Doing the Business
I'm in "The Chifley", peering though pdf files, searching for some material for my next essay. Its is an anthropology essay about the ethics for anthropologists that get involved with development.
Development and aid projects have been the most overt manner in which the industrialised countries of the world have attempted to change the make up of non-industrialised/underdeveloped countries. However, they often fail to achieve their goals. More capital ? Better life, apparently....
One of the major stumbling blocks has been a lack of consideration given to how cultures and peoples are different to those of the industrialised and Western countries and how this impacts on the way programs for development are recieved. This is where anthropologists can step in. They can analyse a society or culture, and attempt to predict and model how a project will be recieved and suggest better methods of implementation, etc.
Anthropologists are in a position to better facilitate these projects and will be able to produce an actual project result that is closer to the desired project result.
This is the case for encouraging the involvement of anthropologists in development. But because the "desired project result" has at times been either benevolently misguided or delibrately against the best interests of those on the recieving end of the project, all hell breaks loose for anthropology in development.
When considering the merits of a project, an anthropologist will judge whether or not the values and intentions of the project are sufficiently similar to their own and act on this basis as to whether or not they work to facilitate the project. This process is not one that has clear logical links and causality. So there will be mistakes, at a unattainable frequency. Anthropologists may find themselves working on projects that are going to make those on the recieving end worse off the more "successful" the project is. This means that there is a risk of a negative outcome for good intentioned anthropologists that delve into development work.
So should anthropologists instead opt-out of development, so that they can be certain that their work will not contribute to some sort of benign evil? The answer is no with two conditions. The first condition is that the frequency of mistakes made by anthropologists about the values of a project is small enough. While determining such a frequency in some sort of 'scientific' or 'objective' way would be next to an impossible task, I believe that the level of risk involved is quite low. The second condition is a precursor to the first, being that anthropologists must have a commitment to the interests *and* the will of those on the recieving end of development work and that they will apply this commitment to their work and in doing so, actually judge whether or not a project is valid.
If these conditions are met, the overall benefit that anthropologists will provide to the recipients will out weight the risk of their work with negative projects.
-Tom
"Publish", click....
