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Anthropology inDevelopment: Notes from anEthnographic PerspectiveSondra L. HausnerVersion of record first published: 22 Nov 2006.

To cite this article: Sondra L. Hausner (2006): Anthropology in Development:Notes from an Ethnographic Perspective, India Review, 5:3-4, 318-342

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India Review, vol. 5, nos. 3–4, July/October, 2006, pp. 318–342Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print; 1557-3036 onlineDOI:10.1080/14736480600939074

FIND1473-64891557-3036India Review, Vol. 5, No. 3-4, August 2006: pp. 1—12India ReviewAnthropology in Development: Notes from an Ethnographic PerspectiveAnthropology in DevelopmentIndia ReviewSONDRA L. HAUSNER

Academic anthropologists are often critiqued for not being intouch with reality, although ostensibly it is what we study. Byshowing how anthropology can be part of the endeavor of devel-opment—a multifaceted project that is always political, collabora-tive, cross-cultural, and public—this article is an attempt torectify that sometimes unfair reputation. Certainly much academicwork is far away from the field, taking place instead in the class-room, the campus office, and the academic meeting. The luxury ofthis distance, combined with an academic immersion into the intel-lectual realm, affords an exclusively critical stance. But a greatmany professionals in the “real world,” paid to apply solutions towhat ails, are similarly out of touch with reality. The places of pol-icymaking—the conference rooms of development organizationswhere social policies are explicitly planned—are usually no closerto the field than are the ivory towers of academe. This is a con-founding situation: the scholars are out of touch with reality, andthe practitioners are out of touch with reality. Reality, apparently,is a very elusive thing.

In this essay, I want to contribute to a discussion about how field-based analytical anthropology might best be applied to internationaldevelopment. The basic argument is this: Development institutionsand donor agencies will continue to cast human rights, reproductivehealth, sexuality, empowerment, poverty, subjecthood, citizenship,identity, forests, water, and education (to name a few domainsthrough which development processes affect people’s lives) withincertain heuristic frames. They must do so, in order to function as insti-tutions. Given that these frames fundamentally shape people’s livesand identities, my question is how can anthropology’s field-derivedknowledge be used productively in this process? I argue that ethno-graphy about the realities of people’s physical and social lives, and the

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ways people are intentionally or unintentionally implicated in globalprocesses including development, is precisely what anthropologistsare good for. We are trained to look for the contingencies of culture,in specific instances and in global domains. How can we use thisinformation to the advantage of our informants, when they are thepeople whose lives and experiences are shaped by development’snarratives?

Anthropological methods may accomplish the very collection ofdata that development seeks. And yet anthropologists rightlybelieve that development too often ignores what its own beneficia-ries have to say, railroading voices, perpetuating structural andsocial hierarchies and power inequities, failing to ask people whatwould really ameliorate a situation (or asking questions in closed orfixed categories), and interpreting their responses in ways that fitdevelopment’s own agendas. Ethnographic research—by which Imean an immersive kind of qualitative research that is truly open-ended1—would help establish how problems are really experiencedby anthropology’s informants, development’s beneficiaries, andalso elicit genuinely “local”—by which I mean developed withininstead of without—potential solutions.2

In this essay, I write not as an anthropologist of development butas an anthropologist in development.3 Others are more equipped thanI to interpret my stories and experiences within the massive structuresthat we singularly label “development,” denoting a multifaceted com-plex that includes everything from state governments to donor agen-cies to international non-profits to grassroots organizations. Each ofthese institutions functions on multiple levels and tries to serve manydifferent constituencies: development is an exponential process, a rip-ple effect. Rather than writing from the outside-in, as might a trainedanthropologist of development, my comments are written from theinside-out, to explore in a little more depth the reception of anthro-pology in development, and to suggest what roles anthropology mightproductively play.

In writing this essay for both anthropologists and developmentprofessionals (acknowledging that, as in my own case, anthropologistsare sometimes themselves development professionals), I hope thatanthropologists who wish their work to be used publicly might find ituseful to know what suspicions, hierarchies, and constraints we actuallyface. Similarly, I hope that if development practitioners come to a

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deeper understanding of how anthropology’s core tenets (self-reflex-ivity) and methods (participatory ethnography4) contribute to goodpractices in development, they might increasingly choose to use them,thereby ensuring that institutions more actively solicit and incorpo-rate the perspectives of their intended beneficiaries.

This is an essay based on fieldwork. What it is like out there, in thefancy halls of the World Bank, the grungy storerooms of on-the-ground NGOs, and the diplomatic splendor of the United Nations.The egos and the politics. None of the patterns or players will sur-prise, and yet by setting it down, or stating it outright, or telling thestory, perhaps I may provide some qualitative evidence—an ethno-graphy—that shows how anthropology is misused and misunder-stood, and also sometimes misappropriated, in the work ofdevelopment.

This is an account of total frustration, on the one hand, an attemptto narrate the experience of watching the near impossibility of socialchange at work, including genuinely well-intentioned efforts thatsomehow become regressive through inefficiency, mismanagement,and workaholism. The glamour, wealth, and elitism of multilateraldevelopment institutions in South Asia cannot help but exacerbate theproblems of social hierarchy that are responsible for a great deal of thepoverty and inequity that development programs seek to alleviate.5

Equalizing power of this sort is an impossible task, which is whyevery development effort that attempts it is doomed to fail, and whymost end up replicating the hierarchy in a different form. At momentsin this essay, I fear I show my bitterness: watching feeble attempts touse knowledge about social structure and exclusion in South Asia getrailroaded, flattened, or just plain ignored can leave a scholar raw.

But, on the other hand, I do not wish this essay to be a hopelessone. Anthropology excels at showing how those at the bottom of oroutside the social order find sources of strength. Through our ownfieldwork, we can find countless instances of people who have suf-fered poverty or brutality and still live with dignity and equanimity.6

Indeed, one powerful critique of development lies in its unwillingnessto allow for local—or subversive—movements or actions of agency tocome to the fore in the face of a globalizing discourse.7 Anthropol-ogy is useful to development in any of a number of ways, but this isone of the most important: it can document local response, agency,

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and perhaps most importantly, resilience. When we show how narra-tives of resistance are encoded in folk-songs,8 or how the daily ritualof drinking tea undercuts even a severe experience of oppression,9 eth-nography reminds us how people’s everyday lives are much larger andricher than the statistic or category assigned to their income level orcaste group.

