Re-thinking Anthropology as Engaged Practice

This talk develops a vision for new thinking on the Anthropology of Development. In recent years, the anthropological analysis of governance processes has suggested that investment in technocratic forms of rule have shrunk the space for political action and depoliticized development. While this position assumes that development interventions are confident and final, an analysis of practice shows that many projects tend to be open ended, provisional and flexible. In fact, today, development initiatives are often perceived as being experimental and necessary to generate knowledge and teach the lessons to be learned for a better future. Improvement is an aspiration that can be postponed, sometimes for ever. I have studied an Indian health insurance scheme as an example of such a flexible policy (Rao 2018, 2019). Here I will discuss how the team used feedback loops to improve its practices and argue that an engaged anthropology can contribute to this process by providing constructive criticism as part of policy dialogues. It requires resisting too simple truth in any good/bad dichotomy and advocates for retaining an analytical distance that generates a deep understanding of complexity and the paradoxes that organise fields of action.