ABSTRACT
There has been a concerted effort by theorists in recent years to shift culture from the margins of development studies and to demonstrate that it is, and always has been, central to understandings of development processes and their impacts on peoples and societies around the world (Porter, Allen, and Thompson 1991; Allen 2000; Schech and Haggis 2000). Michael Watts (2003; also Watts, this volume), for example, argues that culture has always been at the center of post-war development theory. Colonial governmentality worked through local culture to gradually construct or attempt to construct a new sort of colonial subject and yet, paradoxically, traditional cultures were also seen as an impediment to progress, innovation and “development.” Modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s were unable to see beyond culture; theorists “read culture out of their own theory of the modern” (Watts 2003: 434). Cultural difference has been perceived to have consequences for growth, from the cultural particularities of the Southeast Asian “tiger” economies (Rigg 1997) to the perceived deficiencies of African moral economies (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). More recently, as Watts argues, there has been a shift away from theories in which development describes a transition from tradition to modernity where cultures converge to those that see modernity and development as
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– “it is irreducibly cultural geographic” (Watts 2003: 435). Development is now recognized as culturally and ethnographically grounded – in projects, development institutions and so on – and thus there is a need for an institutional ethnography of development. In addition, theorists and activists seeking to posit alternatives to dominant notions of “development” are sensitive to how alterity1 and cultural diversity make a difference to imagining and reimagining development and in thinking about alternatives.
