Culture and development:Taking culture seriously in development for Andean indigenous people

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which 'culturally appropriate development' is thought and practiced in the Andes.</p

Universal and Local Understanding of Poverty in Peru

The purpose of this survey of the literature on poverty in Peru is to contribute to universal and interdisciplinary understanding, while at the same time giving due weight to discipline-specific contributions. The first three sections review relevant literature on Peru by economists, social anthropologists and sociologists. The strict positivism of much economic literature renders it susceptible to neglect power relations and assume a benign and universal process of modernization. Anthropologists have revealed the importance of local cultural identity, but at the risk of downplaying universal dimensions of well-being. Sociologists struggle to reconcile a universal analysis of class structure with renewed emphasis on individual and collective agency in adversity. The last section puts forward an integrating theoretical framework centred on the concepts of inclusion and exclusion. In contrast to the ‘tragic optimism’ of Sender this theory of social exclusion can best be summed up as ‘constructive pessimism’