When I returned to Nepal after finishing graduate work, I becamea freelance anthropologist, ready to convince NGOs and multilateralorganizations that they needed ethnography at least as much as Ineeded work. In development-ese, this essay is the “output” of threeyears of working as an anthropologist in public policy. Ultimately Iwish to make anthropology productive in the public sphere, not socranky or rigid as to be deemed impossible to work with. In the spiritof reflecting the field, this essay follows a chronological flow of expe-rience and understanding. My intention is to contribute thoughts as aforeigner immersed in the culture of development and well acquaintedwith Nepal and India to the larger discussion of public anthropologyin South Asia. If development and anthropology learn to workpatiently with each other, understanding the structures, constraints,and minimal requirements that each field faces, the experiences ofmarginalized, disenfranchised, and poor individuals and communitiesin South Asia might be better listened to and understood, their needsbetter met.

The Anthropology of DevelopmentThe anthropological and historical critique of development dealsextensively with the industry’s selective use of the concept of culture,with good reason. The way development institutions fix the “local” inspace and time;10 oppose science and biology to the “folk” or the “tra-ditional”;11 and variably aggregate and scale up the “local” to representthe “global”12 all point to the conclusion that the concept of local cul-ture is manipulated by institutions of development to advance theirown agendas, in ways that are usually not publicly acknowledged.13

This is a significant difference between the orientation of developmentand the orientation of anthropology: the former requires that self-cri-tique be an internal or private matter only, while the latter insists thatsome self-revelation is critical to its method. Development does morethan address social reality, these authors argue: development createssocial reality, too.

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These critiques emphasize how, over time, development institu-tions manipulate not only the concept of culture but the referent ofculture itself, in the formidable Foucauldian way in which theyfinancially support and ideologically direct state governments andorganizations of civil society,14 and also in the way people come tosee themselves.15 In the case of Nepal, Seira Tamang has argued thatdevelopment aid fundamentally constitutes the category of Nepaliwomen.16 As donor awareness has expanded to understand the prev-alence of caste and ethnic discrimination by the Nepali state andNepali social structures, donors have slowly understood that pov-erty reduction must address structural inequality as well as per cap-ita income, and low-caste Hindu and indigenous ethnic groups havesimilarly been targeted—and constituted—by recent developmentefforts.17

To be fair, anthropology itself has a colonial history, and wasdeliberately concocted as a way to know a subject that was really anobject.18 There is no excuse for imperial behavior of this sort, and Iresisted the discipline and its methods for years in protest. Ultimately,however, I was won over by method: empires, like corporations, havepowerful incentives to know their subjects well. Anthropologists aretrained to ask people what they themselves are thinking, and to cull(to the best of their ability, which is quite refined after several decadesof disciplinary remorse) the data that seems to result more from theasking of the question than from a reflection on what someone else isexperiencing at a particular moment in time. Good anthropology isthe observation of phenomena minus the phenomenon of self. A goodanthropologist is an observer of phenomena who recognizes theobserver effect.

Despite its colonial history, the accusation that academia is out oftouch with reality may be particularly unfair in the context of ananthropology department. In fact, it could be argued that anthropolo-gists are more in touch with reality than many—we love nothing bet-ter than to emphasize people’s real situations; remind ourselves andour colleagues how relations of power impact every interaction;debate how narratives do or do not relate to experience; and puzzleover how history, family, and circumstance produce knowledge andbehavior. Behavioral psychologists call this nexus Knowledge,Attitude, and Practice. And the development world, seeking to incor-porate this approach for behavior modification projects such as

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contraceptive or condom use, now relies heavily on “KAP” (Knowl-edge, Attitude, and Practice) surveys.

Although we rarely employ surveys, the methods of anthropol-ogy are ideal for the purposes and practices of development. Eth-nography—the practice of conducting in-depth, open-endedresearch over an extended period of time with a specific community—requires certain ethical guidelines and a certain flexibility that is fun-damental to the changing nature of human relationships. Not onlydo we fulfill development’s current priority for community-basedapproaches, we prioritize participatory approaches, and we solicit“voices” from the field.19 Contemporary cultural anthropologists areethnographers first and foremost, and while there may be a greatdeal of variability in our interest or capacity for on-the-groundfieldwork, we fundamentally rely on real-life conditions to informus as to what is going on.

Like corporations, development organizations sometimes do hireanthropologists to find out what people are thinking. In contempo-rary donor circles, it is an agreed-upon international principle thatsocio-cultural knowledge is a good thing, necessary for effective pro-gramming. The trouble starts when field reality—the data—doesnot fit the mold. When the language we use to convey on-the-groundreality does not fit neatly into the logical frameworks (“log-frames”)that have been painstakingly laid out to accommodate data, we arriveat a methodological impasse. Good field research has to find some-thing unexpected, a piece of the puzzle that was impenetrable oropaque before we started. This is the very point of conducting fieldresearch: it cannot be anticipated. If we are really lucky, our field datamight even establish a whole new category of thought about the issuewe set out to research. But from the development perspective, newcategories of thought and information pose a problem: the projectlog-frame can no longer be productively used.

And then the question becomes the extent to which the anthro-pologist can stand by the phenomenological principle: that what yousee in reality trumps any amount of statistical data, any presupposedresults, or any tables into which you are supposed to fit your data.Whether s/he capitulates to the culture of development, in which datasets, log-frames, rapid assessments, surveys, and base-line studies—the latest required bywords (indeed, the littler NGOs will still bestruggling to adapt to the new requirements of the big daddies like

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the World Bank and USAID by the time new bywords take over)20—are the rigid systems and mechanisms through which developmentmust take place. It all depends, of course, on whether you want tokeep your job.

A Tale from the FieldLet me relate a tale of working in the development industry. When Ifinished my doctorate in anthropology, I wanted a break from theivory tower, and I moved back to New York City to work as aspeechwriter and policy researcher for the Indonesian Government. Itwas culturally fascinating but depressing work, requiring that I sit in adark corner of Indonesian territory on East 42nd Street, waiting forfaxes from Jakarta to come in, always after hours because of the timedifference. Three months after I started, I was offered a post in Nepal,the country in which I grew up, and politely explained to my new col-leagues that I would still be working for Asia—this time in Asia, andspecifically in the nation that was my childhood home. Despite thedisappointment registered by my chain-smoking Indonesian boss, Ijumped ship.

