ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly outlines the rise and partial decline of neoliberal doctrine in the period since around 1980. It examines several recent ethnographic attempts to engage with contemporary development challenges and the dynamics of capitalism. Anthropologists have had an uneasy, ambivalent relationship with development. On the one hand, in the social-scientific division of labor, the discipline traditionally focused on what Michel-Rolphe Trouillot tellingly termed “the savage slot” in the less developed peripheries of the poorer countries. Development for these people could signal their physical or cultural death and thus the loss of anthropology’s objects of study. On the other hand, anthropologists’ intimate engagement with those they study often leads them to embrace their interlocutors’ hopes of a better life. Frequently, anthropologists and other scholars had occasion to witness development interventions that either failed as a result of inadequate cultural knowledge or that generated benefits mainly for rent-seeking elites.
