The Anthropology of Development

Abstract

AND APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropological use of &dquo;development&dquo; has survived the impedimenta of many connotations. In the nineteenth century an association was made between development and evolution. The onslaught on the Social Darwinians in the first part of the twentieth century repudiated the connotations of development along with social evolution. But threads of argument favoring social evolution were tenuously maintained, and a newly reasoned basis for social evolution and its connection with development emerged in the 1960s.During and after World War II most anthropologists became involved to a greater or lesser extent in a relatively new ambience. They were vessels of knowledge with immediate and important relevance to a new world. The call came from, among many others, Linton (1949) in his preface to Most of the World for them to make known their valuable insights and ease the way of emerging peoples in a postcolonial world. Fresh attention was given to culture change, with major foci on theoretical concepts of growth, process, contact, and acculturation (Keesing, 1953); cultural and technical change (Mead, 1953); and folk-urban continua (Redfield, 1941).Practical response came in the form of a view of anthropology which consciously marked out a field separate from traditional anthropology by employing a new insistence on the dimension of applied anthropology. A society had been founded in 1941. Typical of the new ferment