Between Optimism and Despair: Engineering, Anthropology, and Development in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

There are differences between the typical optimism of engineers regarding the benefits of development and the more skeptical views that have become common among anthropologists during the last 50 years. It is tempting to reduce these differences to intellectual stereotypes: engineers solve problems while anthropologists pose questions, engineers create while anthropologists critique. However, more critical attitudes have begun to emerge among engineers and engineering educators in this field, and not all anthropologists who work in development see reflexivity as a postmodern condition of apathy. Most important is to acknowledge power differentials between development agencies and communities and how the institutional cultures within large aid agencies have the power to determine whether projects fail or succeed according to their own, often arbitrary, criteria. To illustrate how issues of power differentials are often more important than technological development, I briefly consider case studies of attempts to introduce newly designed cook stoves (in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) and dendro power (in Sri Lanka). Shared insights from engineers and anthropologists, who pay critical attention to the practice of development and the context in which it operates, suggest that we should focus on interdisciplinary strengths and not differences when confronting impoverishment that results from deep seated structures of inequality.