ABSTRACT
Development theory emerged as a separate body of ideas following the Second World War. From its inception, it necessarily had to deal with peoples having a wide variety of ways of life and outlooks. However, few writers put culture at the heart of their analyses, and even anthropologists tended to see their subject-matter as something that was disappearing before their own eyes. It was assumed that, with the end of colonialism and the adoption of the correct policies, 'traditional' cultures would disappear and the world would become rapidly 'modernised', a view reflected in the title of Lerner's book of 1958, The Passing of Traditional Society.
