Doing development and writing culture Exploring knowledge practices in international development and anthropology

This article explores the implications of different knowledge practices in anthropology and international development. Knowledge in development is not a straightforward matter of knowledge about context and devising actions. International development practice is knowledge explicitly constituted as a form of action. Anthropological knowledge claims to separate knowledge from action, first, by making knowledge about the past actions of others - representations - and, second, by representing its own knowledge as abstracted from its practice in the present. The absence of anthropological knowledge from development practice is not a matter of the relation between different kinds of knowledge which could be brought together, but is a product of the ontological basis of different practices.