Review article

Policy anthropology as
expert witness

The anti-politics machine. ‘Development’, depoliticization and

bureaucratic state power in Lesotho. By James Ferguson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990. 336 pp. Hb.:
ISBN 0 521 37382 4.

Encountering development. The making and unmaking of the

Third World. By Arturo Escobar. Princeton NJ, Princeton
University Press. 1995. 290 pp. Hb.: ISBN 0 691 03409 5. Pb.:
ISBN 0 691 00102 2.

The social theory of practices. Tradition, tacit knowledge and

presuppositions. By Stephen Turner. Chicago: University of
Chicago PressKambridge: Polity Press. 1994. 145 pp. Hb.:
ISBN 0 226 81737 7. Pb.: ISBN 0 226 81738 5.

Practising development. Social science perspectives. Edited by

Johan Pottier. Contributions by Susan Hutson and Mark
Liddiard, Bill Gerben and Penny Jenden, Margaret Casey,
David Seddon, Geoff Griffith, Philip Gatter, James Fairhead
and Tim Morris. London: Routledge, for EIDOS. 1993.
222 pp. Hb.: ISBN 0 415 08910 7. Pb.: ISBN 0 415 08911 5.

All these books consider aspects of development policy and development projects,
issues important for public affairs as much as. social anthropology, and three of the
writers take us towards what could become a ‘policy anthropology’.’ The fourth
author, Stephen Turner, writes philosophy rather than anthropology and of practice
rather than policy; but he refers constantly to anthropological and sociological writing
(Mauss, Sumner, Bourdieu) and it is, after all, with policy as practice and projects that
anthropologists are concerned.
1 This essay draws on my first lecture in the series ‘Making policy analysis matter: a concern to commit
social anthropology to current public issues’, given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris, through June 1995 at the kind invitation of Professor Jean-Claude Galey. I am
most grateful to Des Gasper for an emancipatory reading of early drafts of parts of this essay.

Social Anthropologv(1996). 4, 2, 163-179. @ 1996 European Association of Social Anthropologists 189

 Each book reveals authors concerned to commit social anthropology to public
issues. Similarly again, they each, if to differing degrees and with different results,
argue for some changes in approaches to anthropological social analysis which would
favour this. Each would hold that social analysis in general, and social anthropology in
particular, would have much to gain intellectually from some reshaping.
Are some anthropologists restlessly and hopelessly divided and torn as between
the demands of the discipline itself and our rights and duties as educated citizens? This
question is better deconstructed, then reconstructed, rather than answered in the terms
in which it is put. For it is a loaded question in a way that may not be immediately
apparent (or intended). And it is silent on the different interpretations and genres of
‘the discipline’, treating this instead as if it were just one entity, whether when being
‘applied’ or not.
This essay takes the view that., whether put to the purpose of expert social witness
or not, issues of theory and method seen to be important for any of its (old or new)
sub-specializations, are important also for the discipline as a whole. The application of
anthropology to policy could therefore be of benefit to anthropology as well as policy.
Typically, ‘applied anthropology’ is just regarded as a one-way application (of
anthropology to policy), from which nothing for the discipline is expected in return.
The ‘policy anthropology’ in this essay marks itself sharply off from applied
anthropology in this regard.
Applied anthropology also tends to be mainly reactive, as for instance when it
limits its focus to the track record of policy, looking into just what is conventionally
called its implementation and lack of implementation. A more proactive applied social
inquiry would focus as well on the appeal of policy’s discourses, and promises of what
will be done over the record of what is actually done.

Development-land
The area of policy anthropology taken up in this essay and by the anthropologists in
the books under notice’ is quite limited - nothing frighteningly overambitious. Its
concerns, briefly put, are the ideological and actual workings of development policy
agencies as institutions and organisations, their processes of policy-making, con-
sequent policy outcomes and related events. Nothing more, but at the same time,
nothing less.
A few comments can convey a brief introduction to this scene, much of whose
successive landscapes of meaning and measurement are owed principally to social
scientists (in ‘development studies’), who are commissioned to inform and advise
international organisations as to the most appropriate concepts and criteria. Regardless
of area or specialization, by and large these consultants are not ‘development
anthropologists’ (a few anthropologists do practice as such). They are economists
writing as researchers or protesters if not as consultants and ‘UN experts’.
Development policy’s instrument is ‘aid’. Aid’s instruments are ‘projects’ and, as
2 For reviews of The anti-politics machine, see e.g. Conrad Brandt, Review of Rural and Urban
Planning in South and East Africa, 1991, 122-5; and Des Gasper ‘On essentialism in and about
development discourse’, forthcoming in European Journal of Development Research, June 1996.
For a review of Encountering development, see Des Gasper, loc. cit.; and for a review of Practising
development, see Elizabeth Harrison, ‘Anthropology in action’,Journal for Applied Anthropology
in Policy and Practice, Autumn 1993,21-2.

