Title: Anthropology, Development, and Beyond | For More Conversations with Economists and Other Scholars
Domain: philosophy

Question: What is the relationship between anthropology and economy in the field of development studies and what it should be in face of the grave problems today?

Background: 1.The world system has changed since the 1990s, when the tremendous power of social and environmental destruction deployed by triumphant neoliberal capitalist globalization became the norm. The West no longer controls the development discourse as completely as it used to. | 2.Heterodox economists are aware that historical, sociological, cultural, racial, gender, and environmental dynamics are not “externalities” that may be ignored, and anthropologists and economists make up a diverse group of professionals. | 3.How wealth is produced and partaken and how it affects the human and nonhuman worlds, which is what at stake when economists/anthropologists discuss development, currently come together with major challenges, such as the increased importance of conservative and ultraconservative politics, new imperialist wars, and climate change.

Definitions: 1.development:A multidimensional process involving economic growth, social progress, and improvement in the quality of life of a population. It is understood as a complex, context-dependent transformation of societies aiming at reducing poverty, inequality, and vulnerability while expanding opportunities and freedoms for all individuals. | 2.development anthropology:A subfield of anthropology that studies the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of development processes and projects. It seek to understand the impacts of development from the perspectives of the people involved, aiming to improve development practices by promoting culturally sensitive, participatory, and sustainable approaches. 3.anthropology of development:A specialized area within anthropology that critically analyzes the concepts, practices, and impacts of development as a global phenomenon. It examines power dynamics, inequalities, and the unintended consequences of development, often questioning dominant development paradigms and advocating for more inclusive, locally grounded approaches. 4.Anthropocene: A proposed geological epoch that marks the period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geology. It signifies a new era where humans significantly alter natural processes, leading to large-scale environmental changes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and landscape transformation. | 5.Capitalocene: A critical term used to describe the current historical epoch, emphasizing that the environmental crises we face are primarily driven by the capitalist mode of production rather than humanity as a whole. It highlights how capitalism’s focus on endless economic growth, exploitation of labor, and natural resources leads to systemic environmental degradation and social inequalities.

Methodology: 1.Review the involvement of anthropologists in development since the 1940s.2.Review the development field in the wider juncture in the late 1980s and 1990s, and discuss the relationship between anthropology and economy in the field of development studies.3.Disscuss the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debates under the context of current major challenges , and advocate new interdisciplinary exchanges.

