Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development This collection shifts the focus away from the wealth of published mate- rial which analyses large-scale, international development plans and poli- cies to examine the conflicts and realities of development at a local, expe- riential level. It provides a series of case studies which illuminate the attitudes and actions of all those involved in local development schemes. The material is drawn from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. All the contributors use rigorous anthropological methods of analysis to shed light on the place of personal sentiment and identity in reactions to planned development schemes. In a world where direct action and public protest are routine responses to local development schemes, they show how protesters, developers and politicians often hold very different fundamental views about the environment, society, government and development which go beyond partisan economic and political interests. This collection provides a valuable comparative perspective on the context of development, and makes enlightening reading for social anthropologists, planners, development workers and specialists in development studies. Simone Abram is a Research Fellow at the University of Cardiff. Jacqueline Waldren is a Research Associate at the Centre for Cross- Cultural Research on Women and a Lecturer-Tutor at Oxford University. European Association of Social Anthropologists Series facilitator: Jon P.Mitchell University of Sussex The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was inau- gurated in January 1989, in response to a widely felt need for a profes- sional association which would represent social anthropologists in Eu- rope and foster cooperation and interchange in teaching and research. As Europe transforms itself in the 1990s, the EASA is dedicated to the re- newal of the distinctive European tradition in social anthropology. Other titles in the series Conceptualizing Society Grasping the Changing World Adam Kuper Václav Hubinger Other Histories Civil Society Kirsten Hastrup Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn Alcohol, Gender and Culture Dimitra Gefou-Madianou Nature and Society Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson Understanding Rituals Daniel de Coppet The Ethnography of Moralities Gendered Anthropology Signe Howell Teresa del Valle Inside and Outside the Law Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge Olivia Harris Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik Locality and Belonging Fieldwork and Footnotes Nadia Lovell Han F.Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan Recasting Ritual Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw M.Crain Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development Knowledge and sentiments in conflict Edited by Simone Abram and Jacqueline Waldren London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 selection and editorial matter, EASA; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-45102-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-45702-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-18277-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-18278-6 (pbk) Contents List of contributors vii Preface ix 1 Introduction: anthropological perspectives on local development 1 SIMONE ABRAM 2 Discourses on development in Malaysia 18 ANNE KATHRINE LARSEN 3 Sex for leisure: modernity among female bar workers in Tanzania 36 AUD TALLE 4 State vs. locality: the new Slovene—Croat state border in the Upper Kolpa valley 55 DUŠKA KNEŽEVIC 5 From economism to culturalism: the social and cultural construction of risk in the River Esera (Spain) 75 GASPAR MAIRAL BUIL AND JOSÉ ANGEL BERGUA vi Contents 6 Contested space: planners, tourists, developers and environmentalists in Malta 96 JEREMY BOISSEVAIN AND NADIA THEUMA 7 The road to ruin: the politics of development in the Balearic Islands 120 JACQUELINE WALDREN 8 When opposite worldviews attract: a case of tourism and local development in Southern France 141 CHRISTIAN LINDKNUD Index 160 Contributors Simone Abram is a member of the Environmental Planning Research Unit at the University of Cardiff. She is editor of Tourists and Tour- ism: Identifying with People and Places (Oxford: Berg), and has done ethnographic research in Britain and France. José Angel Bergua is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Saragossa. He received a doctorate in Sociology at the University of Madrid in 1995. For several years he has been working on ‘youth cultures’. Jeremy Boissevain is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Uni- versity of Amsterdam. He is an associate of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research and the University of Malta’s Med-Campus Programme for Sustainable Tourism. He has published extensively on local politics, ethnic relations, small entrepreneurs, ritual change and tourism. His recent publications include Revitalizing European Rituals (London: Routledge) and Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism (Providence/Oxford: Berghahn Books). Duška Kneževic studied sociology at the University of Ljubljana and completed a doctoral thesis in 1998 at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana. She is a Teaching Assistant and Junior Re- searcher in Social and Political Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Anne Kathrine Larsen is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Trondheim). She re- ceived a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Trondheim in 1994. She has also worked as a UN Associate Expert with regional planning, from 1982 to 1984 in Malaysia and from 1985–6 in the United Arab Emirates. viii Contributors Christian Lindknud has a candidatus-degree from the University of Copenhagen, based on ethnographic research carried out in Southern France in 1994–5. As a freelance journalist and Internet consultant he is currently working with intercultural and international communica- tion in the mass media and on the Internet. He also works with the development of urban tourism in Lyon, France, where he has been living since 1996. Gaspar Mairal Buil is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Univer- sity of Saragossa. He received a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Madrid in 1990. He has worked extensively in Aragon and published on urban anthropology and Aragonese iden- tity. Aud Talle is a Professor of Anthropology at the Department and Mu- seum of Anthropology, University of Oslo. She has carried out re- search among pastoralists in Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania. In En- glish she has published several articles and the book Women at a Loss: Changes in Maasai Pastoralism and, Their Effects on Gender Rela- tions. Nadia Theuma studied Social Anthropology at the University of Malta, where she is now Assistant Lecturer and Researcher in the Tourism Unit of the Department of Management. She has carried out research on the social and cultural impacts of tourism on local communities, and is currently engaged in research for a doctoral degree in Cultural Tourism Management. Jacqueline Waldren is a part-time Lecturer-Tutor at the University of Oxford, and Oxford Brookes University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, at Queen Eliza- beth House, Oxford University. She holds a DPhil in Social Anthro- pology from the University of Oxford. Her monograph, Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca, was published in 1996. Preface The chapters collected in this volume were first presented in a workshop at the 1996 EASA Conference in Barcelona. The workshop organisers (Jacqueline Waldren and myself) had become increasingly concerned with the scant attention paid by anthropologists to the forms that development takes in the so-called ‘developed’ or ‘industrialised’ nations. This con- cern grew out of our discussions following my own experiences of study- ing planning in England, and finding that few anthropologists had gone before me, and even fewer had published ethnographic work on the sub- ject, although notable work had been done in the USA: for example, Lisa Peattie at MIT and Janet Abu-Lugod in New York. The role of notions of development, identities and sentiments as a normalised part of local gov- ernance had become a central issue to our work on both tourism and local government planning over the past few years, and the opportunity to com- pare this with other anthropologists’ understandings of different devel- opment contexts was offered by the conference. The aim of the workshop was to reconsider the differentiated, local notions of development being used in routine state-governed development, in contrast to international aid-sponsored development. Authors were invited to address questions of sentiment, identity, citizenship, governance and power, to analyse how and why governing