164 RAYMOND A P T H O R P E
 in UNDP parlance, ‘programmes’. Projects are interventions in public affairs in the
name and language of ‘development’ by agencies specially charged with this task: their
guided missiles. Programmes, while probably overseeing overlapping projects, are
sums planned to be greater than these component parts. They are in fact close to being
policy theories as well as practices, and call for analysis accordingly. The agencies
inhabiting development-land are varied. Some are governmental, whether international
(bilateral or multinational) or national, in their management and execution. Others are
non-governmental (international or national). However all these are similar as well as
different, with projects or programmes being undertaken by all types.
Typically, as it is commissioned or otherwise done, development policy analysis
focuses on projects or programmes. To give some impression of some aspects of what
is involved, for ex post project evaluations normally availability of ‘performance data’
is considered to be a key requisite. In the case, say, of emergency humanitarian relief
operations rather than economic development interventions, it is a problem that such
data is unlikely to exist, let alone be available.
A s a programme is supposed to be greater in its impact than the sum of its parts,
evaluation must therefore determine just what that sum was planned to be, by which
type of arithmetic, and whether in design and practice its guidelines and activities were
sufficiently proactive to give a fair chance of realising what was planned.
Another task for analysis, given that some programmes are more integrated than
others, is to determine what under review is meant to be closely, and which loosely,
integrated, what brought in, and what left out. And was the downside: the price of
integration properly anticipated and countered? For example, was the rigidity and
additional tier or two of control worth it (and for whom)?
Compared with projects, then, programmes are intended to have broader sig-
nificance, indirect as well as direct outcomes, impact even more than effectiveness, and
somewhat different notions of what evaluable issues and rsuccess’ and ‘failure’ would
be. The intent of a programme is more to set the scene and usher in a new policy
environment for projects. Projects are intended more as straightforward delivery
mechanisms.
Generally speaking, both types of intervention may seek and claim legitimacy in
the rationalist language known as ‘economism’ (or ‘economicism’). This tends to be
true particularly of projects. The academic subdiscipline known as development
economics - currently merging more and more into standard economics - in its
orthodox neo-classical mode, is closely associated with this particular language of
public policy: for example, it provides much of its philosophy, terminology and
methodology. Whether in the fine weave of economics and politics, agencies of
whatever type do actually make their decisions in the same terms (and to the same
extent) in which they announce and justify them is, of course, another question. Any
language can be used as a language of rationalisation, not only rationalist language.
Most social science occupies itself with only forms and structures, projects and
programmes, ideas and interventions, which are already in place or planned to be. It
concerns itself much less with the making or finding of these forms and structures, or
with their modes of performative persistence or change over time. This vital realm of
creating and attributing and justifying is thus a relatively neglected realm. (Most
theory and writing in classic social anthropology reads even as if no such processes of
making or attributing actually happened at all. The result of such neglect was the
‘structural-functionalism’ in the famous texts. This may have lent itself well to

POLICY ANTHROPOLOGY AS EXPERT WITNESS 165

intellectual play with ‘elementary’ structures and functions. But it left the play of these
structures on the intellect and consciousness, and therefore policy and management,
entirely out of account.)
Beyond a focus on planning, agencies and governmental or non-governmental
interventions, planistrators and peasants, there is, for example, the whole field of
policy which does not emanate from such agencies, is unlikely to be written in policy
documents of the type used by such agencies, and has altogether different boundary
conditions. While only the former come within the scope of this essay, other whole
fields are required for a general curriculum which should, of course, comprise multiple
conceptions and areas of policy.
Eventually it will be essential to bring ordinary together with official and
disciplinary policy language and texts, contexts, objectives, perspectives and many
other things. Agencies have no monopoly of agency: their power of action has
ordinary as much as official dimensions. As is well known, but seldom analysed
beyond the reaches of irony and cynicism, the results of their busy interventions on
themselves, and in areas far removed from what they state to be their ‘target groups’,
are often of far greater effect than the impact on anyone else.

Development discourse
James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine makes a lucid and compelling case for an
anthropological approach to reading and interpreting. The example he takes is the
World Bank’s ‘development discourse’, a crucial topic which first appeared in
development studies in the early 1980s. Ferguson’s point of entry and departure,
which this writer shares completely, is that such establishmentarian langue and parole
is too important to be regarded as merely mystifying rhetoric. It is, to an extent,
constitutive of policy.
What is to be appreciated, he says and shows, is that while ‘it may be that much of
this discourse is untrue (the World Bank may talk a lot about helping poor farmers but
in fact its funds continue to be targeted at the large, highly capitalised, farmers) ... this
is no excuse for dismissing it. As Foucault has shown, discourse is a practice: it is
structured, and it has real effects that are much more profound than simply
“mystification”. The thoughts and actions of “development” bureaucrats are power-
fully shaped by the world of acceptable statements and utterances within which they
live; and what they do and do not do is a product not only of the interests of various
nations, classes or international agencies but also, and at the same time, of a working
out of this complex structure of knowledge.’
Exactly so, and well put. The language especially of ‘top’ management is one of its
most characteristic, self-justifying, techniques. Antipathetic though anthropologists
are to management and projects, preferring structures and cultures to organisations
and administrations, the discipline does have an appetite for language studied as a
social institution. Recent ‘anthropology of consciousness’ initiatives will surely find
new menus there this taste can thrive.
‘Development’ is construed as ‘an interpretive grid through which the impov-
erished nations of the world are known to us. Within this interpretive grid, a host of
everyday observations are rendered intelligible and meaningful. Poor countries are by
definition “less developed”, and the poverty and powerlessness of the people who live

166 R A Y M O N D APTHORPE
 in such countries are only the external signs of this underlying condition. The images
of the ragged poor of Asia thus become legible markers of a stage of development,
while the bloated bellies of African children are the signs of social as well as nutritional
deficiency. Within this problematic, it appears self-evident that debtor Third World
nation-states and starving peasants share a common “problem”, that both lack a single
“thing”: “developmen” ’ (p. xiii).
Then Ferguson asks: ‘how does this dominant problematic work in practice, and
what are its specific effects? What happens differently due to the “development”
problematic that would not or could not happen without it?’. H e answers, in brief, as
follows: ‘“development” institutions generate their own form of discourse, and this
discourse simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowl-
edge, and creates a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are then
organised on the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while “failing” on their
own terms, nonetheless have regular effects, which include the expansion and
entrenchment of bureaucratic state power, side by side with the projection of a
representation of economic and social life which denies “politics” and, to the extent
that it is successful, suspends its effects. The short answer to the question of what the
“development” apparatus in Lesotho does, then, is found in the book’s title: it is “an
anti- politics machine” depoliticising everything it touches, everywhere whisking
political realities out of sight, all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own
preeminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic state power’ (pp. xiv-xv).
Again, in certain situations and regards, exactly so. And where this is the case, to
ask of interventions in the name of development only, for example, whether ‘aid
programmes do really help poor people?’ is indeed ‘politically ndive’ and certainly
would not take policy anthropology very far. Rather we should ‘see “rural develop-
ment” interventions as real historical events, susceptible of the same sort of political-
economic explanation as any others’. Policy anthropologists must differ from political
economists who are ‘often too quick to impute an economic function to “develop-
ment” projects and to accept the premise that such are primarily devices for bringing
about a particular sort of economic transformation (and) give too important a place in
their analyses to “interests” . .. there is no easy congruence between the “objective
interests” of the various parties involved and the stream of events which emerges.’
The case study which triggered - and has left its marks on - this working through
of a Foucaultian conceptual framework, is a searching and semiotic analysis of the way
in which Lesotho is constructed by the Bank as ‘the object of “development” ... a
“less developed country”’. Ferguson’s argument is that what the Bank does thus
construct through the type of description it uses, tells us, as this essay would like to
put it, much more about the agency than about Lesotho. The Bank writes of a country
‘.. . virtually untouched by modern development ... basically (still) ... a traditional
subsistence peasant society’. Per contra, academic social science has established a very
different picture: ‘the fact is ... that Lesotho entered the twentieth century, not as a
“subsistence” economy, but as a producer of cash crops for the South African market;
not as a “traditional” peasant, subsistence society but as a reservoir exporting wage
labourers in about the same quantities, proportionate to total population, as it does
today’.
‘The Bank’s writing is not simply an error, the sign of gross ignorance or
incompetent scholarship .. . What is being done (by the Bank) ... is not some sort of
staggeringly bad scholarship, but ... a special sort of discourse with a special job to do.

