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.

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.

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.

Hari Mohan Mathur presents an account of how anthropology, long relegated to the background by economists, is beginning to have an effect on development matters, especially in developing counties where rural and tribal people are the dominant groups.

Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society. Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization theory. Reconsideration of these debates will enrich contemporary thinking regarding the history of American anthropology and international development