The post I had been offered in Nepal was to conduct and analyzeresearch as the Senior Research Officer (Qualitative) for a meta-levelevaluation project. The question of our research was to how measure“empowerment” and “social inclusion,” two important terms that hadnot been adequately considered in development efforts in Nepal,despite caste hierarchies that we knew to be exclusive and disempow-ering. Empowerment and social inclusion as concepts, however, weresufficiently broad and malleable to require a team of researcherstrained in different disciplines, quantitative and qualitative, to defineindicators and collect and interpret data. Eventually, if we couldtogether define and refine the variables, indicators, and indices, wemight use the resulting instrument in other contexts, and in othercountries.

This sounded ideal. My one nagging concern was exactly how theethnographic methods in which I was newly trained would fit into thebroader category of the “qualitative research” demanded by theproject. The attempt to include qualitative methods as an equal partnerwas an innovative effort on the part of the donor who was funding theresearch. Faced with the irrefutable proof that statistics cannot tell youeverything about people’s lives and lived experiences, many multilateral

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and bilateral organizations have slowly accepted qualitative researchas a necessary part of research efforts. Even so, I suspected that eth-nography as conducted by contemporary anthropologists—“deephanging-out”21—might be considered fairly radical as qualitativemethods go.

I was not alone in wondering about the range of methods thatwould work in the context of the Nepali research project. When Iarrived back in Kathmandu, every new colleague greeted me with thesame—and very genuine—question: “Dr. Hausner! How nice thatyou have come. Can you tell us, please, what is qualitative research? Isit focus groups?” Thousands of Nepali students study sociology andanthropology each year, at secondary and tertiary levels, but nobodyhad heard of ethnography. Qualitative methods training in Nepal lit-erally stops at focus groups. Focus groups have their place, but theycan also be a very contrived method of gathering data, only slightlymore open-ended than questionnaires. In this instance, it seemedhighly unlikely that focus groups would be effective as a way to elicitinformation on the experiences of power and exclusion: How cansomeone freely discuss prohibition from entry into a group event in agroup context? Ethnography—open-ended research with individualmembers of a community, circumstances permitting—seemed thelogical answer.

I bravely started my new job as the qualitative research officer,training a small team of eager graduate students in ethnographic meth-ods. Our project looked specifically at the question of water taps, asalient location of exclusion for the Dalit or “untouchable” commu-nity in rural Nepal. We also documented the level of inclusion andempowerment of women, across caste and ethnic group. In seminarswith my student researchers, I tried to explain how just standing bythe water taps to see how people interacted with each other, notebookin hand, might reveal a great deal more about the extent to which peo-ple were and felt excluded than any formal sheet with questions wemight devise. Although I worked with them on the mechanics of tak-ing field notes for many hours, my student researchers, steeped in thedevelopment language of “KAP surveys” and “base-line studies,”would not accept that proper research could be conducted without aform to fill in. In the end, we did both: we stood by water taps, and wewent house-to-house to ask questions that we had listed on a sheet. Iinsisted, however, that our questions focus more on experience than

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on income levels, especially since that part of the project would becovered by the quantitative researchers.

A few months into the job, upon reviewing the budget sheet forour project, I discovered that even though I had been contracted as a“local hire,”—a Nepali contractor will earn half the rate of an interna-tionally hired contractor, even with identical credentials, and oftenmore experience—the NGO that had hired me was taking 85 percentoverhead on my salary, institutional policy. I was shocked, but myfirst contract was only for five months, so I said nothing: I would fin-ish my contract and renegotiate—either as an international hire or as alocal hire with less overhead docked. I continued with the ethnogra-phy of power and exclusion at water taps on my local salary. At theend of five months, however, when the project was not complete—itturns out development projects, like books, are never quite readywhen they are supposed to be—I decided to tell my boss at the donoragency that the conditions under which I was working were not fair.She was genuinely shocked, and told my contracting NGO that some-thing should be done, especially as the qualitative work (me) was“excellent.” At least the ethnography was passing muster.

But nothing was done. At the end of the sixth month, the quantita-tive data set was not ready, although my ethnographic data had allbeen collected, analyzed, and written up, in language as clear andstraightforward as I knew. I was informed that I needed to stay on,although my contract was finished, I had finished my part of thereport, and nobody had time to talk about my pay scale. Two and ahalf months later, I had written and revised the project report, pro-cured the funds for the second phase of the project from the donor,and was still living on what the NGO called “a volunteer’s salary”that amounted to less than my graduate student stipend. The donorwanted more analysis for the report. The NGO did not want to rene-gotiate my contract until this phase of the project was complete. Itried to point out that the report was good, and comprehensive, andsuccessfully accomplished what it set out to do. But there was more tobe done. There was always more to be done. This time, I refused tostay. Needless to say, I was not hired for Phase II of the project.

The Use of EthnographyThis essay is ultimately not about unjust labor conditions, although myfirst experience back in the field as a professional was a rude awakening

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to the disparity of development salaries, and the ways egos, institu-tional relations, and methodological favoritism invariably drive thedevelopment agenda. It was also an introduction to just how tenuousthe use of anthropology in development is, and how rarely a genuinepartnership occurs at any believable level.

Why has development resisted the use of ethnographic data—apart from the obvious response that development itself might beimplicated—and why might it be useful after all? What can ethnogra-phy offer development that quantitative data cannot? Consider thefollowing paragraph as an example, written for this article as anempirical observation of development projects in Nepal, based onthree years of participant-observation in the industry:

The tremendously low rate of success of development projectsreflects an infuriating and grave situation—infuriating because amore respectful view of culture and cultural analysis could helprather than hinder people’s living conditions, and grave becausedevelopment projects that have focused exclusively on livelihoodenhancement and poverty reduction are increasingly taking onlife-and-death situations that capture news headlines and shock uswith the severity of the human condition: HIV and AIDS, starva-tion, trafficking, the inhuman conditions of refugee camps,conflict.

Although there are no statistics in the paragraph, it poses an argu-ment that considers trends and patterns, embedded in the use of theword “increasingly.” The paragraph still conveys meaning and force,because it makes us consider whether:

1. the absolute numbers of people affected by starvation, trafficking,and the inhuman conditions of prisons, refugee camps, and war-zones has increased, or

2. the international development agenda has itself increasingly turnedtowards areas of conflict, violence, and security, because those areasconstitute a growing global consensus of where multilateral effortscan be most effective.

