ABSTRACT

The role of culture in development has become an important subject in the development literature since the mid-1990s. Scholars increasingly recognize culture’s interconnectedness with the many and varied economic, political and social changes which developing societies are experiencing in their quest to modernize, and the impossibility of understanding such changes without taking ‘the cultural factor’ into account. As Tim Allen (1992: 337) points out in an early contribution to the literature on culture and development, ‘religion and kinship are just as significant as economic transactions and the political life of nation states, and in fact these things are not really separable or comparable’.