P O L I C Y A N T H R O P O L O G Y AS E X P E R T W I T N E S S 167
What is needed is not so much a correction or setting straight of the discourse of the
“development” industry in Lesotho (though such a critique is of course possible) as a
way of accounting for it, and of showing what it does.’
This core problematique, stated so clearly and powerfully, is this book’s principal
value. It paves the way to expert witness concerning the intelligibility of policy
established through its actual institutions and workings as illustrated in its languages
and discourses. It helps us to predict how unexpected consequences of interventions
are only to be expected. It highlights how a failure of a promise to bring agricultural
development may be a success as regards state-building. That some of its formulations
and generalisations are not sufficiently qualified does not diminish its success in
demonstrating beyond question where this problematic can lead.
Also, when anthropology gets round again to some serious thinking about
description (this discipline’s traditional introspective concerns in this area lie more
with observation), this book will intrigue another audience. Its Foucaultian treatment
of ways of describing ‘Lesotho’ exemplifies an order of approach to anthropological
theory of social (and economic and political) description which is completely different
from anthropology’s received approaches in this area. Dwelling as these latter do on
just the ‘thick‘ or ‘thin’, or ‘etic’ or ‘emic’, they barely scratch the surface of
description.

Description ‘complex’ and ‘simple’

The extent to which, in particular or general cases, an analytical and interpretative
description of even a single event or activity is independent of the means used for this
description, is highly debatable. Ask a different, but still a descriptive, question about
an event or an activity (or an ideology or an institution) and you may get a very
different picture. Use a different indicator in a policy analysis, and you will get - and
perhaps also make - a different impression. That description in policy is obviously
‘method-laden’, relating as it does to political and administrative as well as intellectual
factors, is obvious. Exactly the same is true in social science in areas other than policy
studies.
Deep difficulty with description is an increasingly urgent item for serious enquiry
throughout social science and the humanities. Social science that supposes ‘basic
description’ to be just virtuous practice on terra firma, ‘coming first’ and therefore in
no special need of examination before it takes to the air to fly to comparison and
generalisation and prediction, is simply not a believable bird.j The case for new theory
of description could be introduced by a useful initial step that compares and contrasts
two types of description. I will term these respectively ‘simple’ and ‘complex’, but we
will see that these labels are very imperfect.
‘Simple’ description of policy performance rests on thinking (a) that the policy in
question can be identified unambiguously, and (b) that its performance can similarly
readily be described. But these are in fact often unrealistic assumptions. Simple
description of organizations is apt to project them just as units, as bounded and basic
units of management. A key task of this type of description is therefore to establish

3 And neither a working worm,on and under the ground, enriching the good soil of particularism.

168 RAYMOND APTHORPE

just where such bounds lie. For example, it asks whether ‘the family’ is extended or
nuclear, and coterminous or not with ‘the household’? Command and control in such
a unit is typically assumed to exist - or to be required - in unitary terms, as if such a
unit had or ought to have - regardless of situation and function - only a single head,
indeed only a single character (e.g. matrilineal or patrilineal).
Simple description can thus lean safely on arithmetical methods quite generally.
With these for instance, gravity patterns (as in human and economic geography),
concomitant variation, relations of dependent and control variables and the like, can be
established unexceptionally provided only that the data and the methods are avail-
able.
Mistaken simple description is that which is subject to technical correction for
errors, if data and method are available. When I joined a meeting of a small group at
the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the 1970s for a
think-in that eventually resulted in what became known as ‘rapid rural appraisal’, the
idea was to list a number of commonly made errors in simple description of
development (though it was not called this at the time) - errors that could be readily
subject to technical correction, for instance by a longer stay in the field or at another
time of year. What later was published under that name about ‘dry season bias’ would
have been better termed not bias but error. Errors of observation that creep into
demographic and other statistical series are similarly misnamed.
‘Complex’ description is necessarily comparative description. Therefore it is
highly dependent on methods of periodisation and choice of time-frame. What may be
argued as evidence of success (or failure) of a policy’s track record, compared with one
benchmark, may not look the same if comparison is with another marker, say another
baseline or control group. And to such complex problems (which are themselves
policy problems and therefore ‘wicked’, a term used in policy analysis to mean neither
well-bounded nor open to only one interpretation), there are no straightforwardly
technical or rational-scientific approaches. Several other considerations about ‘success’
and ‘failure’ are similarly about yardsticks and indicators. For instance, should both
success and failure be described and evaluated by the same or different yardsticks?
Complex description looks at organisations and institutions as processes rather
than as units and as possibly having different heads and authority structures, say,
according to purpose, situation and gender. Processes tend to spill over boundaries, so
boundedness is not necessarily the chief feature of descriptions of processes. Moreo-
ver, if formal structures exist only when they are sustained by informal structures, then
all the idea of a formal - or for that matter an informal - organization is valueless for
description of this type.
Complex description of organisations must understand them as active principles
in affairs and policy, with their own dynamics. For example, when the University of
Oxford voted against awarding Prime Minister Thatcher an honorary doctorate, no
doubt the minority who were in favour of her getting this award thought that she
deserved it, or ought not to be denied it. But some of majority who voted against did
so not on their view of her just deserts; rather it was, as one anti-Thatcher voter put it
to me, on ‘not to split the University’ grounds.
Mistaken complex description is not subject to correction simply by technical and
straightforwardly arithmetical adjustment: not error but bias is the culprit here. Most
philosophical debate about the limits of observation feeds into theory of complex, not
simple, observation.