If we wish to pursue answer number 2, we would further askwhether the increase in the attention the United Nations and the

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United States (the latter of which insists on setting a global agendathat is still being actively contested internationally) is placing on con-flict and violence is a result of:

(a) increased numbers of conflict-afflicted nations in the world;(b) increased international interest in said conflicts, as measured by

media reports, for example (as in Noam Chomsky’s famous workManufacturing Consent), development reports, NGOs solicitingfunds, or some other indicator; and/or

(c) some other combination of factors.

My little paragraph and the narrative flowchart which follow areconstructed as a model with which I wish to show how ethnography—field observation without a calculator—counts as real social science,without statistics. There comes a point in the flowchart where we dorequire numbers in assessing how many people and/or nations areaffected by conflict in the world (and we would haggle over the defini-tions and measurements of conflict; the nation; international mediacoverage; and so on) but these calculations come at the last stage—notthe first—in our thought process of understanding a social trend atwork. As it is laid out, it is a straightforward and logical argument,based on actual evidence. It conveys meaning even though it is anexclusively qualitative argument.

And with or without statistics, I also might be plain wrong. Theemphasis of development projects has certainly changed (a questionbest answered with historical analysis), but perhaps the same numberof life-and-death situations were targeted in earlier eras, cast in a dif-ferent light, with equally legitimate goals: reducing maternal mortal-ity, for example. (It is United Nations Millennium Development GoalNumber 5, in case you were wondering, and we are nowhere nearmeeting it. But just wait until 2015, when we have a major assessmentof the Millennium Development Goals, discover that we met none ofthem, and create a new international platform to implement them!Empowering women is Millennium Development Goal Number 3, bythe way, so all our ethnographic work at water taps may not havebeen for naught.)

How do you measure whether women have been empowered?Measuring maternal deaths is a much more straightforward researchprocess, as evidence can be corroborated with hospital records and

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death registers. Empowerment, by contrast, is an experience, some-thing that will likely mean different things to different people, andalso change over time. From an ethnographic standpoint, a researcherwould establish how people in a given place and time define or articu-late empowerment, and use correlative structures within a specific cul-tural setting to measure whether it is effectively happening at aparticular time as the result of a given project.

When I broached this possibility in the early days of the project onempowerment and inclusion, it was summarily dismissed: The wholepoint was to establish a universal index of empowerment, so that peo-ple’s levels of experienced power could be measured with a uniforminstrument anywhere in the world. It is easy to understand the moti-vation and the impetus for a global organization to compare and con-trast empowerment processes across states and continents, but theprocess is fundamentally flawed from the perspective of cultural anal-ysis. The very possibility that different categories of experience will beranked variably depending on place, time, and perspective—or thatthere is no single, unifying category called “empowerment”—fallsoutside the index.

In contrast to this story, in which a major multilateral project optsto occlude questions of cultural specificity in an attempt to empowerthe disenfranchised of the globe, consider an example of the produc-tive use of ethnography in the context of an international NGO, anorganization less beholden to national governments and internationalmonetary systems. In 2004, I was hired to conduct an ethnographicstudy on women’s experiences as they migrated from Nepal to Indiaand to urban centers in the face of the Maoist insurgency that hadtaken hold in the Nepali countryside. One of the findings of myresearch team was that people migrating to India for wage labor werepoorer than people migrating to cities within Nepal or situated on theNepal-India border. Men and families who were slightly better offtended to settle in new urban centers within Nepal, while those whowere very poor crossed the border to India to find work and earncash.22

This finding was apparent from empirical evidence about the dif-ferences in dress, language, and statements of migrants actually cross-ing the border and those of migrants newly settled in border towns.We corroborated our observations through interviews: those crossing

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the border to find work needed money, they told us, for food, clothing,and other nonagricultural commodities. Those newly settled in townshad brought their cash with them—they had some money to beginwith—and were usually engaged in trying to start up a small businesssuch as a tea stall or restaurant.

The breakdown I posited constitutes a logical finding that had notbeen shown elsewhere, with significance for understanding the pat-terns and relations between comparative wealth, displacement, and thedestinations of migrants. We could not have looked to bank accountsor investment records, surveys, or focus groups for this information,because our informants were displaced migrants who did not workwithin formal channels.23 Most importantly, it was not a question Iknew to ask in advance; rather, it was a finding made apparent bywatching the dynamics at a border post. Ethnography—spending timewith people at the border and openly assessing what patterns might beelicited—revealed significant aspects of the dynamics of migration inNepal that we had not thought of before, and that could be directlychanneled into programming responses to the problem of displacedpopulations in conflict.

The Qualitative ParadoxAlthough ethnography might be viewed askance by most develop-ment organizations as “not cost-effective” or “too academic,” qualita-tive data more broadly has been well received in recent years. Of late,it is a very hip thing to use qualitative data—the message has finallygotten through that statistics do not tell the whole story. Genuineinterest in qualitative methods is increasingly widespread. On thebasis of three years of thorough observation of development projectscurrently being implemented, designed, or proposed to donors, Iassert that qualitative methods are “in.”

But trouble persists even in the context of those projects thatexplicitly want qualitative methods, and that believe they are beingradical in their insistence on using them. Too often, developmentprojects that argue they want both quantitative (statistical) and quali-tative (non-statistical, including ethnographic) methods do not reallyknow what qualitative data provides, or how to use it most fruitfully.Projects that attempt to use both kinds of data usually end up recast-ing qualitative research in such a way that it works to support quanti-tative conclusions, rather than function as an equal partner. One of the

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conclusions of this piece is that anthropology is best used before adevelopment project begins—when the field is still wide open, as itwere—to help define the contours of a problem and the way infor-mants conceive of possible solutions. This is in contrast to the wayanthropology is currently used in development, whereby qualitativeinterview techniques are used most often in evaluation measures, afterthe project (or a specific phase of the project) is complete.

