Anthropology and development in Germany

Abstract

The history of anthropology’s engagement with development in the post-World War II German-speaking world (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) can be divided into three phases: from being strongly rejected by most professorial chair holders (to around 1980), through the emergence of a subfield of anthropology (from 1980) and into the mainstream of the discipline (since around 2000). However, this perspective presupposes a broad definition of “anthropology of development” that encompasses more than the application of anthropological knowledge in development cooperation, as is often implied by the term “development anthropology”. In the slow modernisation process of German anthropology over the last fifty years – as defined by the discipline’s turn towards the modern world and its rapid internationalisation – the critical study of development as a field of professional practice has played a pioneering role by providing important theoretical and methodological stimuli. Together with their European colleagues, not least from APAD, German-speaking anthropologists have developed a particular style that has also been referred to as the “anthropology of development based on anthropology in development”. Today, the anthropology of development has evolved into an ethnographic inquiry of global social engineering.