Abstract
All research practice draws on particular world views that are held and taken for granted by members of the research community. Researchers learn to perceive and order their research activities without reflecting on the special features of their particular world views. As a result, they construct and legitimate particular sets of beliefs about the ability of their particular research agendas to shape the ways in which social and technological phenomena are articulated and hence addressed. This chapter demonstrates how such world views are embedded in research practice as systems of classification that order and interpret incoming and outgoing information in ways that are very similar to human cultural practice. In particular, this chapter draws from anthropological concepts that describe similar processes used by social groups to produce and reproduce particular identities through processes that include and exclude other groups. Hence, it is argued that research practice needs to be more cognizant of the implicit assumptions that underlie it, because the outcomes are in no small measure predetermined by them.
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- 1.
A host of valid critiques have been leveraged on participatory research and other populist approaches. Some of the criticisms have included the tendency to equate Participatory Rapid Appraisal (a set of tools) with participatory research (a philosophical approach and methodological orientation to research), the tendency to apply a set of participatory techniques without adjusting patterns of perception and behavior, or the tendency to use “participation” as a form of political control – overshadowing questions of legitimacy, justice, power and the politics of gender and difference (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Kapoor 2002; Williams 2004). The view of the author is that while these critiques are often valid, it is not due to the inherent limitations of participatory research per se – but rather to how it has been practiced and by whom (e.g. those lacking a firm grounding in the underlying principles and theory), the result being its mis-application and the dilution of its intended effects.
- 2.
The classificatory schemes have been adapted from the works of Edward Said (1978), E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), and Louis Dumont (1980) as cited in Baumann and Gingrich (2006 [2004]).
- 3.
Instrumental in the sense of being employed to achieve narrow functional ends. The ‘instrumental’ role of participatory research refers to it being co-opted by a technological research agenda, where participatory methods and approaches are utilized in isolation from their theoretical origins.
- 4.
These alternative views of poverty encompass the idea of income and consumption as important only to the extent that they contribute to enhancing the capabilities of people to achieve the lives they want. Capabilities through participation include meeting basic needs such as nourishment and health, as well as more complex social ones such as enhanced community status and self respect.
- 5.
A distinction is made between participatory rural appraisal (PRA), which in addition to emphasizing a set of tools (as mentioned above), strives for speed and focuses on practical issues rather than being theory driven, and participatory research (PR), which focuses on fostering an awareness among farmers or the poor themselves of the reasons for their economic, social, and political status (see Wright and Nelson 1995).
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Gurung, B. (2010). Framing Participation in Agricultural and Natural Resource Management Research. In: German, L., Ramisch, J., Verma, R. (eds) Beyond the Biophysical. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8826-0_11
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