It's [the] Culture, Stupid!' Why 'Adding Culture' is Unlikely to Make Any Serious Difference to International Developmentalism

Bibliographic Data

ID2174457
AuthorsRaymond Apthorpe (Russian State Agrarian Correspondence University, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume6
Issue2
Pages130-141
Publication date2005-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanberra Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0314-9099 • E-ISSN: 1740-9314
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14442210500168259
OpenAlexW1985921266
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited10

What major difference adding an extra ingredient—‘culture’—may make to a standard concoction—‘international developmentalism’—depends in part on how friendly the concoction is to what is to be added—and (with apologies to Jan Nederveen Pieterse) stirred. Therefore any hopes for any cultural re-turn in development studies should not neglect their cognitive iconography and the obstacles this may pose to what is desired. Six strands in the iconography of international developmentalism are highlighted in this paper: its high doctrine/low scholarship character, appetite for single best-fitting regression-type modelling and die-hard positivism, reliance on lethal binaries that kill existential and practical concerns, disposition to ready-made solutions in search of problems to attach themselves to, and ‘no politics please we are experts’ stances. Keywords: CultureDevelopmentDeterminismPositivismInterdisciplinarityCognitive Iconography Grateful thanks for the patience and help of editors of this issue and journal and to an anonymous referee for challenging queries to which I hope this version of the paper responds. Notes 1. See also Tsing (Citation2004) for a later, exquisitely succinct critique. 2. Parallel, and not so parallel, worlds. Of Gunnar Myrdal's (and his collaborators’) developmentalist and other social and economic studies (in the US as well as Asia) some are characterised by high doctrine/low scholarship and others by the opposite. In my view the pioneer whose work, taken both as a whole and on the basis of individual studies, is least thus riven is Arthur Lewis. 3. The UNDP speech on the Human Development Report (HDR) at the April 2000 international workshop at Sophia University's Institute of Comparative Culture in Tokyo was exceptional in the credence it gave to some of the anthropological critique, but there is no evidence that it has been followed up. 4. For a contemporary essay on ‘human face’ appropriation—by the foreign military occupation—see Uchiyamada Citation2004. 5. For a synthesising report on a series of ‘local ownership’ studies, see Guimaraes et al. (Citation2003). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRaymond Apthorpe Raymond Apthorpe is Visiting Fellow, Graduate Studies in International Affairs, Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, and also Visiting Professorial Associate, Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Art · Art history · Developmentalism · Doctrine · Epistemology · Historicism · Iconography · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political theory and Gramsci

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