The Politics of Belonging in India
Year: 2011
Type: book
Abstract: In Cultivating Development, I took the case of participatory development in Adivasi-dominated regions of India to re-assess the decade-long history of a British aid project. This took place between 1990 and 2003 in the Bhil western region, and I was involved as a social development consultant. My aim was to ask not whether development works, but how it works. How, in this case, are the very different interests of Bhil villagers, an Indian public sector agro-input production and marketing giant, and a British aid agency brought together through a project discourse that hid diverging ambitions and buried ideological divisions? The focus of the book was aid policy and the debates in the anthropology of development. In this chapter, I take up one strand of the argument which concerns the place this development intervention had within the historical trajectory of Bhil society of eastern Gujarat, south Rajasthan and western Madhya Pradesh. National or international development policy only works if it is translated into the different ambitions and intentions of those bureaucrats or beneficiaries who it enrols. Indeed, participatory policy models do not and cannot shape actual practice in the way that they claim. Rather, I assert that they are ignored, resisted, ‘consumed’ or ‘tactically used’ (Mosse 2005: 16).
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: Mosse, David
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1510027111