300651 Anthropology of development (S) (SoSe 2024)

Learning objectives:

- Students acquire an in-depth understanding of selected issues of development and issues around development
- Students are exposed to a range of theories regarding development and development issues
- Students are encouraged to think about development anthropologically and to understand ways in which anthropologists have engaged with development issues.

Key skills:
• Discussion skills: able to present ideas clearly, formulate a coherent argument, respond to other ideas constructively, and develop confidence in one’s ability to engage with other people in a discussion.
• Reading skills: able to prepare for the weekly seminars and the essay, identify key arguments and evidence used in a piece of writing and then critically appraising them.
• Writing skills: able to prepare an essay, including the abilities to identify a relevant topic and synthesize academic sources, and construct an original and well-presented argument.
• Research skills: locate information that is relevant to the themes of the module.
• Self-reliance: able to manage time efficiently and be sufficiently reliable for group work, and to independently locate, evaluate, and use anthropological literature.
• Group work: able to prepare presentations, organize meetings
• Presentation skills: be able to present information clearly and confidently, and to develop confidence in presenting ideas in a supportive atmosphere

Requirements for participation, required level

What, actually, is development? The word seems self-evident, but it is worth thinking about. Who gets to decide what it means, and to decide the rules of what is development and what is not? Anthropologists have generally considered development as social change arising from planned or unplanned interventions, yet critics of development often point to such social changes as being conceived in the global North and exported to the South with little meaningful discussion. Accordingly, whose version of future building prevails, and to what end? Why do so many development projects not produce their desired results or are labelled as failures?

This course engages with all these questions, and more. It will familiarise students with how social anthropologists approach development issues and allow you to develop your own analyses of development issues with references to the sort of questions anthropologists consider when thinking about development.

This course is suitable for MA students, ideally with some background in anthropology and/or development issues. The course includes a high volume of reading, and students are expected to read and reflect on the core texts as a minimum each week. Where the core texts are books, the introductions are available as scanned versions via the EKVV. Students are also invited to follow suggestions for further reading and seek out their own sources they find relevant. Finally, it is vital that students attend all seminar discussions in order to participate in discussions, and to think through how issues raised in different weeks relate to each other.

Bibliography

Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2010. Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, Pluto Press