POLICY ANTHROPOLOGY AS EXPERT WITNESS 169

Ethnography as policy

Arturo Escobar’s Encountering development has the nature of a textbook. It is

indefatigable in its coverage of literature appropriate to its theme (including The anti-
politics machine as well as later and earlier work similar in genre: e.g. by Timothy
Mitchell, Chanda Mohanty and Adde Mueller). Of work not cited, however, an
omission which closely anticipates this book‘s principal theme is Antonio P. Con-
treras’ ‘The discourse of development: some implications of local power/knowledge in
the Philippine uplands’, Philippine Sociologicul Review, 37 (1989): 12-24). Some of
Escobar’s generalisations lack refinement and qualification, but again there is an
outstanding achievement to note.
In this case, what is offered is an approach to ‘a culture-based political economy’
(p. vii), with a ‘cultural critique of economics as a foundational structure of modernity’
taken as a point of departure. Escobar’s broader goal is ‘an anthropology of modernity
... In the Third World, modernity ... is not “an unfinished product of the
Enlightenment”. Development is the last and failed attempt to complete the Enlight-
enment in Asia, Africa, and Latin America’ (p. 221).
My own view is that whether the good ship Development (earlier named Progress
and before that Czvilisution, and at the moment perhaps still threatening to be renamed
Free Trade) has finally sunk (as apart from alternately being buffeted by heavy seas
and becalmed in doldrums), is highly debatable. Intervention in international affairs,
and the internal affairs of nations, in the name of ‘development’, has very strong
staying power. Partly this is because very much else is done in this name that is not so
labelled. Nevertheless, that the barque is leaking and listing again can hardly be
doubted. And there are, as ever, some new grounds for an enquiry. Few of its captains
and crew would put present troubles down to cargo shifting in the hold because it has
been inadequately tied down. They are confident once again that this time they have
‘got it right’. Rather, they tell of earlier loading as well as navigation errors, and
uncertainties about destinations. This time they say they know where they have to go:
‘East Asia’. That only some passengers say they want to go there, and that anyway
‘East Asia’ is not known for welcoming immigrants, does not seem much to worry
captain or crew.
It is odd that, for the most part, anthropology has had relatively little to say about
economic modernity and what for Escobar is ‘its end in the third world’. Its own
preoccupations with cultural alterity may, however, paradoxically be part of the
reason. Development economics’ recurring concerns with ‘other cultures’, and its
views of these as ‘obstacles’ to economic development were relentless, before, that is, it
found misguided state policies to be the principal obstacles. Some such concerns still
run to some extent - sometimes in reverse as, for instance, where the most distinctive
features of ‘economic miracles’ are attributed somehow more, or as much, to cultural
as to economic features.
Encomtering development makes a goodly contribution to a strategic battle or
two on the cultural front. Escobar moves anthropology to centre stage for a cultural
critique of our times. Good. Let us see how far other anthropologists will be able to
take this too. His quarry includes economic development models seen ‘not from the
point of view of their economic rationality, but as cultural constructs and central
pieces in the politics of the development discourse’ (p. 76). Escobar’s approach is
through a severely post-structuralist critique of what he sees starkly as a post-modern

170 R A Y M O N D APTHORPE
 situation, his identification and reading of this situation being his main justification for
this method. To readers who are not similarly or totally persuaded, this will irritate;
more than irritate, it may even deter understanding altogether by anthropologists (and
others) who have yet to come to terms with this school.
This would be unfortunate. Perhaps policy anthropology has much to gain from
the general approach taken by this text, whether our subspecialisation is tied to
development agencies and their work or branches out more widely. And much of the
anthropology which Escobar finds appropriate to his task - such as Gudeman’s
‘culture as economics’ - is deservedly of excellent standing in other schools as well. O n
Dorothy Smith’s conceptualisations as regards ‘institutional ethnography” he draws as
well. These are highly germane for policy anthropology. They draw attention clearly
to work practices of organizations, along with their institutions such as their
discourses and documentary practices. A policy anthropology must create an anthro-
pology of message, not stop only at a politics of information.
‘Labelling’ is mentioned as a principal artifice of policy language. A label that
seemingly is descriptive only, turns out not to be just that. More than just list -
correctly or falsely - the contents in the bottle, it also conveys a complex message
about what evaluation the labeller wants you to put on these contents. Sometimes the
message extends to what action you should take. Written records and similar
documents’ may not be anthropology’s normal fare, but framing, naming, numbering
and classifying certainly are.
Escobar’s, like Ferguson’s, line as between his professional cultural anthropology
and his personal cultural politics is explicitly drawn in his epilogue chapters. It is also
recognisable where it is not deliberately drawn. Their shared idea is that this line
should be crossed and the two areas merged. Thus what in general (as in his other
writings) Escobar, like Ferguson, takes is a view of social science - here ethnography
and cultural anthropology - virtually as policy. The potential this combattive stance
has for fanning a direct confrontation with development economics is, however, only
one side of the coin. The other side is that taking such a position may not only be over
ambition but misplaced ambition. Moving social science and policy analysis toward
interdisciplinarity is one thing. Quite another is social science conceived as usurpatory
of political power.
Long ago in African affairs there was sociology’s contribution to policy in South
Africa of the concept ‘apartheid’. Today there is, for example in Rwanda, an
ethnography’s contribution to policy of a racist ‘ethnicity’. In both cases counter-
arguments from each disciplinary source to these worst cases there were and are. But
this is not at present exactly the issue: rather it is in which type of way ought social
science to seek to make its advisory mark: whether wholly as policy, or, short of such
extremism, of or in policy?
A policy anthropology limited to a providing of expert witness remains on this
side of social science as policy. It accepts leaving the final word to judge and jury. To
take the ascendancy achieved by development economics in development policy (the
4 For an appreciation and development of Dorothy Smith’s concept of ‘institutional ethnography’,
see Bryan S. Green, Knowing the poor. A case study in textual reality construction, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983,15-19.
5 Stanley Raffel’s Matters offact. A sociological enquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979) is
an indispensable source on institutional record keeping (by not a development agency but another
curative and therapeutic agency - a hospital).

