David Mosse
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 87968 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | David Mosse |
| NOMBRES | David |
| APELLIDO | Mosse |
| FIRMA | MOSSE D |
| AFILIACIONES | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3800-3536 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1271 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
The Moral Blind Spots of Evidence-Based Psychiatry
Open Dialogue is a rights-based approach to psychiatric crisis response with growing global uptake. Over the last five years, it has been subject to a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) within the UK's National Health Service. While the trial researchers have emphasized the need for more evidence to inform policy, many practitioners involved in the trial have been lobbying for Open Dialogue's immediate rollout across the country. Drawi…
Caste Identities and Structures of Threats
Caste is a complex ontological construction. Despite several anti-caste movements and constitutional provisions, caste exists in the Indian psyche as part of everyday life. Even in the advent of globalization, caste continues to foster social and economic inequalities and exclusion in newer forms and perpetuates violence. The available research on caste-based stigma and humiliation provides a limited understanding as it deals with Dalits only; an…
Policy Worlds
There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, c…
NGOs as Social Movements
Donor-funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co-opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term 'NGOization'. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights-based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs an…
The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy-Erratum
The Ideology and Politics of Community Participation
This chapter examines some influential ideas about &s;common property&s; and &s;community management&s; which currently dominate policy thinking and programme design in an important area of natural resources development. The real &s;tragedy of the commons&s; is not inherent in common property systems - since under the right circumstances local institutions can and do manage community resources - but in the collapse of these community systems and …
The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy
What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the eco…
Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom
Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claim…
“Complexio Oppositorum”? Religion, Society, and Power in the Making of Catholicism in Rural South India
Can the Experience of Participatory Development Help Think Critically about 'Patient and Public Involvement' in UK Healthcare
The expansion of spaces for 'patient and public involvement' in health systems in the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet 'participation' as a principle for planned interventions in international development is well established as a field of practice and controversy. Development workers and scholars have passed through moments of enchantment and disenchantment with the idea that the true source of innovation, expertise, and workable (an…
Caste and development
Inherited caste identity is an important determinant of life opportunity for a fifth of the world's population, but is not given the same significance in global development policy debates as gender, race, age, religion or other identity characteristics. This review asks why addressing caste-based inequality and discrimination does not feature in intergovernmental commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and whether it should. Taking…
“Complexio Oppositorum”?
This chapter concerns Roman Catholicism in rural Tamil society as the product of shifting socio-political and institutional conditions. It argues that narratives of ‘Christian modernity’ — deepened and made more sophisticated with recent ventures in this field (Robbins 2004, Keane 2007) — have drawn attention away from settings where Christianity was introduced in ways that facilitated its localization within existing social and representational …
An intricate anthropology of care
Comment on Roberts, Nathaniel. 2016. To be cared for: the power of conversion and foreignness of belonging in a Chennai slum. Oakland: University of California Press
Minds of caste - Discrimination and its affects
This guest editorial considers the relevance of caste in today's world in terms of ‘castes of mind
Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested
This article draws out some of the implications of the fact that what anthropologists claim to know, or want to say, is unavoidably and in complicated ways bound by the ethics of involvement, detachment, and institutional location. I will first consider the increasingly common practice of circulating the output of anthropological research within the social context of its fieldwork, among the various research participants and interlocutors. Second…
Knowledge as Relational
The Anthropology of International Development
This review examines how international development has been studied by anthropologists, both as a particular form of institutional practice and as the terms of global economic and cultural integration. This review also explains a shift from an anthropological critique of the discursive power of development toward the ethnographic treatment of development as a category of practice. It reviews research into organizational and knowledge practices, a…
The Saint in the Banyan Tree
The Saint in the Banyan Tree
The Saint in the Banyan Tree is a nuanced and historically persuasive exploration of Christianity’s remarkable trajectory as a social and cultural force in southern India. Starting in the seventeenth century, when the religion was integrated into Tamil institutions of caste and popular religiosity, this study moves into the twentieth century, when Christianity became an unexpected source of radical transformation for the country’s ‘untouchables’ …
Adventures in Aidland
Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant…
A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power
The article argues for what can be called a 'relational' approach to poverty: one that first views persistent poverty as the consequence of historically developed economic and political relations, and second, that emphasises poverty and inequality as an effect of social categorisation and identity, drawing in particular on the experience of adivasis ('tribals') and dalits ('untouchables') subordinated in Indian society. The approach follows Charl…
Epilogue
This special issue illustrates the broadening social science interest in water. In particular it shows the importance of regional research perspectives on the emerging ‘water crisis’, which is a co
International policy, development expertise, and anthropology
This forum article has two parts. In the first, I make some observations about policy knowledge in international development and the ways in which it has become the subject of anthropological study. In the second, I reflect on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and the development world that it describes, asking, "what's the use of anthropology to inter- national development
The anthropology of international institutions
Power and the Durability of Poverty
A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power
