Culture, Politics, and Development

Woolcock, Michael

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: AFTERLIFE;    ANCESTRY;    ANTHROPOLOGIST;    ANTHROPOLOGISTS;    BASIC;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6939
RP-ID  :  WPS6939

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Whether in the domains of scholarship orpractice, important advances have been made in recent yearsin our understanding of how culture, politics, anddevelopment interact. Today s leading theorists of cultureand development represent a fourth distinctive perspectivevis-à-vis their predecessors, one that seeks to provide anempirically grounded, mechanisms-based account of howsymbols, frames, identities, and narratives are deployed aspart of a broader repertoire of cultural "tools"connecting structure and agency. A central virtue of thisapproach is less the broad policy prescriptions to which itgives rise -- indeed, to offer such prescriptions would besomething of a contradiction in terms -- than the emphasisit places on making intensive and extensive commitments toengaging with the idiosyncrasies of local contexts. Deepknowledge of contextual realities can contributeconstructively to development policy by enabling carefulintra-country comparisons to be made of the conditions underwhich variable responses to otherwise similar problemsemerge. Such knowledge is also important for discerning thegeneralizability (or "external validity") ofclaims regarding the efficacy of development interventions,especially those overtly engaging with social, legal, andpolitical issues.