ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which participatory development projects in the environmental field have recently turned towards what their proponents refer to as “traditional institutions,” including “traditional leaders” or “traditional tenure systems,” and attempted to use them instrumentally in their work. It argues that these features illustrate the wider shift in attitudes and approaches to culture on the part of development actors in government and non-governmental organizations, and reveal the way in which that shift is manifest on the ground. In Africa, approaches to development that are trying to build on indigenous culture are far from unusual, and they can be seen as growing in popularity because they serve a variety of different interests. For some policy-makers and campaigners searching for a postcolonial future, they represent the possibility of a
often equated forms of local culture with ethnicity, and it was their project to replace them with new, nationwide, “modern” identities. In the words of Samora Machel, Mozambican President from 1975 to 1986, “for the nation to live, the tribe must die.” Missionaries, both foreign and indigenous, also had, and continue to have, a powerful influence, frequently presenting African cultures as replete with dangerous superstitions and as forms of heathenism. In recent years, as I show in this chapter, some development actors have seen culture as providing a potential refuge and form of protection from a new wave of threats to identity and to livelihoods from globalization (see also Chapter 1, this volume).