POLICY ANTHROPOLOGY AS EXPERT W I T N E S S 171

clearest case of social science as development policy) as a nut to crack is one thing.
Whether that dominance ought to be overturned and replaced by an alternative but
otherwise equivalent dominance - just a different academic discipline - is quite
another.

Advisers and rulers

Notoriously in development, and no doubt certain other fields, advisers want to be
rulers - and then their own advisers.
Rationalist models of policy and languages of analysis, pursued in whichever
academic discipline, exaggerate policy as ‘decision-taking’. To define policy or
planning just as ‘choosing’ focuses attention on analysis only. It disguises the role of
either as control not development - to keep or consolidate a power base. Para-
doxically, therefore, to make the advisory game matter when the time is ripe may
require keeping a certain distance from the game of ruling, never seeking singlehand-
edly to take the burden of ‘being practical’ and ‘knowing what should be done’.
This latter is the ruler’s, not the adviser’s, role. The commissioned analyst, like the
accredited diplomat, has been empowered to take on a certain task. But both are
without a constituency to represent and rule.
To the adviser seeking to make her or his evaluation matter to be told at the end of
the assignment merely ‘Youhave been paid for your work. What more do you want?’
is dispiriting (though better than not being paid!). I was present once when this was
said at a final debriefing by a ruler - of a non-governmental agency not an empire - to
an evaluation team which had just presented its final report. In fact she praised the
report and was evidently quite ready to consider it - another plus. But above all she
was much exercised in her mind between, on the one hand, what was good
independent evaluation practice, and on the other, good agency practice.
Her remark was not a criticism of the work, but nor was it a negotiation about
what had, after all, been agreed by both parties as evaluable by the team. Instead, it was
an underlining of social and administrative roles and boundaries. Of this particular
case, however, more could be said. On the part of the team there was a touch of heavy
scientism: so confident did it feel of the scientific grounding of its findings that, for the
politics of policy analysis, it took them too seriously. It made the mistake of thinking
that, because of their technical quality, they should be acted upon automatically.

Policy practice and ‘getting from one b i t of mastery t o

another’
With Bernard Schaffer’s and my ‘policy practice’ expression, used virtually as one
word, our intention was to address what we considered to be those false approaches in
policy analysis which crassly distinguished between ‘policy itself‘ and its ‘implementa-
tion’ as something quite separate and not really policy at all. We disagreed with this
view of administration as no more than policy’s imperfect means of execution. We
sought to repudiate the constant blaming of ‘implementation’ difficulties for ‘policy’
failure. The effect - and often intent - of such lop-sidedness was obvious: to allow
basic matters of choice and intervention formulation to evade critical analysis

172 RAYMOND APTHORPE

 altogether. This meant that broader perspectives could become self-perpetuating,
completely regardless of track record.
A case in point had come from my own work on agricultural cooperatives which
had found some types of ‘evaluations’ to be of the order rather of exonerations in thin
disguise. International cooperatives agencies were advancing precisely the same factors
as reasons for cooperatives failing to achieve their manifesto goals as those which
earlier had led to their being preferred over, say, companies or corporations, with not
the slightest degree of self-questioning arising. Further, it had held that any serious
evaluation should be twofold. What a ‘cooperative’ meant and did for peasants
qualified as one issue. What this favourite means did for the state or government and
its planistrators qualified as another. (This latter anticipated part of Ferguson’s
position noted above.) Where great gulfs of social, cultural, economic and political
difference divide peasants and planistrators, why would reasons of government, and
reasons of development ever give the same picture or lead to the same policies?
Our ‘policy practice’ argument was made mainly with regard only to the first
element in this single expression. That was sufficient for our purpose. With the second
we were much less deliberately engaged. We did not aim then to go any further: for
example, to distinguish policy practice from non-policy practice.
Stephen Turner’s The social theory of practices is a penetrating inquiry into
concepts (and some orders) of practice, and practice as ‘not objects but ... rather
explanatory constructions that solve specific problems of comparison and unmet
expectations’ (p. 123). It argues its case, whether you agree with it or not, with great
perspicacity, as for instance against Mauss and Bourdieu. One looks forward now to
equally brilliant responses. Turner’s controversial conclusion is that, in general,
practice and practices are not ‘shared’ in the sense that normally - in schools of social
anthropology and sociology - qualifies them as ‘social’.
No, he says with great force: practices are matters of individual habits of
construction. They are not of given, or traditional, or tacit, or social, construction.
This is because - and Turner takes the matter of transmission as absolutely crucial for
his argument - they are not socially transmitted. Rather, persistence, transmission, is
‘by habits that arise in the individual as a consequence of the emulative performance of
particular activities, observances and the like’ (p. 99). To him (and indeed this writer)
‘raising [this] possibility is enough to undermine the notions of traditions as hidden
collective object - like possessions, the appeal of which rests on the supposed necessity
of the existence of some such object ... [There is no such thing as] some sort of
collectively shared single habit called a practice or way of life which one may possess
or fail to possess .. .the collective or public facts about traditions or cultural systems of
meaning begin and end with the observances of public objects themselves. Everything
else is individual. There is no collective tacit fact of the matter at all’ (pp. 102-3).
Arguing that practices cannot be both causal and shared (p. 123), he compares his
own with Donald Davidson’s end position (reached though by a different route): “‘we
must give up the idea of a clearly defined structure which language-users acquire and
then apply to cases”, i.e. the idea of a language as traditionally conceived, because there
is no such thing to be learned, mastered or born with‘ (p. 135).
To fit this new picture, he says, ‘Stanley Cavell’s famous comment that we learn
language and the world together may be revised.. . Not only do we learn language and
the world together, at the same time as we learn them we acquire habits that enable us
to be more or less proficient in using both language and the world. To learn and

