ABSTRACT
This article considers the potential contribution of social anthropology to the study of poverty in development. Despite increasing anthropological attention to the social and institutional relations of international development (Ferguson, 1990; Bornstein, 2003; Haugerud and Edelman, 2004; Mosse, 2004) social anthropology has remained to some extent outside the formal apparatus of development studies (Cernea, 1995; De L'Estoile, 1997; Green, 2005) to the extent that development studies has been viewed at least partially in some recent ethnographies of development as part of the research problematic (for example Ferguson, 1990; Escobar, 1991). The ambivalent relationship between anthropology and international development has contributed to an apparent paradox in development studies, that despite the longstanding association of social anthropology with research in communities and countries where the effects of poverty are pronounced, social and cultural anthropology has not yet prioritised poverty as an object of study (Ferguson, 1979; Booth et al., 1990). 1
