ABSTRACT
Development has experienced a cultural turn and its language, paradigms, and actors are to a profound degree now engaged in understanding the cultural field within which development occurs. The reasons for this are varied, depending on diverse actors’ standpoints – African writers are concerned about the loss of historical-geographically specific ways of organizing society and meaning, while policy-makers offer cultural alternatives to failures of the past. The decentering of the West through postcolonial and feminist criticism combined with the experiences of East Asian Tiger economies resulted in a revaluation of development’s implicit values and a questioning of the Westward trajectory that undergirded much development practice. Yet culture as a factor remains wide-ranging; although anthropologists and cognate disciplines find it hard to pin down, they are agreed that culture is embedded in economies, politics, and racial formations. As material culture and structures of feeling, as well as specific forms of (re-)production, culture inevitably informs economic (and reproductive) life although it remains highly contested and becomes entangled in racial hierarchies and patterns of exclusion.
