Dial-an-Anthropologist: The Next Big Thing in Aid Work?

by Jina Moore · 2010-05-22 10:42:00 +0100
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The Internet is full of critiques of aid projects around the world — some of them more useful than others. As critics often say, projects misdiagnose the problem; they don't fully fund the proposed solution; they have an infinite set of possible unintended consequences. The most common refrain? They get the cultural approach all wrong.

Until now.

Well, maybe. A group of graduate students at the London School of Economics wants to put the power of anthropology into aid work. (For you find this is promising requires, of course, that you believe in the power of anthropology, but let's take that as a given for the moment.) Frustrated by their campus conversations about the unused knowledge of anthropologists, they started Worldwise Development, a website that seeks to link aid workers with anthropologists who possess regional and topical expertise.

The website is in its infancy, but the plan is to create a sort of professional homework hotline. Click on a country on the interactive map and bring up a list of anthropologists working in that country. Want real-time feedback on a proposed intervention? Post a question on the message board; Worldwise Development gets it, via SMS, into the hands of an anthropologist who can answer it.

It's an interesting idea, and one that might help prevent aid projects from repeating the same mistakes.

But a girl who lives in Rwanda has to wonder: What about the insidious legacy of anthropology in the very parts of the world that aid now intervenes to try and help? It was anthropologists, after all, who created the racial classification system that colonial powers used to privilege some and subjugate others in their vassal lands. In Rwanda, it's not too much to say that the practice of anthropology laid the social stratifications that were exploited during the genocide.

Sure, anthropology has changed over time, but I for one would want a professional mea culpa before deciding bringing more anthropology into aid is the right idea. And then there's this: The Internet lets us communicate with people we never could before. Why dial an anthropologist when I can email a Rwandan?

Photo Credit: fakelvis

Jina Moore is a professional journalist and correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor whose work also appears in Newsweek, The Boston Globe and Best American Science Writing. Read more at http://www.jinamoore.com/.
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