POLICY ANTHROPOLOGY AS EXPERT WITNESS 173

comprehend is to acquire habits, habits that enable one to go on. And this does not
happen only in “magic moments”, but continuously - even in the course of reading
through and understanding a text ...’ (p 121).
Finally, ‘the argument of this book ... suggests that the causal side of coming to
belief and understanding and the justificatory side diverge: that coming to belief and
understanding involves the acquisition of habits, and that these acquisitions need not
be thought of as acquisitions of a common object, and consequently the kinds of
analogical reasoning we employ when we construe the explicit beliefs, actions and
observances of others should be understood in a wholly instrumental way ... The
romantic picture of the intellect immured should be left to cultural historians of the
future as a curiosity. The only prison here, the only opacity, is the Maussian one: we
cannot do anything to get behind the notion of practice, either in a causal or
justificatory way, because practices are not objects, but are rather explanatory
constructions that solve specific problems of comparison and unmet expectations. The
Maussian analyst must formulate discoveries for an audience which has similar
expectations. But breaches in expectations occur adventitiously, and reveal no more
than specific, limited, differences. We cannot identify practices as such. We cannot
even separate the “social” part of practice from the “natural” part. The same holds for
artificial intelligence emulations of human thought and conduct. Success and failure
occur only within preset problem domains, specific sets of tasks which are to be
emulated . ..The picture that I have developed here is one in which practices is a word
... for the individual formations and emulations that make up life. No one is immured
by these habits. They are, rather, the stepping-stones we use to get from one bit of
mastery to another’ (pp. 122-3).
This is a challenging and relevant philosophical discussion for a policy anthro-
pology to consider. Philosophy that distinguishes passive social constructions from
active individual habits of constructions and deconstructions is an example of
philosophy giving the attention to instrumentality that policy analysis requires.
Further, Turner is optimistic about change and suggestive of some strategy to explore.
This work also helps conceive anthropology and other social sciences as not science OY
art, but science and art. It is important for policy anthropology to pursue these
arguments. But is nothing social (or sacred)? Is everything ‘only’ a matter of individual
habits. (Turner asks: ‘Could observances, performances, utterances and all the other
sorts of things that people notice, understand, respond to and, in the course of doing
so, form habits be what “makes up” society?’)
For a (non-economistic) policy anthropology, even sophisticated versions of
methodological individualism are severely constrained and constraining. But how to
address ideological, institutional, organisational and actual conduct issues each in, and
on, its own terms is obviously no mean question.

Ideologies, Institutions, organisations and actual conduct

To address, firstly, ideological issues, the clue is that ideology is everywhere
universalistic in intent. This is true of ethics for, rather than models of, policy.
Ideologies always in their own terms aim at a transcendence through which to perfect
the human condition. Their aim is to go beyond the ‘constraints’ or ‘abundances’ of
material conditions to attain an ideal, This ideal is countenanced as having valid lessons
for all cultures, countries, economies, societies, situations: its message as ethics is for all

174 RAYMOND APTHORPE

 and everyone. This is why ideology brooks no dissent, and except at times of
cataclysmic change - and sometimes even then - remains steadfast. It admits of
anything new only through revelation, is self-contained as well as self-content, and
remarkably comprehensively comprehensive and declamatory.
A document in point is the report of this year’s UN World Social Summit. Look
no further for a type-case of a work of ideology by an international organisation in full
feather. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is left out. And what is well and truly included in
is entirely unexceptionable: the private sector must be strengthened; the public sector
must be strengthened; the interaction between the private and public sectors must be
strengthened; strengthening must be strengthened ( but not too much); and so on.
Ideologies each have their more or less distinctive intellectual and historical
themes - such as, to take a few at random, concerns with the nature of ‘self‘,
‘substance’, ‘spirit’, ‘government’, ‘policy’. When analysis has to decide what is special
or particular about one ideology compared with another, as would be understood by
those who adhere to it as well as by those who don’t, the focus shifts from ethics to
institutions. For example, what is Islamic about Islamic economics is less Islamic ethics
than Islamic institutions. (In the World Social Summit report it is to particular
religious, legal or cultural institutions that heads of government or state refer when
registering their countries’ reservations about aspects of the report’s main state-
ments.)
This brings us to our second concept. Institutions are particular to, not transcend-
ent of, an ideological tradition, a particularity reflecting an historical, not mechanical,
meaning and function. Institutions in human affairs permit, not determine, the making
and breaking of organisations. As every good anthropologist knows, the institution of
contract is what makes individual contracts possible.
Organisations, our third concept, are associations (of various types, including
projects and programmes) with social, moral and legal effect, meant to realise interests
and purposes. It is organisations, not institutions, which have the types of transaction
costs explored, for instance, as in firms and households that the methodologically
individualist ‘new institutional’ economics has made its own. Organisations not
institutions have stated goals, leaderships, rents to pay for premises and the like. Again
anthropologists are perfectly familiar with this.
Our fourth - and most elusive - idea, is actual conduct. To return to the contract
example, this would be, for instance, about how the individual parties to such
instruments really conduct themselves. Are the common agreements and objectives
that were signed also embraced? Does the actual behaviour of contracting parties
accord with the terms of the association? Indeed are common and shared objectives
actually common and understood in the same way by all parties - for instance, across a
language of association which is not equally accessible to all?
It is as answers to these questions become available that one can begin to see what
in actual conduct is perhaps ‘individual’, and what is ‘social’. Then, to complete the
broad picture that starts in this way to emerge, this procedure of analysis has to start
all over again and not follow only one route forward.
At the level of actual conduct there were again different issues to explore. Some
peasants were found to be, yes, rugged individualists who do not readily pool or share.
Cultivators of, say, maize or tobacco act under different production constraints.
Different relations of gender to mode of livelihood raised different issues again.
So, for example, it had to be recognised that the environments in which

