240513 SE Infrastructure Projects and Development: Anthropological Critique (P4) (2020W)

The notion of "development" with its underlying idea of continuous progress rooted in earlier colonial and enlightenment thinking, has been used to describe and explain social and cultural differences since the 1950s. "Development" did not only provide an utopian vision of a post-colonial future, but also provided the rationale for the creation of international development institutions (IMF, World Bank, UNDP and other agencies). The work of practicing anthropologists, who often had been employed by these very same organizations, constituted the applied field of development anthropology. On the other hand, anthropological inquiries have been increasingly central to the emergence of a "post-development" critique that stems from a wider postmodern, postcolonial subversion of the superiority of Western forms of knowledge. This critique of development reveals how the supposedly benign goals of development actors and agencies result in new forms of inequality, and enforces Western "solutions" and forms of expertise, while constructing a passive "Global South". Often focusing on the analysis of development discourse and ideology, this approach is referred to as anthropology of development.
This course aims explore the complex relationship between anthropology and development by focusing both on discourses and practices of modernization and development in different ethnographic contexts. The topics that will be covered in the course include social, economic and cultural aspects of community and regional development in a globalized world, the concepts and components of sustainable development, issues of inequality and representations of marginalized groups (such as indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities). The links between development and industrialization, resource extraction, and infrastructure projects will be drawn. The geographical scope of the course will cover (post)colonial remote locations across the world, while paying particular attention to the former Soviet Union and the circumpolar North. The course will have seminar character: it will start with an introductory lecture and proceed with a number of reading and review assignments, where students’ input will be central.