When qualitative methods are used in conjunction with quantita-tive methods, as in the case of project evaluation or redesign, quantita-tive methods—and the ways in which they are used, judged, andmeasured—trump qualitative methods at every turn. This is notbecause qualitative methods are less useful: It is because if you holdqualitative methods up to the measures and tests to which quantitativemethods are beholden, they cannot fare as well. In part because donoragencies generally operate first and foremost from the frame of inter-national economics, the language by which qualitative methods aremeasured as valid, objective, and useful in development circles tend tobe those that were designed for quantitative methods. If you use qual-itative methods in the ways quantitative methods are best used, youwill not see what benefits qualitative methods can offer on their ownterms. It is like the gender and science question: Women’s methodswere not even allowed a place in the discussion, because the criteriathey were being held to were designed to evaluate men’s methods.24

Ethnography may be another level altogether, a method whosenature defies the language of methods because it relies on experience.Precisely because it relies on experience, ethnography might be heldup as a superlative qualitative method, possibly the main contribu-tion of public anthropology. Part of being an anthropologist in thedevelopment field has meant lobbying for the use of ethnography. Iam usually asked a question that immediately reveals quantitativebias: “But how can you tell if it’s representative?” What this meansis: if there are no statistic, how do I know if I can take this claim asanalogous to that of the experience, view, or perception of a suffi-cient percentage (whatever that might be) of my target population?Fair enough. To respond to this question, I explain that while repre-sentativeness is certainly important, range is too. That is, even if theperson who made this claim fell somewhere on, say, the lower orupper sixth of the bell curve—which would be a third of the totalpopulation—it might still be a view worth hearing, an experience

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worth heeding, and it might even reveal a minority position thatcould elucidate the structures of hierarchy and exclusion understudy.

Rarely do I add that anthropologists are precisely trained to ana-lyze a great deal of raw field data in graduate school. The stuff of ourtrade is to assess whether someone’s experience figures into thelarger story we want to tell. Our skills lie in making decisions aboutwhich pieces of data need to be represented because they are repre-sentative, and which narratives need to be included in a larger storybecause they are not. If we are really trying to help the poorest pop-ulations of South Asia, I might argue, we need to hear what the“exceptions”—those at the very bottom of the totem pole—the out-liers—have to say.

On LanguageWhen I first started working in development, I had to learn how tofunction in a “logical framework,” in more ways than one. On paper,a “log-frame” is a fairly elaborate matrix whereby a given develop-ment project can signify to its donors, its beneficiaries, and otherinterested parties (collectively known as stake-holders) its intentions,its planned timelines, its activities, and its intended outcomes—allvery sensible stuff, once you get around its unbearably formulaicnature. The top line of a log-frame is “Super Goals,” the next is“Goals,” the next is “Objectives,” and so on. To a novice, these mightsound like the same thing, but as in any field, very specific rules gov-ern the proper use of a log-frame. By way of explanation, I was toldthat “Super-Goals” were allowed to be very broad (“like worldpeace,” for example). You did not even have to try and meet your“Goals,” and you are also “not held accountable to your Objectives,”as colleagues explained to me when I first started working on thecaste and gender empowerment project. You are only held account-able to your “Outputs,” those concrete activities you tell your funderyou will accomplish.

These matrices are really just another attempt to create a commonlanguage among practitioners. In 2002, log-frames were the frame-work of the moment. (Now, I hear, USAID prefers PMPs, Perfor-mance Monitoring Plans.) There is nothing wrong with creating tablesand frameworks to understand, analyze, or project expensive and ide-ally complicated projects. The problem is rather in the unthinking

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reliance on a single formula as the answer to every project, no matter itsgoal, the tendency to forget they are heuristic devices, not reality.

Log-frames and PMPs belie a fundamental difference betweenanthropology and development in their approaches to language. Inanthropology, we make our daily bread critiquing rhetoric, showinghow language both represents and produces reality. In development,the more everyone uses the same words the better: it indicates we areon the same page, dedicated to the same goals, able to streamline andmainstream. This is part of the universalizing process of global devel-opment institutions,25 whereby every culture is viewed as having a dif-ferent approach to the same human issues. In the case of sexual healthprograms, science is the universal category;26 in the case of povertyreduction, empowerment is the universal goal. (“Empowerment” doesnot threaten capitalist models, specifically endorsing an individualist,consumerist approach to the predicament of human suffering, andthereby constitutes a logical capitalist response to poverty on the partof Bretton Woods institutions.) Development believes it is being pro-gressive—finding a common language to discuss common problems—just where anthropologists would critique a relativist, totalizingstance.

Language undoubtedly affects the way people up and down thepolicy spectrum understand the issue on which they are working, andit needs to hold up to legal scrutiny from any international body. Butthe insistence on using the same language for the same problems (nomatter the content of your Super-Goals, Goals, Outputs, or Out-comes) can be extreme, and gives rise to a suspicion that developmentis at times more about public marketing strategies than it is aboutsocial change. For example, at the United Nations, you are counseledagainst using the term “youth,” even in the context of efforts toinvolve them in social movements. There is a logical reason for this:the legal designation for youth in India includes everyone under 35,and the UN prefers to target younger people than that.

While the preferred term reflects a legal condition of a UnitedNations member state, in practice what this means is that we must usethe identical language in every aspect of our work with adolescentsand young people—in every document, every press statement, andevery memorandum. Out with youth, in with young people. It doesnot matter if you say it five times in the same paragraph: you are notto vary the language.

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A Tale from the Field II: The Use of CultureMy 2005 consultancy with the United Nations Population Fund(UNFPA)27 was an interesting return to the agency at whose head-quarters I had interned 15 years earlier, when as a college senior Ihad studied the processes behind state population policies. I quicklylearned that the rhetoric had changed—UNFPA now focusesexplicitly on “reproductive and sexual health” and “gender-basedviolence” instead of limiting its scope to “family planning” and“fertility reduction.” This is certainly a step in the right direction.28

But the overall structures and practices of the organization appearto be identical to those I observed and wrote about in the early1990s; the critique of the UN’s bureaucracy is endemic to the insti-tution itself.

When I started work at UNFPA’s Kathmandu office, I found Iwas the only foreigner in the entire United Nations complex whospoke Nepali. I watched people’s jaws literally drop open when Iresponded to Nepali staff members in their own language. In somecircumstances, competence in the language of one’s “host country” isrequired; in a UN professional, apparently it is no less than shocking.This is an indication of just how far removed multilateral developmentprojects are from the everyday realities of their so-called beneficiaries,and just how radical anthropology must seem.