POLICY ANTHROPOLOGY AS EXPERT WITNESS 17s

cooperatives function in actual practice are mixed. For instance, they include non-
cooperative forms of social and economic organisation. In actual conduct, cooperatives
may have to come to compromising terms with other types of organisation, some
taking on non-cooperative features but still meriting being called cooperatives:
coercitive, corporate or competitive.
Whether it owns up to it or not, classic structuralist analysis in social science
(including social anthropology), dwells on ideology and institution. In policy analysis
terms, this tends to mean that its focus is on the chronic. Situational and marginalist
analysis focus on organisational and actual conduct, and thus lead readily to the acute.
Seen in this way, structuralist and situationalist analysis are complementary not
contradictory. They are not the exclusive alternatives that anthropological theory in,
say, the 1950s and 1960s painted them.

Ethnography of and in development

Some social science workers say they ‘pull down the shutters and stay out of public
policy’. The reasons they give for this stance vary from the intellectual and moral to
the political and frankly fogey. Also brought into this picture may be development
policy evaluation construed not as a cast of mind but as a field of employment with its
own recruitment and other procedures and institutions. Not without reason, this field
tends to be seen as closed to pedestrians (lowly paid but reputable field researchers)
and open only to jet setters (consultants, highly paid when on the job, but disrepu-
table).
There is also the matter, especially for anthropology, of social science’s honour-
able concerns with rich descriptive and interpretative analysis as opposed to efforts
supposed to lead to law-like generalisations and predictions. Social science undoubt-
edly has considerable descriptive power, if only it would develop this sufficiently and
use it. O n the other hand, social science is very often, and justly, challenged and found
wanting in respect of its record and power to produce law-like generalisations and
predict.6There is a dilemma. Given access and perseverance, it is not impossible to find
out how donors really operate, and how public and private enterprises tick. But,
especially when they are themselves the commissioning agencies for evaluations, this
may be precisely what organisations do not want from an external consultant or
researcher. When you do manage to penetrate the defences you may well find yourself
being ‘put down’, even for what was not meant in the least as a demolition job.
There is nevertheless a great potential for expert analysis which goes beyond just a
recording of isolated facts and figures to make a serious difference to policy. An
interpretative and narrative account pays attention to processes and explanations for
these processes. Some of these will be recognised and readily seen to be crucial by
various actors and observers. Such accounts can therefore be highly persuasive for
certain actors and observers who wish to see such processes and explanations included
in an analysis. A study which plays down prescription while emphasising description,
is also harder to ridicule: it leaves room for stakeholders to learn and benefit from the
enriched understanding offered, without feeling directly threatened. The special
problems presented by those stakeholders in development policy analysis who are
other analysts - who may well come from other disciplines or schools - are also

6 See, for example, A. MacIntyre, After virrwe (London: Duckworth, 1982), especially Chapter 8.

176 RAYMOND APTHORPE

 perhaps lessened through such an approach. So policy anthropology should put its
best narrative powers forward to succeed in performing expert witness well.
Johan Pottier’s edited collection Practising development offers a mixed selection
of experiences - of projects rather than programmes or policies - in (despite its
subtitle) not social science broadly but ethnography and social anthropology nar-
rowly. As Pottier says, it ‘gores] beyond the debate on “ethnography in development”
and highlightrs] aspects of “ethnography of development”’. Not a case study nor a
textbook, it is a collection of papers a good half of which deserve their own summary
presentation and analysis beyond those in their editor’s short preface, useful guide
though it is. Those which are of the greatest relevance to this essay are Johan Pottier’s
broad ‘The role of ethnography in project appraisal’, Bill Garber and Penny Jenden’s
critical ‘Anthropologists or anthropology? The Band Aid perspective on development
projects’, and James Fairhead’s penetrating ‘Representing knowledge: the “new
farmer” in research fashions’.
Fairhead’s chapter is an excellent ‘rethinking in retrospect of one’s own experi-
ence’ exercise. ‘A third cause for concern’, he writes, ‘is that current representations of
local knowledge fail to distinguish between practices that are directly informed by
“knowledge”, and practices in the eye of the observer, judged good or bad, which are
not seen as practices at all by their practitioner. The latter ought perhaps to be
considered as “fortuitous side consequences”. But an overemphasis on looking for
knowledge (reason) behind the practices can lead researchers to deal with such
fortuitous side consequences by assuming that nothing observed is truly fortuitous.’
An acknowledged inspiration for this collection was the volume Social anthro-
pology and development policy edited by R. Grillo and A. Rew (ASA Monograph, 3.
London: Tavistock). In respect of both policy and project anthropology both
collections argue for, as Practising development puts it in words partly drawn from its
precursor, ‘continual ethnography ... because the social worlds within which develop-
ment efforts take shape are essentially fluid [and] the reification of ethnography
hinders or even prevents subsequent learning’. Pottier also refers to Margaret Mead’s
1977 lament that ‘there is presently no preparation for anthropologists to understand
. .. the versions of an emerging planetary bureaucratic culture, represented by the
specialised UN agencies, the multinationals, the World Bank, or a new coalition like
the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’.
I take it that it is well-known that matters in this latter regard in the development
area have made leaps forward since the middle 1970s. What is unfortunate is that the
part played by social anthropology in this opening up has been so small.

