups and their interactions. The Introduction provides a thought-provoking examination of the principal new approaches that have emerged in the discipline during the 1990s. Part I then makes clear the complexity of social change and development, and the ways in which socio-anthropology can measure up to the challenge of this complexity. Part II looks more closely at some of the leading variables involved in the development process, including relations of production; the logics of social action; the nature of knowledge; forms of mediation; and ‘political‘ strategies.

An exploration of anthropological perspectives on the cultures, moralities and politics of the world of aid and development.

Non-Aboriginal material.