Development and Personhood
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Karp, Ivan
setName: label: See more items in
content: Ivan Karp papers
label: See more items in
content: Ivan Karp papers / Series 6: Born Digital Files / 6.1: Writings and Projects
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1989 October-2001 November
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Developing out of Karp's interest in notions and practices related to personhood and agency, this folder contains material about Karp's project and interest in a particular facet of notions of personhood and their implications, i.e. how theories and practices related to international development carry implicit assumptions about different kinds of persons and relations and how they shape other understandings. This included analyzing continuities between and contradictions in the discourses and practice of colonialism and development, and particularly modes of discipline and colonial education which sought to shape persons and subjects in specific ways. It also involved analyzing Kenyan newspaper articles and how they presented notions of development and personhood.

The folder "HICKS" contains a couple of files dated 1993 that seem to be work by a research assistant, summarizing and compiling lists of quotes from articles concerning colonial education in Africa (esp. east Africa).

Other files include various sets of notes, reading notes, files of bilbiographic searches (e.g. on colonial education), and some research material Karp gathered for this project. The latter include a number of files with notes from Kratz's conversations with people in her research area that touched on notions of development. (For example, the file "Ngugi.D&P" relates to her conversation with Daniel Ngugi, a Kikuyu man in her research area.) Research material also includes an uncorrected transcription of an "All Things Considered" radio story by Danny Zwerdling. An assistant must have transcribed it since it has the sound-alike errors of someone who doesn't know Kenya (such as Mefari instead of Mathare). Karp used this story in one of the papers he wrote under this project. This folder contains several initial versions of the paper (including a version presented at the Red Lion seminar the year Karp and Kratz were at Northwestern), an abstract for its presentation at the 2000 AAA meetings, etc. It was eventually published in 2002 as "Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse" (files for this version are named "knauft", "knauftnotes" and "knauft.bib" - the editor of the book was Bruce Knauft).

Karp planned to write a second paper that would have developed this further through a comparison and discourse analysis of two documents: a 1988 position paper by Edward Jaycox (of the World Bank) called "What Can be Done in Africa? The World Bank's Response" and a 1948 colonial policy document by Sir Philip Mitchell (colonial governor of Kenya) called "The Agrarian Problem in Kenya." Karp had these two documents scanned in preparation for his and Kratz's work. They are contained here in the subfolder "SCANNED_ARTICLES." Karp planned to also include with this some of his analyses of contemporary Kenyan newspaper articles.

The file "DEVHUMANITIES_ROCKEFELLER" (which Kratz renamed) seems to be an advisory document Karp wrote for Rockefeller Foundation officers in 1993, soon after the African Philosophy conference he organized with Masolo in Nairobi. It presents a series of ideas for meetings, workshops, programs that would bring humanities work together with work on development.

The files "DISDEV" and "DISDEV.MEMO" relate to a project on Discourses of Development that Randy Packard and Fred Cooper were working on with a series of workshops. Karp and Kratz took part in one at Berkeley.

This folder also includes a file called "SUBSTUDI" which is an early formulation of another thread in Karp's thinking which looks at the epistemological and political relations between African philosophy and Subaltern Studies in India. This developed further in Karp's thinking later and was one base for Karp's graduate seminar "Traveling Theory" and his thinking in the mid-late 1990s about the critiques of area studies.

N.B. the folder "WAGNER" appears to be an empty document.

See also Subseries: Steven Omuse which includes two letters from Karp asking his research assistant in Kenya to record material related to the Development and Personhood project. Series 2. Development Discourse contains additional research material for this project.