The article argues for what can be called a 'relational' approach to poverty: one that first views persistent poverty as the consequence of historically developed economic and political relations, and second, that emphasises poverty and inequality as an effect of social categorisation and identity, drawing in particular on the experience of adivasis ('tribals') and dalits ('untouchables') subordinated in Indian society. The approach follows Charl…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
Caste and development
Inherited caste identity is an important determinant of life opportunity for a fifth of the world's population, but is not given the same significance in global development policy debates as gender, race, age, religion or other identity characteristics. This review asks why addressing caste-based inequality and discrimination does not feature in intergovernmental commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and whether it should. Taking…
Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice
Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is drive…
Authority, Gender and Knowledge
Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods are increasingly taken up by public sector organizations as well as NGOs among whom they have been pioneered. While PRA methods are successfully employed in a variety of project planning situations, and with increasing sophistication, in some contexts the practice of PRA faces constraints. This article examines the constraints as experienced in the early stages of one project, and suggests some more gen…
Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities
One legacy of Malinowski's ethnographic method is the separation of 'field' and 'desk'. What anthropologists know is inseparable from their relationship with those they study - the epistemology is relational - but ethnographic writing breaks fieldwork relations, cuts the network, and erects boundaries: it is necessarily anti-social. As anthropologists turn their interest in what people believe, say, and do (and the inconsistencies between these) …
Encountering Order and Disjuncture
For anyone interested in development issues, the beginning of the 21st Century does not feel like a particularly optimistic time. There has certainly been a bold recent shift in development policy
The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource
Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of 'community management' approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of 'locality', and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous…
Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of 'Community Management
This is an essay in the sociology of knowledge. It aims to demonstrate, firstly, how development institutions construct rural society in terms of organizational imperatives, and secondly, how these 'constructions' come to be underpinned by social theory. The focus is on irrigation in south India and colonial and contemporary state policy initiatives to promote local institutions for the community management of decentralized resource systems. The …
The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy
What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the eco…
Collective Action, Common Property, and Social Capital in South India
This article uses detailed research on common property and collective action in an ancient south Indian water resource system to highlight the different objectives, modes of analysis, explanation, and generalization of economists and anthropologists. The article does not try to resolve these differences but goes on to use the south Indian case to show how a recent attempt to deploy "social capital" as a unified socioeconomic concept--one that att…
Idioms of Subordination and Styles of Protest among Christian and Hindu Harijan Castes in Tamil Nadu
L'etude des strategies employees par les intouchables chretiens et hindous, par les castes harijan du village d'Alapuram (Tamil Nadu) pour parvenir a la mobilite sociale montre non seulement la diversite des actions mais examine aussi la construction sociale de la subordination et les expressions de la dependance et de l'absence de pouvoir qui definissent la position des Harijans dans la societe. L'A. montre comment les Harijan reproduisent les r…
Knowledge as Relational
Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil Nadu, India
L'A. montre comment, dans la conceptualisation des saints, les idees hindoues concernant la mort, le sacrifice, et le pouvoir divin se sont melangees aux notions catholiques. Description de deux contextes rituels opposes : dans le premier, les saints catholiques sont definis par des jeux de relations similaires a ceux qui structurent le pantheon hindou, dans le second les saints sont concus en termes essentialistes. Deux espaces moraux indigenes,…
Power and the Durability of Poverty
Epilogue
This special issue illustrates the broadening social science interest in water. In particular it shows the importance of regional research perspectives on the emerging ‘water crisis’, which is a co
Minds of caste - Discrimination and its affects
This guest editorial considers the relevance of caste in today's world in terms of ‘castes of mind
Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom
Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claim…
South Indian Christians, Purity/Impurity, and the Caste System
Can the Indian caste system, often viewed as a Hindu institution, take non-Hindu ritual form? If so, what are the implications for theories which regard notions of purity and impurity as the ideological basis of caste? Rejecting views of caste as rooted in Hindu religious ideas, or as an institution of power divorceable from religion, this article shows how caste relations and rank in a Roman Catholic community in Tamil Nadu are constituted throu…
Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested
This article draws out some of the implications of the fact that what anthropologists claim to know, or want to say, is unavoidably and in complicated ways bound by the ethics of involvement, detachment, and institutional location. I will first consider the increasingly common practice of circulating the output of anthropological research within the social context of its fieldwork, among the various research participants and interlocutors. Second…
Can the Experience of Participatory Development Help Think Critically about 'Patient and Public Involvement' in UK Healthcare
The expansion of spaces for 'patient and public involvement' in health systems in the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet 'participation' as a principle for planned interventions in international development is well established as a field of practice and controversy. Development workers and scholars have passed through moments of enchantment and disenchantment with the idea that the true source of innovation, expertise, and workable (an…
International policy, development expertise, and anthropology
This forum article has two parts. In the first, I make some observations about policy knowledge in international development and the ways in which it has become the subject of anthropological study. In the second, I reflect on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and the development world that it describes, asking, "what's the use of anthropology to inter- national development
Ethics and Development Ethnography a Response to Sridhar, at 21[6]
Rule and Representation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
NGOs as Social Movements
