Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development (Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Book 6)

"Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development's discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about 'pure' and 'applied' anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge."--Publisher's website CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction: The Anthropology of Expertise and Professionals in International Development Chapter 2 Calculating Compassion: Accounting for Some Categorical Practices in International Development Chapter 3 Rendering Society Technical: Government through Community and the Ethnographic Turn at the World Bank in Indonesia Chapter 4 Social Analysis as Corporate Product: Non- Economists/Anthropologists at Work at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Chapter 5 The World Bank’s Expertise: Observant Participation in the World Development Report 2006, Equity and Development Chapter 6 World Health and Nepal: Producing Internationals, Healthy Citizenship and the Cosmopolitan Chapter 7 The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence Chapter 8 Parochial Cosmopolitanism and the Power of Nostalgia Chapter 9 Tidy Concepts, Messy Lives: Defining Tensions in the Domestic and Overseas Careers of U.K. Non-Governmental Professionals Chapter 10 Coda: With Alice in Aidland: A Seriously Satirical Allegory Notes on Contributors Index