ABSTRACT
The Exchange Between Glynn Flood and Sandy Robertson resonates as sharply now as when it was written over twenty-five years ago. At issue is not merely an anthropologist's concern for ‘his people’, and the desire to preserve a vanishing lifestyle for some open-air museum of human cultures; nor even a controversy about the impact of capitalist development on the Awash Valley area of Ethiopia. It is much more basically about the idea of ‘development’ itself, about whether it has anything to offer the indigenous peoples of the areas in which it takes place, and about the sustainability of pastoralism within the modern world economy.
