Anthropology and Rural Economic Development

Abstract

Anthropologists have usually studied rural peoples and have often been concerned with problems of economic development and social change. Such a concern goes back at least to the period between the wars, when colonial governments began to realize that anthropological knowledge could be of use to them, both in their everyday administration and in their development schemes. Initially, anthropologists who were interested in problems of social and economic development were involved in promoting development; more recently there has been interest in the process itself as a subject of pure anthropological inquiry. This paper describes and comments on some of the approaches that anthropologists have followed in the analysis of economic development and social change in rural Africa. Such research is important in post-colonial Africa for both practical and theoretical reasons, as new social and economic institutions are being created in Africa's rural areas that will bear importantly on future economic development. Most modern anthropology is carried out within the context of a community such as a village, an ethnic group, or a district. The anthropologist aims at understanding in depth; he also follows a self-consciously holistic approach. He assumes that there is a connection between the social organization of a group, its belief system and ritual, its conceptions of time and space, its technology, its economic organization, and its physical environment. Most anthropological analyses, even when focussed elsewhere, include sections on the environment in which people live and the ways in which they exploit that environment. Evans-Pritchard's, The Nuer', one of the classical anthropological monographs on an African society, includes a detailed section on ecology in which he shows how the annual cycle of migration forced on the Nuer by their habitat in the marshes of the southern Sudan has all-important implications for their social structure. In Africa as elsewhere, social organization is one aspect of technology, and the particular form that exploitation of the environment takes is a reflex of the social organization. Economic organization and social organization are analytically separate, but interdependent, abstractions.