ABSTRACT
Since the 1950s, the international development industry has brought agricultural modernisation programs – or Green Revolutions (GRs) – to many parts of the so-called Third World. In many cases, GRs have spawned postdevelopment resistance – anti-GRs – that urge the affirmation of culture and the revalorisation of lost or existing local or Indigenous knowledge. Comparing the mature post-GR, postdevelopment of Andean Peru with stifled postdevelopment practice in East Timor, it is shown that the knowledge politics surrounding development and postdevelopment can be understood as a struggle for legitimacy. Through the author’s personal research experience in the field as well as his problematic dealings with applied anthropology development consultants, it is shown that researchers of development and postdevelopment not only witness such struggles, they also become embroiled in them. In a context where development industry actors have grown increasingly chary of critical research, advice is offered to ethnographers of development and postdevelopment in practice.