My main task as a UN consultant on gender-based violence was towrite three pamphlets on the subject, for widespread disseminationand advocacy. I was instructed to include any case studies I could findin little easy-to-read boxes, which seemed like a sensible way to con-vey individual realities. I had directed the study on migration just afew months earlier; because we had used ethnographic interviewingmethods that were totally open-ended, we found—unexpectedly—that domestic violence was often cited as the cause of young women’smigration to Kathmandu.29 Following UNFPA’s explicit mandate toinclude qualitative and quantitative research in programming toaddress gender-based violence, I included the following box in one ofthe pamphlets, a case study of a woman who had experienced vio-lence, but who could discuss her experience with clarity, strength, andconcern for others:

A 17-year-old Tamang woman waitressing in a Kathmandu dancebar told researchers she had come to Kathmandu because her father

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was drunk and her stepmother “hated” her: Domestic violence hadmade her leave home despite her fears in a conflict situation.When asked if she was scared, she told us, “When things cross thelimits of your tolerance, then you don’t get scared. I didn’t evencare if Maoists killed me, or if I had to become a sex worker. I wasso frustrated and mad at the environment of my home.” She hadmet a kind woman who had helped her when she arrived in Kath-mandu, and she wondered aloud, “What would other girls fromthe village do, who come to the city without any information orsupport?”

To my surprise, the entire box was pulled from the final version ofthe pamphlet text, without explanation. In its place was inserted a listof policy priorities:

Sexual and reproductive health priorities in conflict situations:• Sexual and gender based violence• Family planning• Safe motherhood• STI/HIV infections• Traditional health care practices

These are legitimate policy priorities, but what of the request toinclude people’s stories? Individual voices? Case studies that conveyreal experiences? Ultimately, it appears, people’s actual lives are toomessy—or perhaps too raw—to fit into the boxes. It is more impor-tant to assert the rules.

I was also asked to emphasize culturally sensitive programming inthe pamphlets.30 Then I was told that I had not done it right: contextu-alizing the discussion in the specifics of Nepali culture was not cor-rect. Rather, I was supposed to refer to the UNFPA booklet 24 Tipson Culturally-Sensitive Programming, a “very important” document,which, like a children’s book, lays out one tip per page, with a picturefrom a given culture adorning the top right hand corner of each page.(I was asked to include tips number 7, 9, and 16, by the way: WORKWITH LOCAL LEADERS; SOLICIT LOCAL INPUT; CREATECOMMUNITY OWNERSHIP to get your idea accepted.) It is agreat idea, in a way: simple, easy to read, logical, culturally sensitivesuggestions for programmers anywhere and everywhere in the world

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who might not be fluent in English. It needs to be simple, and wellprinted, and it is.

The photo on the front might have been India or Nepal, showing asmiling young girl’s face with a white rice tilak. I flipped to the back,but no reference was given to which country—which actual culture—was being reflected. Emphasize culture, but it does not matter whichone. The ideas that it might be problematic to leave out the name ofthe country or culture from which you are drawing—implying that allcultures can be appropriated in the universal quest for cultural sen-sitivity—or that it might be respectful or even useful to identify aculture appears not to have dawned on anyone in the vast bureaucracyof text approval at a UN agency. The referent was most importantly aculture, in the service of mankind.

This seemingly slight omission so clearly recreates the same prob-lem all over again: all cultures may be used to the benefit of the UnitedNations, because they are serving the greater purpose. The idea thatcalling upon programmers to consider culture might mean consciouslyacknowledging its specificities, and specific cultural ways, has neverbeen heard. If it were acknowledged that the über agenda might besubtly impacted by smaller units—cultures, in their many specificities—and that cultures not made into one (or none) in high-circulation andhigh-cost booklets and pamphlets would have more, not less, to con-tribute, development processes would come closer to being actualtwo-way streets.

“Culture” is useful to the United Nations insofar as it supports theuniversal goal, and it ends up being appropriated by the agency in such away that it recreates rather than challenges the dreaded top-downapproach. As part of my consultancy, I was instructed to read and use aseries of handouts on culturally sensitive programming. These included:“Guiding Principles for Working from Within,” “Using Culturally Sen-sitive Approaches to Achieve Universal Goals,” and “Mediating ChangeThrough Culturally Sensitive Approaches.” An elaborate diagram labeled“Culture Lens” showed the pie-chart of culture as comprising “Knowl-edge” and “Skills” which could together promote human rights andgender equity and equality. These documents codify what anthropolo-gists critical of development have argued: that all cultures are representedas equivalent. Indeed, culture is posed both as that which sometimesstands in the way of proper development, and as that which sometimescan be usefully manipulated for (presumably universal) change.

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Even so, the very purpose of the handouts appeared to be misun-derstood within the UNFPA field office: I was told to put the lan-guage of the handouts directly into the pamphlet. I pointed out that ifthe pamphlet was designed to give people a sense of the ways culture,religion, and society might inculcate violence against women, thehandouts were designed for programmers trying to be culturally sen-sitive, not for readers whom we were hoping to educate as to thenature and issue of violence against women, in the context of Nepal.Were we not supposed to make culturally understandable materials,rather than tell people how to be culturally sensitive in their own cul-ture? It was a senseless application of headquarters policy. On thispoint, my supervisor had to agree.

But development never really prioritizes culture: After all the hul-labaloo about cultural programming, it took so long to approve thedocuments that there was no time to get them translated into Nepalibefore they were released. 15 out of a total of 16 days of gender-basedactivism passed before the Nepali editions of pamphlets on domesticviolence went to press. They were not available for the Nepali presson the International Day for the Elimination of Violence againstWomen.

Conclusion: From Research to ProgramTo design the best programs, we need real, qualitative, open-ended,and, yes, ethnographic research. If we wish to find out what people’slives are like—what they find troublesome or problematic, and whatthey do not—ethnographers have something to contribute to thedevelopment project. In this essay, I have called for the use of anthro-pological research prior to the establishment of development projects,as well as for a genuine and open-ended view of culture and culturalexperience as part of development programming.

