Anthropology and Development: From Colonial Ties to Critical Engagement

Ask an anthropologist how they feel about “development” and you’ll often get a pause before the answer. It’s a field the discipline helped build, then walked away from, then rejoined on uneasy terms. That back-and-forth isn’t accidental – it’s rooted in anthropology’s own origins as a discipline that grew up alongside colonial rule, was later drafted into Cold War strategy, and only found a genuine (if contested) place in development work decades after other social sciences had already claimed the territory. Understanding this history explains why anthropologists today can be found both inside development agencies and loudly criticising them.

A discipline shaped by empire 🔗

Anthropology did not emerge in a vacuum. Its early ethnographic fieldwork was carried out mainly in colonial settings, where contact between ruling and ruled cultures created both the subject matter and the funding for the new discipline. Colonial administrations needed detailed knowledge of the societies they governed – kinship structures, land systems, local authority, belief systems – and anthropologists were often the ones positioned to supply it.

A discipline dependent on colonial patronage 🔗

This was not a neutral exchange. Colonial governments funded expeditions and research stations, and in return expected usable knowledge. Scholars now widely describe anthropology’s formative decades as those of a colonial science, built around an “objective outsider” studying non-European peoples framed as primitive or exotic. The anthropologist’s dominant position over the community being studied mirrored, and sometimes directly served, the colonial administrator’s dominant position over the same people. Information gathered for scholarly purposes could and did double as intelligence useful for governance and control.

From empire to Cold War: the military detour 🔗

Colonial entanglement did not end with decolonisation. During and after the Second World War, and through the Cold War, Western governments again turned to anthropologists and other social scientists for insight into populations abroad – this time framed around counterinsurgency and strategic influence rather than administration. The most infamous episode was Project Camelot, a mid-1960s US Army-funded initiative that recruited social scientists, anthropologists included, to build predictive models of revolution and insurgency in Latin America. Its exposure and subsequent cancellation triggered what one detailed historical review calls an acute ethical shadow over the discipline that lasted well beyond the 1960s, as later revelations about anthropological involvement in counterinsurgency research in Vietnam deepened the controversy. These episodes hardened a suspicion, still felt today, that proximity to state power compromises anthropological independence.

The post-war pause: anthropology turns inward 🔗

Once the immediate colonial and wartime pressures eased, anthropology entered a long period of self-scrutiny. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, a genuine movement to decolonise anthropology took shape, pushing the discipline to reckon with its role in extracting knowledge from, and sometimes exploiting, the very communities it studied.

This retrospective mood coincided with the birth of the modern international development agenda after the Second World War. But anthropologists were largely absent from it. Development in its early decades was the domain of economists, geographers, and political scientists, who built modernisation theories and growth models with little patience for slow, small-scale ethnographic detail. Anthropology’s instinct at the time was also inward-looking and self-critical, not outward-facing toward policy work, so the discipline kept a reflective distance from a project it might otherwise have shaped from the start.

The 1970s: culture becomes impossible to ignore 🔗

When forcing communities to change stopped working 🔗

By the 1970s, cracks in the modernisation model were showing. Large infrastructure and agricultural projects were failing not for lack of engineering competence but because they collided with local kinship systems, land rights, and belief systems that planners hadn’t bothered to understand. International development agencies gradually accepted that communities could not simply be instructed to change – they had to be understood, and motivated on their own terms. This is precisely the moment anthropology found new relevance in the development circuit, coinciding with a broader shift in development studies away from crude modernisation theory toward more critical, politically aware frameworks.

Employed, but rarely in charge 🔗

Institutional change followed. The World Bank, for instance, had relied on anthropologists only informally before the 1970s, since its economists largely assumed they could handle social questions themselves. That changed as the Bank began recognising the social costs of its own megaprojects – dam-related resettlement being a particularly stark example, where entire communities were displaced without adequate attention to social consequence. This pushed the creation of the Bank’s first in-house social science positions in the early 1970s, a small but symbolically important shift. Similar patterns played out across other bilateral and multilateral agencies. Yet this new employment mostly took the form of fieldworker and project-appraisal roles rather than seats at the policy table. Anthropologists were valued for gathering ground-level social data, less so for shaping the strategic direction of development itself – a structural imbalance that persisted for decades, and one still visible in India’s own experience with large dam and mining projects, where displaced tribal and rural communities frequently had a voice only after the damage was already underway.

Bystanders, critics, and opponents: a divided discipline 🔗

Anthropology never responded to development with one voice. Some anthropologists took up staff and consulting roles inside agencies, becoming active participants in project design and evaluation. Others positioned themselves as critical bystanders – engaging with development’s questions without fully endorsing its premises. A third group opposed the development paradigm outright, arguing that it was inherently a continuation of colonial power dynamics dressed in technical language, and advocated for alternative, community-driven models instead.

The 1990s reckoning 🔗

This tension reached a head in the 1990s, when a wave of scholarship subjected “development” itself to sharp critique. James Ferguson’s influential study of a failed project in Lesotho argued that development apparatus often functions as an “anti-politics machine,” converting deeply political questions of poverty and power into narrow technical problems, while quietly expanding bureaucratic state reach in the process. Around the same time, other scholars framed development as a Western discourse that constructed the very idea of an “underdeveloped” world to justify ongoing intervention. This body of critique cemented anthropology’s reputation as development’s most persistent internal skeptic, even as growing numbers of anthropologists were simultaneously being hired to work within it.

Why development still needs anthropologists 🔗

Despite this skepticism, anthropology’s practical value to development work kept growing rather than shrinking. Researchers looking back on the last decades of the twentieth century describe them as something close to golden years for anthropologists’ involvement in the development industry, driven by the discipline’s accumulated knowledge of sociocultural change, its methodological rigour in long-term fieldwork, and its habit of taking local perspectives seriously rather than assuming universal solutions. Development agencies increasingly needed people who could sit with a community for months, understand its internal logic, and translate that understanding into something planners could use – work economists and engineers were rarely trained or positioned to do.

Anthropologists also increasingly found themselves in a facilitating role: mediating between the technical language of development bureaucracies and the lived priorities of the communities those bureaucracies aimed to serve. That role – part translator, part advocate, part critic – captures where the discipline stands today. The tension between critical engagement and practical involvement hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it defines anthropology’s relationship with development: close enough to influence outcomes, distant enough to keep asking uncomfortable questions about who development is really for.

What do you think? Given anthropology’s colonial and Cold War history, should anthropologists working inside development agencies today be seen as reformers working from within, or as continuing an old pattern of proximity to power? And can a discipline built on deep, patient fieldwork ever comfortably serve institutions that operate on short project timelines and quick results?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropology/Cultural-change-and-adaptation
2. https://anthropology.sas.upenn.edu/news/2021/04/28/statement-anthropology-colonialism-and-racism
3. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13252
4. https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/19-2-colonization-and-anthropology
5. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/253/1/Anthropology_and_development_a_brief_overview.pdf
6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-57426-0_1
7. https://anthropology.stanford.edu/publications/anti-politics-machine-development-depoliticization-and-bureaucratic-power-lesotho
8. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/734217