Donor-funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co-opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term 'NGOization'. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights-based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs an…
Authority, Gender and Knowledge
Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods are increasingly taken up by public sector organizations as well as NGOs among whom they have been pioneered. While PRA methods are successfully employed in a variety of project planning situations, and with increasing sophistication, in some contexts the practice of PRA faces constraints. This article examines the constraints as experienced in the early stages of one project, and suggests some more gen…
Idioms of Subordination and Styles of Protest among Christian and Hindu Harijan Castes in Tamil Nadu
L'etude des strategies employees par les intouchables chretiens et hindous, par les castes harijan du village d'Alapuram (Tamil Nadu) pour parvenir a la mobilite sociale montre non seulement la diversite des actions mais examine aussi la construction sociale de la subordination et les expressions de la dependance et de l'absence de pouvoir qui definissent la position des Harijans dans la societe. L'A. montre comment les Harijan reproduisent les r…
Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil Nadu, India
L'A. montre comment, dans la conceptualisation des saints, les idees hindoues concernant la mort, le sacrifice, et le pouvoir divin se sont melangees aux notions catholiques. Description de deux contextes rituels opposes : dans le premier, les saints catholiques sont definis par des jeux de relations similaires a ceux qui structurent le pantheon hindou, dans le second les saints sont concus en termes essentialistes. Deux espaces moraux indigenes,…
South Indian Christians, Purity/Impurity, and the Caste System
Can the Indian caste system, often viewed as a Hindu institution, take non-Hindu ritual form? If so, what are the implications for theories which regard notions of purity and impurity as the ideological basis of caste? Rejecting views of caste as rooted in Hindu religious ideas, or as an institution of power divorceable from religion, this article shows how caste relations and rank in a Roman Catholic community in Tamil Nadu are constituted throu…
Honour, caste and conflict
From the late 17 th century, Christian cult shrines and church centres established under the Jesuit mission in Tamil South India, were incorporated into local systems of political patronage and religious gifting. In particular, through systems of festival of honours, they served the same purpose as local Hindu temples in extending and legitimating the authority of rulers and village headmen, and in integrating the highly diffuse domains of politi…
The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource
Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of 'community management' approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of 'locality', and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous…
Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of 'Community Management
This is an essay in the sociology of knowledge. It aims to demonstrate, firstly, how development institutions construct rural society in terms of organizational imperatives, and secondly, how these 'constructions' come to be underpinned by social theory. The focus is on irrigation in south India and colonial and contemporary state policy initiatives to promote local institutions for the community management of decentralized resource systems. The …
Brokered livelihoods
Seasonal labour migration is an increasingly important aspect of rural livelihoods in tribal areas of Western India. Such migration can no longer be viewed merely as an adjunct to an essentially agrarian way of life, but has to be seen as integral to the coping, survival and livelihood strategies of tribal farming families. Rural to urban migration is often viewed as a consequence of environmental crisis in which migrants as 'ecological refugees'…
Cultivating Development
Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice
Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is drive…
Cultivating Development
'A superb book, one of those rarities that can change entire ways of thinking. David Mosse is the first social scientist in a generation who can successfuly take cutting-edge insights from academic anthropology and use them to explain practical problems in development...For anyone interested in development, Cultivating is a do-not-miss experience.' Scott Guggenheim, Lead Social Scientist, The World Bank '[Mosse's] provocative thesis challenges th…
Possession and Confession
Ethics and Development Ethnography a Response to Sridhar, at 21[6]
Collective Action, Common Property, and Social Capital in South India
This article uses detailed research on common property and collective action in an ancient south Indian water resource system to highlight the different objectives, modes of analysis, explanation, and generalization of economists and anthropologists. The article does not try to resolve these differences but goes on to use the south Indian case to show how a recent attempt to deploy "social capital" as a unified socioeconomic concept--one that att…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
Encountering Order and Disjuncture
For anyone interested in development issues, the beginning of the 21st Century does not feel like a particularly optimistic time. There has certainly been a bold recent shift in development policy
Rule and Representation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities
One legacy of Malinowski's ethnographic method is the separation of 'field' and 'desk'. What anthropologists know is inseparable from their relationship with those they study - the epistemology is relational - but ethnographic writing breaks fieldwork relations, cuts the network, and erects boundaries: it is necessarily anti-social. As anthropologists turn their interest in what people believe, say, and do (and the inconsistencies between these) …
Power and the Durability of Poverty
Epilogue
This special issue illustrates the broadening social science interest in water. In particular it shows the importance of regional research perspectives on the emerging ‘water crisis’, which is a co
International policy, development expertise, and anthropology
This forum article has two parts. In the first, I make some observations about policy knowledge in international development and the ways in which it has become the subject of anthropological study. In the second, I reflect on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and the development world that it describes, asking, "what's the use of anthropology to inter- national development
The anthropology of international institutions
A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power
The article argues for what can be called a 'relational' approach to poverty: one that first views persistent poverty as the consequence of historically developed economic and political relations, and second, that emphasises poverty and inequality as an effect of social categorisation and identity, drawing in particular on the experience of adivasis ('tribals') and dalits ('untouchables') subordinated in Indian society. The approach follows Charl…
Adventures in Aidland
Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant…
The Saint in the Banyan Tree
Sociology (31 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (19 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Politics (10 obras) · Caste (9 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras) · Geography (9 obras)