The Rationale of Development Anthropology

In: The Pakistan development review: PDR, Band 33, Heft 4II, S. 1181-1187

Abstract

The controversy between the 'academic' and 'applied'
parameters of anthropology, has divided the practitioners of
anthropology since the discipline became a university science in the
last decades of the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Anthropology has primarily been concerned with the study of the nature,
content, and transformation of social phenomena in general. There is
hence, an obvious contradiction between the generality of the
subject-matter, and concern with scientific objectivity on the one hand;
and the biases inherent within the applicability of the parameters of
anthropology to concrete given situations, and the obligation to
compensate for the debt owed to the sources that make the study
possible, on the other.