Answer: 1.The field of development studies exemplifies the changes of economic anthropology and the relationship between economy and anthropology | In a special issue about the relations between anthropology and economics, it is mandatory to mention economic anthropology as a disciplinary niche that has represented anthropologists' visions on economic issues. | From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, Marxism as an influential theory and a common ground facilitated crossfertilizations among anthropologists, economists, historians, and geographers. | As Marxism has declined after the end of the Cold War, many of the issues discussed by economic anthropologists slowly retreated to the back of practitioners' minds or became a part of research areas identified by distinct labels and engagements with topics such as development, globalization, infrastructure, financialization, climate change, and the Anthropocene. | It is possible to find subjects dear to economic anthropology in different areas of contemporary research, but this does not mean that it currently exists in a rebranded fashion. First, economic anthropology has kept its own heuristic space. Second, the insertion in a new field of inquiry calls for new research, interlocutions, recalibrations, or creations of concepts and interpretations, and it generates genuine and original knowledge and theories. | The field of development studies allows to refer to scholarly, professional, and political relations and subjects of common interest of economists and anthropologists. | Conclusion: The field of development studies exemplifies the changes of economic anthropology and the relationship between economy and anthropology. | 2.Review the involvement of anthropologists in development since the 1940s. | Since the 1940s, development has been a discourse specialized on issues of global wealth or poverty and inequalities and on defining models and actions to solve the problems of so-called underdeveloped countries, developing countries, or emerging | economies. Economists' prominence is especially visible in places such as the World Bank (WB), the global governance institution once thought to be the mecca of development, and where they also have interacted with development anthropologists who entered this scenario as specialists on local, "backward," "exotic," "poor," and "Third World" peoples. | The involvement of anthropologists in development may be subdivided into two trends: development anthropology and the anthropology of development. Development anthropology is mainly concerned with the impacts of development on local people. The anthropology of development is mostly dedicated to a critique of "development" as a Western discourse. The study of what was called "development projects" and development agencies or agents is included in this last area of anthropological concerns. | In the 1970s the academic production on development started to blossom. By studying the impact of development projects based on comparisons of different local responses, anthropologists tried to find constant structures that would allow them to predict individual and group behavior in a vein similar to economists, whose professional practices often involve risk analysis and how to avoid contingencies. At the same time, anthropologists became hire options for multilateral and national bureaucracies and civil society agencies related to the development industry. But Whether or not the practice of "development anthropologists" had positive effects on the institutions they have worked for and on the lives of local populations is a hot issue among anthropologists that resonates with debates related to the applied or academic divide in the discipline. | In the 1990s, there is a postdevelopment critique. According to Escobar (2005), the main point of the postdevelopment debate was not to propose another version of development but to answer the question of "why, by means of which historical processes and with what consequences, Asia, Africa and Latin America were 'thought' as the 'Third World' by development discourses and practices" . One important research effort within the interdisciplinary and diverse field of postdevelopment was the study of development in concrete settings, its agents, agencies, and processes. | Conclusion: The roles anthropologists play in the field of development studies are changing. | 3.The Development Field in the Wider Juncture in the Late 1980s and 1990s | The 1990s was a particularly important decade for the involvement of anthropologists in global development policies, a professional environment usually hegemonized by economists. | Macro political, economic, and sociological dynamics that affected the world system by the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s: The bipolar world of the Cold War was finished, opening a period of crisis of socialist utopian discourses and projects. This gap was filled by other utopian discourses that had been gaining momentum since the 1970s and reached their climax in 1988 and 1992. The early 1990s was a propitious juncture for a series of experiments under the banner of the newly accepted global consensus: sustainable development. | The impact of sustainable development was particularly felt in the global development agencies and in the aid industry. The window was open for a greater participation of anthropologists in these processes within multilateral agencies, state organizations, and NGOs. But development is a power field in which anthropologists and economists converge and diverge. It is made up of several social, ethnic, political, technical, professional, organizational, financial, state, and private agencies and agents. | The development field has spurred the mingling of economists and anthropologists in working environments. Their relationships are dependent on the institution's hierarchy and internal politics and not on some supposed ontological superiority of one discipline over the other. Moreover, The impact of wider political, ideological, and utopian discourses on the development field cannot be underestimated and | may open avenues of cooperation and conflict between anthropologists and economists. Generally speaking, Anthropologists will usually emphasize the value of diversity, cultural relativist approaches (such as different conceptions of nature and the good life), and the empowerment of local people. Economists will usually emphasize the value of models, numbers, rational choices, and market forces as modes of solving development problems. | 4.Changes in Academia and in the World System | The high time of development anthropology and anthropology of development is behind us, some of the subjects encompassed by the development debate of the 1990s and early 2000s are currently part of other domains of academic and public interest such as the growing field of interactions and exchanges among different epistemic communities called Anthropocene. | Limits of Anthropocene: The larger discursive and institutional field in which the Anthropocene locates itself is made up by agencies and agents that are not as identifiable as those of the development field. Moreover, in certain interpretations of the Anthropocene, there is a tendency to think that subjects of complex political fields can hardly be distinguished and that the establishment of powerful collective counterhegemonic subjects is no longer possible. Such visions obliterate the mapping of the power field now in action and make it harder to establish political priorities for scholars and citizens. | The relationship between Anthropocene and sustainable development: Anthropocene as a discourse shares similarities with sustainable development. It makes up a field of contentions where different political forces may meet, oppose, or ally themselves. There are some notable differences though. Sustainable development is a utopia, whereas the Anthropocene is a dystopia. And more importantly, sustainable development, as an heir to the many meanings and adjectives associated with "development," generated its own organizational and political field, institutional and otherwise, that, despite its normalization, has also been useful for the promotion of the notion and political field of the Anthropocene itself. | Issue for future: How each of these discursive fields, with their agents and agencies, may establish productive and virtuous exchanges between them and with other sets of progressive discourses capable of constructing new formulations to win the hearts and minds of the many millions of people who know there cannot be a future without environmental and social justice. | New challenges: The world system has changed since the 1990s, especially after the end of the Cold War, the development power field has also changed in the past two decades. The most notorious novelty is the role of China in international development. | 5.Anthropologists and Economists Are a Diverse Group of Professionals Facing New Interdisciplinary Challenges | "Heterodox economists," who are mostly oriented by political economy or Marxist theories and not by the prevailing neoclassical economics school, are aware that historical, sociological, cultural, racial, gender, and environmental dynamics are not "externalities" that may be ignored. | Anthropologists and economists make up a diverse group of professionals. Their approximations and detachments are based on both disciplinary and political visions. The kinds of specific disciplinary education and worldviews embedded in economics and anthropology are not enough to explain all divergences and convergences in the relationships between these professionals. | Conclusion: Ultimately, what is at stake when economists/anthropologists discuss development is how wealth is produced and partaken and how it affects the human | and nonhuman worlds, currently, these questions come together with major challenges. it is time for anthropologists to critically and more consistently engage with notions and problems concerning humankind. And the expectation of a generalized catastrophe caused by global warming calls for the integration of diverse cultural, political, and scientific standpoints beyond the realms of economics and anthropology.

Checklist: 1. Does the answer include the perspective that the field of development studies exemplifies the changes in economic anthropology and the relationship between economy and anthropology? | 2. Does the answer review the involvement of anthropologists in development since the 1940s? | 3. Does the answer discuss the development field in the wider juncture in the late 1980s and 1990s? | 4. Does the answer discuss how anthropologists and economists should act in response to new interdisciplinary challenges? | 5. Does the answer discuss the content of changes in academia and in the world system?