Researching a program that already exists, which requires an ana-lyst to assess the effects of a project on people’s lives, will certainlyreveal a particular project’s uses and shortcomings. But a presupposedset of outcomes and indicators limits what a researcher is able to find,before he or she even begins. A back-and-forth between research andprogram is sensible insofar as research should determine the contoursof a program, which can then call upon further research to assess itsimpact. The program should not precede the research, as is the currentstandard practice. In the absence of good ethnographic research, you

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do not know what particular problems you are trying to solve, or howyour intended beneficiaries would most like your assistance. If youmove from research to program, rather than the other way around,you are in a position to know how the communities in which you planto work view the problem you intend to fix before you design yourproject, and your rates of success—and your beneficiaries’ rates ofhappiness—will be much higher.

I have participated in many meetings where development pro-grams have been internally critiqued for barging ahead with projectswithout researching or understanding the shape of a problem. Thiscall has opened up new possibilities for collaboration. The view nowprevalent that research has a value establishes a positive link betweenresearch and program. It puts researchers in better stead, rendersacademia less suspicious, and sets forward the grounds for a conver-sation between policymakers and researchers. The possibility that astudy is poorly designed, poorly executed, or just plain wrong israrely considered among many development professionals. But thistoo can change, as more sophisticated techniques of discriminationare taught, and as professional researchers make their voices heardabove the din.

The unquestioned prioritization of quantitative research is alsoslowly changing, even in economic development circles, and as quali-tative research gains further acceptance, ethnographic research will aswell. Let us encourage policymakers to use ethnographic work priorto, in conjunction with, and separate from quantitative researchprojects, and also to let it stand on its own. Ethnography can tell pro-grammers stories they did not know existed, demonstrate links andconnections that no questionnaire could have dreamed up, and estab-lish personal connections that can make the difference between adevelopment project that everyone wants to milk and one that every-one wants to participate in.

Outcomes, indicators, and questionnaires can be good tools forevaluation research, but ultimately they presuppose the category. Youknow what you are looking for before you get there. Ethnographyallows you to open the field, and direct your first line of inquiry tothose for whom you intend your project, not to the rule book thatgoverns program design. So you know what is working and what isnot, in your informants’ own language. The potential of open-endedresearch—ethnography—that does not presuppose the categories of

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inquiry is enormous. Implicitly or explicitly, directly or indirectly, ifasked, informants (or beneficiaries) may tell you what would workbest in their homes, what disputes or underlying communal tensionsprevented other projects from functioning, and what tried-and-truelocal solutions might be replicated.

I sound like a UN professional extolling the virtues of culturallysensitive programming. And to a degree I suppose I am, as long as thevital discussions between research and program are unending as wellas open-ended; culture maintains an active rather than a passive role inthe rightful practices of development; and respect and justice is metedout in all directions and all ways. Anthropology is no panacea, butperhaps its method—ethnography—may go some distance in estab-lishing a global conversation that does not erase cultural difference.

NOTES

My thanks to Carole McGranahan for both soliciting an article in which I had the free-dom to tell this story and fine editorial guidance, and to the many people who helpedform the ideas in this piece: Rhoderick Chalmers, Tory Clawson, John Frederick, LindsayFriedman, Julie Hemment, Dina Hossain, Sushma Joshi, Shova Lama, Keith Leslie, JoMorrisson, Matthew Rudolph, Seira Tamang, and especially Anne Rademacher. Thanksalso go to the two anonymous reviewers of the piece for their detailed and very helpfulcontributions, especially s/he who assisted with relevant works in the development liter-ature, and Andy Young, for his objective view. Finally, two exceptional statisticiansdeserve my deepest thanks for tutoring me in the ways of numbers: the late KishorGajurel, whose talents and kindness will be sorely missed, and my father, Bernard Hausner,who through his love and patience taught me the difference between social science anddiplomacy.

1. Here I follow the notes from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) meeting onEthnography, December 2002. For disciplinary discussions on the methods and practicesof ethnography, see especially G. Kaufmann, “Watching the Developers: A Partial Eth-nography,” in R. D. Grillo and R. L. Stirrat, eds., Discourses of Development: Anthropo-logical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 107–32; Robert M.Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, eds., Writing Ethnographic Field Notes(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Richard Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropol-ogy: Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991); LilaAbu-Lughod, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” Women & Performance: A Jour-nal of Feminist Theory (1990), pp. 7–27; Steven P. Sangren, “Rhetoric and the Authorityof Ethnography,” Current Anthropology Vol. 29 (1988), pp. 405–30; James Clifford andGeorge Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1986).

2. Sometimes externally developed solutions are explicitly requested, however, and thisdynamic deserves further study and discussion. In a number of participatory settings inwhich I have worked, eliciting the participation of marginal groups has been more suc-cessful than attempts to establish what that population would wish for its betterment,advancement, or “upliftment.” On some occasions my question, “What would you liketo see done here?” has been met with a refrain of, “We are uneducated. If you tell us whatis possible, we will be behind you.” In part, this reflects the influence of development asan institution that posits itself as the all-knowing (as demonstrated by Stacy Leigh Pigg,

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“Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development inNepal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 34 (1992), pp. 491–513), inopposition to the ignorant or uneducated villager who has internalized the message. Butin part it must be taken as a genuine call for knowledge, education, and those serviceswhich development, in its most beneficent manifestation, can provide. I have heard peo-ple wish that development would go away, and I have also heard people very ardentlywish that it would stay and bring the infusion of capital, employment, and socialadvancement that people rightly assume an institution of such wealth and power is capa-ble of bringing.

3. In this title choice, I follow Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg, eds., Sex in Develop-ment: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2005).

4. For good examples and discussion from the field of participatory action research, seeJulie Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 2007 [in press]); Anne Rademacher, “Culturing UrbanEcology: Development, Statemaking, and River Restoration in Kathmandu,” PhD Dis-sertation, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 2005; Anne Rademacher andRaj Patel, “Retelling Worlds of Poverty: Reflections on Transforming ParticipatoryResearch for a Global Narrative,” in Karen Brock and Rosemary McGee, eds., KnowingPoverty: Critical Reflections on Participatory Research and Policy (London, Earthscan,2002); Davydd J. Greenwood, ed., Action Research: From Practice to Writing in anInternational Action Research Development Program (Dialogues on Work and Innova-tion) (Amsterdam: Johns Benjamin Publications, 1999); Davydd J. Greenwood andMorten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998).

