Doing development and writing culture

This article explores the implications of different knowledge practices in anthropology and international development. Knowledge in development is not a straightforward matter of knowledge about context and devising actions. International development practice is knowledge explicitly constituted as a form of action. Anthropological knowledge claims to separate knowledge from action, first, by making knowledge about the past actions of others — representations — and, second, by representing its own knowledge as abstracted from its practice in the present. The absence of anthropological knowledge from development practice is not a matter of the relation between different kinds of knowledge which could be brought together, but is a product of the ontological basis of different practices.