ANTH 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Social Inequality, Neoliberalism, Participatory Development
1 May 2018
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ANTH 212
23 March 2018,
Last class continued
Other cultural aspects of colonial admin
• Geographical expertise
o Claim of governing territory at large but being located within it
o Racial difference that allowed colonial officers to rule others
Compared to development experts
• Technical, mobile knowledge
o Not attached to any location (tied to globalizing process, neoliberal archetypes)
o Expertise is moving around the globe, it re-territorializes and re-organizes
underdeveloped territories
o Example: would have experts that would be putting in strings different areas
affected by different diseases, or where they are more prevalent
▪ Create countries that look similar to this analysis
▪ Proceeding like this, expert can opt for technical solution (be it
distributing vaccines)
▪ Underlying idea is that same techniques and solutions apply everywhere
(e.g. Farmer)
• Looks at how epidemiology (as defined by Western science) does
not encompass whole experience of disease
• From eyes of science, two diseases should not affect people the
same way – social inequality should be included in analysis to
make sense of why people are affected the way they are
▪ By re- territorializing can invent technical solution, but this cannot deal
also with other causes and other factors that shape disease and social
issues – but these diseases only developed according to Western
knowledge
• Highly technical knowledge being promoted as fads sometimes by different donors
o Many mechanisms come into creating new knowledge
o Experts always called into workshops/learning about new buzzwords
o Fast rate of changes in terminology of development in ways that people are
described, defined by workers and donors
o Development workers might feel alienated by having to learn buzz words to
please donors/solve an issue
▪ Buzz words used in certain area = effective – conceals fact that
development workers conceal many things
o Goldman – local experts called into workshops, to change whole way of naming
things, way they do interventions etc.
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