Social learning and policy

Policy anthropology as expert witness has much closer links with social science as
social learning than with social science as social engineering.
Independent and other types of consultants, and teachers of development studies,
benefit from spending a great deal of time and effort learning the social institutions and
organisations of those they advise or the classes they teach. In turn, much of what they
are called upon to convey in these situations is also social learning. This may or may
not be immediately apparent in a submitted report or textbook that finds favour and
makes a difference. It remains the case nevertheless that social learning is what actually
makes the difference to making a difference.

P O L I C Y ANTHROPOLOGY AS E X P E R T W I T N E S S 177
 The skills required for social learning are so close to those required for
anthropological fieldwork as this to amount to aprzma facie argument for a special role
for this particular discipline as expert social witness. Social learning is required also of
other disciplines and their ways. Development economists’ current preferences since a
sea change, say, two decades back, continue to be for ‘the invisible hand’ of the market
to play its cards. The reasons for these preferences need to be determined carefully.
The art of policy analysis is to find good reasons for bad practice, and bad reasons for
good practice, of disciplines and schools as well as organisations. That to realist social
analysis (and non neo-classical economics) the Smithian hand is far from invisible can,
and ought to, be explored to the limit by policy anthropology.

Policy anthropology as expert witness

The metaphor ‘expert witness’ is useful particularly for what could be termed the
‘evaluative description’ that is the hallmark of expert-witnessing. By this I mean a style
of explanatory account which is evaluative in intent and style, and principally uses
descriptive evidence to show how policies and projects actually work, ought to work
and could work. This merges into ‘descriptive evaluation’ where the emphasis on a rich
descriptive account is less dominant but still marked.
The ‘expert witness’ metaphor comes, of course, from jurisprudence. In court, a
counsel or judge may call for the services of an expert-witness to testify on matters of
science, technology or society. Usually in law courts it is forensic scientists, account-
ants, psychologists and psychiatrists who will be called, not economists, sociologists,
anthropologists, geographers, planners or writers. But there are some instances from
the latter groups. For instance, one can think of a wide range of cases: issues of privacy
and erotica, customary and Aboriginal land rights, effects of the working of apartheid
on those subject to its discrimination - all of which are other-cultural issues.
‘Expert’ as in ‘expert witness’ or ‘UN expert’ connotes professional and reliable
authority. In actual conduct, it also denotes something rather different, namely
availability at the place and time required. However, two different functions are
uppermost in these two cases.
UN experts are recruited principally to advise top managers and bureaucrats (and
sometimes politicians) as to what ought to be done, which policy to adopt, which to
reject, which way to go, and so on. How they ought best to go about this particular
way of making a difference to policy, is, as we have seen, debatable. Expert witnesses
are called to testify about what is, or is not, being done, or has been done. They are
called primarily to help establish the facts of a case, and how formally and informally
institutions and organisations normally work and ought to work. They are called upon
to decipher events and processes, to make them clearer to non-experts; such inter-
pretations of the evidence then feed into a wider process of judgement. This type of
sorting out of issues is different from UN experts’ ways of giving advice.
To make an effective intervention in public policy, an appropriate mode of
analytical description is needed, open and accessible and not itself constituting another
event that has to be deciphered. Social science’s jargonistic language practice is
notorious. What may also be crucial is the matter of precisely when, and by whom and
how, expertise is to be brought into a judgemental process.
Of all the human sciences, again there is a prima facie case for social anthropology
having special credentials. For inside-knowing of what to the outside (let alone the

178 RAYMOND A P T H O R P E
 inside) may otherwise be unknown or at least difficult to interpret, its set of concerns
with intelligibility as translation is distinctive.’ There are also, however, some clear
debits. For example, much of its energy still goes into being mostly by academic
anthropologists for academic anthropologists - and often about academic anthro-
pologists. Obviously, anything that is meant to make a difference to policy must be for
a wider audience and by different kinds of author.
Another debit is that positive attitudes towards, and skills in, consultancy are not
typical: for policy analysis research is by no means all. The two differ, for instance, in
timing, funding, recruitment, terms of reference and much else. Consultancy daring to
admit due doubt as to the accuracy of field findings (‘had we been able to stay longer in
the village, undoubtedly from even the same informants, different findings would have
emerged’) must expect a poor reception on that ground alone. For its lack of bottom-
line, it will be considered weak, and for its caution, unreliable.
There is also the question of joint and team work. In policy and policy studies this
is common, indeed very much to be desired (extending even to jointly written higher
degree theses). Contrast with the heroic but lonesome (and typically altogether too
ambitious) research anthropologists’ adventures across whole continents and cultures
couldn’t be sharper. Come to think of it, generally consultancy is a modest and tightly
bounded type of assignment, never open ended. Its ambition is always strictly
limited.
At an even more fundamental level uncharted reefs lurk for kid sub-specialisation
and parent discipline alike for ‘truth’ in social inquiry.* As in the expressions ‘the truth
of science’ and ‘truth lies in comparison’, typically only ‘science’ and ‘comparison’ are
singled out. It is a heavy and quite unnecessary handicap for, for example, post-
structuralist and post-modernist debates always to have to contend with ‘objectivity’
and ‘subjectivity’ only as binaries, and only as values. More relevantly for both sides in
these debates, these signs would be better understood as contraries, and as tech-
niques.

Raymond Apthove
Five Houses International
P 0 Box K410
Haymarket
Sydney
NS W 2000
Australia

7 Talal Asad’s ‘The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology’, in James Clifford
and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing culture. The poetics andpolitics of ethnography (University of
California Press 1986) is indispensable.
8 See, e.g. Michael Jackson, ‘On ethnographic truth‘, Canberra Anthropology. An Ausnalian Journal
of Anthropology, 10 (1987), 1-31; and Martyn Hammersley, Reading ethnographic research. A
critical guide (Harlow: Longman 1990), especially ‘Validity’, pp. 57-64. ‘By “validity” I mean
truth’, writes Hammersley.

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