ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a special-purpose plan made for Egypt's Western Desert New Valley in the early 1980s. It explores the wisdom of hindsight to point out how better use of the team's social scientist could have improved the plan. The chapter illustrates by dwelling on the extreme case where the planning is dominated by numerical modeling, a methodology seldom associated with anthropology. It argues that regional planning is at once among the most useless of pursuits, for anthropologists or anyone, since plans are seldom implemented in toto or even in part—but yet quite useful if the drafters perceive their acts as regional scenario making and policy advising. Anthropologists, using both the formal and the more ad hoc research techniques they are accustomed to, are best equipped for sharpening the information at hand on key issues. An anthropologist, especially one experienced with the language and the people of the region, however, could deal much more competently with farmers than the economist.