5. In the Indian context, Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and itsImplications, Translated by Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1966]) gives us a starting point forunderstanding how deep-rooted, trenchant, and intractable hierarchical structures are.See David Mosse, Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy andPractice (London: Pluto Press, 2005). In the Nepali context, see Mary Cameron, Onthe Edge of the Auspicious: Gender and Caste in Nepal (Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 1998), and Lynn Bennett, Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Socialand Symbolic Roles of High-Caste Women in Nepal (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1983).

6. See, for example, Meena Khandelwal, Sondra L. Hausner, and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds.,Women's Renunciation in South Asia: Nuns, Yoginis, Saints, and Singers (New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Sondra L. Hausner, The Movement of Women: Migration,Trafficking, and Prostitution in the Context of Nepal's Armed Conflict (Kathmandu:Save the Children—USA, 2005); Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Lis-ten to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1994).

7. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the ThirdWorld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). But see Anna Tsing, Friction: AnEthnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

8. Raheja and Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words.9. Carole McGranahan, “Boiling Water for Tea: Life History and Testimony in the

Tibetan Refugee Community,” presented at the Annual Meeting for the Association forAsian Studies, San Francisco, April 2006.

10. Ann Armbrecht Forbes, “The Importance of Being Local: Villagers, NGOs, andthe World Bank in the Arun Valley, Nepal,” Identities Vol. 6, No. 2–3 (1999),pp. 319–44.

11. Stacy Leigh Pigg, “Globalizing the Facts of Life,” in Vincanne Adams and Stacy LeighPigg, eds., Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

12. Rademacher and Patel, “Retelling Worlds of Poverty.”

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13. The location of the researcher is important in academic ethnography, and while some ofthis is based on individual researchers needing to get tenure wanting to be acknowledgedas the authors of documents and ideas, (as suggested by Sangren, “Rhetoric and theAuthority of Ethnography”) anthropologists also feel the commitment of social scien-tists who must ask how the position of the researcher affects the data.

14. Adams and Pigg, eds., Sex in Development.15. Nanda Shrestha, “Becoming a Development Category,” in Jonathan Crush, ed.,

Power of Development (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 266–77; Pigg, “InventingSocial Categories through Place.” Important references in development anthropol-ogy include Escobar, Encountering Development, who argues that development’stotalitarian stance threatens to obliterate local movements and local idioms for socialchange, adaptability, and vision, and Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds.,International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Poli-tics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) who insist onplacing the development project into geopolitical historical context. My thanks toCharlene Makley for assisting me with defining this literature. Also see Adams andPigg, eds., Sex in Development, for a recent and thorough discussion of sexual andpublic health interventions in development, especially Pigg, “Globalizing the Factsof Life,” for an analysis of how science is implicated in development programs aspart of a modernizing, globalizing project that seeks to incorporate its beneficiariesinto a global language of biologized sexual health.

16. Seira Tamang, “The Politics of Developing Nepali Women,” in Kanak Mani Dixitand Shastri Ramachandaran, eds., State of Nepal (Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2002),pp. 161–75. Also see Katherine Neilson Rankin, The Cultural Politics of Markets:Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal (Anthropological Horizons)(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) for a critique of micro-credit pro-grams as designed for a particular kind of woman, rather than leaving open room forwomen to define the way they want to run the programs. See also Sondra L. Haus-ner, “Action Research on the Mobilization of Mothers’ Groups (Internal Report)”(Kathmandu: The Asia Foundation, 2006) for a suggestion that women’s groups areable to reach a larger number of low-caste women than mother’s groups, which tra-ditionally involve higher-caste and elite women. Here we see how the use oflanguage—“women’s groups” vs. “mothers’ groups”—can reflect local efforts tomold potentially beneficial programs to specific needs that speak to the way hierar-chy is perpetuated.

17. See, for example, Department for International Development (DfID) and the WorldBank, Unequal Citizens: Gender, Caste and Ethnic Exclusion in Nepal (Kathmandu:DfID and the World Bank, 2006).

18. For seminal critiques of anthropology’s colonial history, see Johannes Fabian, Time andthe Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1989); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnog-raphy, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); NicholasDirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992);Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: HumanitiesPress, 1973).

19. See Rademacher and Patel, “Retelling Worlds,” for a critique of the way these “voices”are used, however, and for a detailed discussion of how attempts to include participatorywork in multilateral programming may be flawed.

20. NGOs depend on being able to function within the frameworks of donors, both admin-istratively and topically. See Rademacher, “Culturing Urban Ecology” for an excellentethnographic description that details how the director of a Kathmandu NGO asked herwhat, exactly, “urban ecology” meant, as his own organization planned to shift to thetopic in order to access more funding. Rademacher cogently suggests that the NGOtherefore “needed more than knowledge of urban ecology; it needed to understandurban ecology as an institutional knowledge product.”

21. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

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22. See Hausner, The Movement of Women, p. 6. The exceptions to this pattern werewomen who migrated alone, who, although very poor, appeared more likely to move toan urban center in Nepal than to cross the border to India.

23. My thanks to Matthew Rudolph for identifying this example of the importance of eth-nography in understanding the political economy of migrants’ lives.

24. Groundbreaking feminist critiques of scientific methods were set forth by DonnaHaraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilegeof Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575–599,and Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1985).

25. See Lazima Onta-Bhatta, “Street Children: Contested Identities and Universalizing Cat-egories,” Studies in Nepali History and Society Vol. 1, No. 1 (June 1996), pp. 163–199,for the discussion of universalizing categories.

26. This is demonstrated by Pigg, “Globalizing the Facts of Life.”27. The agency was formerly known as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities

(UNFPA); when it changed its formal name, it did not change its acronym.28. But see Pigg, “Globalizing the Facts of Life,” for a critique of the way sexual health pro-

grams manipulate the use of science and biology, positing them as opposed to culture, orso-called traditional views. She argues that “culture” is equated with folk or local beliefsin development projects, which cast beneficiary populations as needing to be modern-ized and globalized with the use of scientific fact (that is, with that which is “universallytrue” rather than culturally variable) in order to update potentially harmful culturalpractices. The invitation to join the modernized, globalized, scientific world becomespart of the subtext of health programs focusing on sexuality.

29. Hausner, The Movement of Women.30. The UNFPA website states that “UNFPA in 2002 launched its initiative to systemati-

cally mainstream cultural approaches into programming efforts.” Accessible atwww.unfpa.org/culture/overview.htm.

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