Development, Aid, and Its Critics
Key thinkers, concepts, and critiques from the anthropology of development and humanitarianism.
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Questions Covered in This Set
10 cards to master
What event/speech is credited with launching the post-WWII 'development' project?
Harry Truman's 1949 inaugural address, which reclassified two-thirds of humanity as living in 'underdeveloped areas' needing U.S. science and industry.
What is the core anthropological critique of development (as opposed to 'aid doesn't work')?
It asks what development IS as a cultural practice — with its own experts, jargon, rituals (logframes, evaluations), career paths, and cosmology of a linear path from 'traditional' to 'modern'.
Arturo Escobar's argument in Encountering Development (1995)
Development works as a Foucauldian discourse: it produces the objects it claims merely to describe (peasants become 'smallholder farmers requiring technical assistance').
What did James Ferguson study in The Anti-Politics Machine (1990)?
A World Bank–backed rural development project in Thaba-Tseka, Lesotho.
Why did project documents falsely portray Lesotho as an isolated subsistence economy?
Agencies can offer technical fixes (livestock, roads, extension) but cannot restructure South African labor migration or political economy — so the country had to be described as curable by the medicine on offer.
What were the unintended consequences of the Thaba-Tseka project?
Though it failed on its own terms, it expanded the Lesotho state bureaucracy — offices, roads, administrative presence — into a politically weak opposition region.
Define the 'anti-politics machine'
Development's tendency to translate questions of power, land, and inequality into technical problems for experts, depoliticizing them while quietly expanding bureaucratic power.
What is 'rendering technical' (Tania Li, The Will to Improve, 2007)?
The labor of drawing a boundary around a problem so it appears fixable by a project with a budget and timeline; based on research in Indonesia.
Didier Fassin's argument in Humanitarian Reason (2011)
Humanitarianism substitutes compassion for justice: the suffering body becomes a more legitimate basis for a claim than a citizen's political rights.
What is 'biolegitimacy'?
Fassin's term for the legitimacy granted to suffering bodies — e.g., migrants in France gaining residency more easily by being sick than by claiming asylum from persecution.
