6 - Conclusion: Anthropology and planned development

Summary

This book has sought to demonstrate how anthropologists can usefully turn their interests and aptitudes to the study of development institutions. In this concluding chapter we discuss the often sceptical attitudes of anthropologists to planned development. We argue that rather than evading involvement in planning we should seek to make a more appropriate contribution to it by applying our interest in social structure and process, and in the diversity of human societies, to the urgent task of proposing and analysing alternative forms of social organisation. As we have insisted in previous chapters, it is only when we have more realistic, rational and humane images of our collective future that coherent planning will become practicable.

As a major force for change in the contemporary world planned development affects, broadly and intricately, the lives of ordinary people who are the subjects of anthropological enquiry. An interest in development is therefore inescapable, but there is a marked lack of agreement among anthropologists in attitudes to planning, particularly with regard to their active involvement. The strength of feeling which debate about these matters can arouse says a great deal about the nature of the discipline and the vocation of its disciples. For anthropologists, the world of planned development is full of painful contradictions: the virtues and vices of state intervention, the costs and benefits of primitive ways of life, the moral and political dilemmas of active commitment or passive disengagement.