Social Organization and Development Anthropology: The 1995 Malinowski Award Lecture

Abstract

The way we legitimize to others or to ourselves the need for social analysis in development interventions creates a structure of expectations that becomes compelling. In other words, if we argue just the pragmatic, short-term operational benefits' side of using anthropology, we will end up playing a very mundane fix-it-here-and-fix-it-there role. If, however, we convincingly construct the argument for a theoretical applied anthropology, we lay claim to having voice over the substance of development paradigms and policies. The rigid dichotomy between applied and theoretical anthropology is a simplistic representation that must be rejected. The practice of anthropology can generate value-added for society only if it is practiced as theoretical applied anthropology. What has to be applied through applied anthropology is our theoretically generalized knowledge about societies and cultures. What else would anthropologists have to apply? They use the research methods. What they apply is the storehouse of knowledge. Anthropologists bring to their work the knowledge about what is general in individual local societies (cross cultural commonalities) and proceed to uncover what is unique in that individual society. An alternative model which, represents the strongest way of arguing the case for, and actually practicing, applied anthropological and sociological analysis is to focus on the patterns of social organization within which social actors act.

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