Paper short abstract:

My paper is based on my work as a gender consultant in Rural Nepal, which I documented and analyzed (Hertzog 2011). I shall examine how anthropologists are handling personal as well as professional discontent with regard to their problematic role in the "development industry".

Paper long abstract:

My paper is based on my work as a gender consultant for an irrigation company in Rural Nepal, which I documented and analyzed (Hertzog 2011). Becoming aware of my own patronizing position I have adopted a self-critical stance which served me well to purify my shame and to calm down the growing awareness of my compliance with the hierarchical-patriarchal system and with the inevitable ethnocentric position I assumed.

Being one of the numerous anthropologists (and many other social science scholars) who studied development in the "third world" I shall argue in my paper that as much as we, anthropologists, are reflective, moral, human, sensitive to human suffering and injustice, committed to social change, we still are closest to our own interests. Thus, our academic "mission" inherently and inadvertently involves patronizing, manipulation and instrumentalization of our "informants". This situation involves built-in social distance and ethnocentricity that is contained in any researcher-researched relationships. Yet, these are accentuated by far in the encounters of the highly educated scholars from the "West" who come to investigate the "less-developed" in the "East".

In my presentation I shall examine some of the critical anthropological, sociological and feminist literature on development context, that has expanded rapidly since the 1980s. I shall illustrate and elaborate on the manipulative ways in which we, anthropologists and other scholars, are handling personal as well as professional reservations and discontent with regard to our problematic role in the "development industry".