Susan W. Almy, “Anthropologists and Development Agencies,”American Anthropologist 79, no. 2 (Jun. 1977), 280-292.

Notes

• 280 – Has worked for Rockefeller Foundation
• 281 – “Agency anthropologists are not well represented within the profession’s journals or classrooms. They may actually write more, but in a style and frame of analysis not acceptable to disciplinary journals.”
• 282-3 – “By definition, osical scientists deal wit hthe analysis and modification of human organizations, and physical scientists deal with the analysis and recomination of nonhuman elements. When the latter develop a new technique for rice production or cloth making or water purification, varying information is spread to organizations in government, business, religion, philanthropy, communities and neighborhoods, which then use, abuse, or ignore the technique as they think will best serve their interests. Social scientists sometimes modify organizational environments to make better use of the technique or to protect against its negative effects . . .. More rarely they work with the physical scientists to build such inputs directly into the new technique as it is evolved: e.g., an agricultural economist/anthropological program in the Guatemalan agricultural ministry to define and help develop the agronomic improvements salient for small farmers . . ..”
• 284 – “Why are there so few anthropologists at the professional level working in or for international assistance agencies and national ministries? Anthropologists worked in the British colonial services during the period of expanding empire and applied their skills to the colonial occupation of Oceania and to military and civilian morale problems during World War II. Rising demands for university education . . . in the developed countries, and anticolonial sentiment in the developing ones, sent them back to academia to teach. Present development planning teams seldom include a noneconomist social scientist, although this is beginning to change.”
• 284-5 – “Agency anthropologists must work in close collaboration with other scientists, technicians, and administrators if they wish to learn how to communicate with them ,to draw them into communication with the target population and with each other, and to anticipate and devise ways around objections to the anthropologists’ recommendations.”
• 286 – “Social scientists — and especially anthropologists — are typically hired by one group (or patron) to exercise their skills on another group the patron considers hostile or inferior.”
• 286-7 – “Much of the difficulty anthropologists and their cousins have with agencies stems from this same concern. First, most social scientists share the public’s distaste for specialized manipulation of social systems. Even those who have chosen such specializations as careers sometimes justify their work by the contradiction that their sciences are too imperfect for them to develop the degree of control and prediction toward which they aim. The researcher is working toward explanation of human behavior whether in academia or in an agency, but in the agency the immediate likelihood of a theory’s implementation is increased, and with it a sense of contradiction and level of tension.”
  • Important – anthropologists and their social scientist cousins use the epistemic status of social science — namely its status being lower than that of the exact sciences — to exempt them from policy
• 287 – “The strictly academic researcher builds theory and hypotheses, collects data, and writes reports with only academic colleagues in mind, and will probably alter publications slightly to attempt to avert harm to the people studied, and may take on conclusions and recommendations addressed to a vague Establishment. This common process, known in this country as ‘academic freedom,’ is becoming known in the developing countries as ‘academic imperialism.’”
• 289 – [SECTION: GETTING ANTHROPOLOGISTS INTO AGENCIES]
• 290n2 – “The causative impact of social science criticisms of the unintended effects of the Green Revolution and other sectoral advances in industry and medicine in changing development ideology will never by fully quantified or acknowledge by the key participants, but is clearly perceived as valid by most of them.”
• N3 – “Some U.S. anthropology masters programs have recently been developed to train applied researchers. A few faculty in some Ph.D. programs give such training to their students, but much more of this is done in economics programs.”