Thomas
Yarrow (University of Wales, Bangor)
Introduction: engaging through detachment?
In common with a range of social scientists, anthropologists have tended to imagine that a productive relationship with development professionals should proceed on the basis of engagement. From this perspective, anthropological knowledge has been understood as a theoretical resource to be applied in the solution of various development problems. Even less overtly applied critiques have reproduced, more than they have apprehended, an interventionist logic. The result has been a flattening of epistemological difference. By contrast, I suggest that we need to understand how shared interests, might usefully anchor fundamentally different ways of enacting knowledge. How, then, might anthropologists and development professionals learn to acknowledge the generative potential of their detachment? Perhaps being useful might entail being more ethnographically engaged but less theoretically applied?
