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Accepted Contribution:
In the room where it happens: anthropology, development, and critical distance
Sohini Kar
(London School of Economics)
Being an anthropologist in a department of development raises the question of what balance is necessary between critical distance and the ability to input the insights of disciplinary knowledge and practice into policymaking, particularly when there are contending methodologies and epistemologies.
Contribution long abstract:
While development policy and practice have long been the focus of anthropological analysis, there has been a less sustained focus on the role of anthropology in development. For many anthropologists, there is an important role in the critical distance between policymaking or practice, and ethnographic methods and analysis. On the one hand, this stems from a problematic history of anthropology and colonial knowledge production. On the other, it produces a kind of absence of the anthropological voice in the debates about development.
Anthropology of Development has often sought to maintain a critical distance to the work of development that is not as easily maintained when being in an interdisciplinary department oriented to addressing the issues of development. The question then becomes of what it means to be in greater proximity to the “room where it happens” – where the decisions are made around development policy? What is the balance necessary between academic distance and the ability to input the insights of disciplinary practice and epistemology, when there are contending methodologies and epistemologies?