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L’anthropologie du développement dans les dynamiques académiques de recherche en sciences sociales

Anthropology and development in Germany

A history of the present
Thomas Bierschenk
p. 201-225

Résumés

L’histoire de l’engagement de l’anthropologie avec le développement dans l’espace germanophone (Allemagne, Autriche et Suisse) de l’après-guerre peut être divisée en trois phases : depuis un fort rejet par la plupart des titulaires de chaires professorales (jusqu’en 1980 environ), en passant par l’émergence d’un sous-domaine de l’anthropologie (à partir de 1980), pour devenir un courant dominant de la discipline (depuis 2000 environ). Toutefois, cette perspective présuppose une définition large de l’« anthropologie du développement » qui englobe plus que l’application des connaissances anthropologiques dans la coopération au développement, mais la réflexion critique d’un champ de pratiques professionnelles. Dans le lent processus de modernisation de l’anthropologie allemande au cours des cinquante dernières années – défini par le tournant de la discipline vers le monde moderne et son internationalisation rapide –, les recherches sur le développement ont joué un rôle pionnier en fournissant d’importants stimuli théoriques et méthodologiques. Avec leurs collègues européens, notamment ceux de l’APAD, les anthropologues germanophones ont développé un style particulier qui a également été appelé « anthropologie du développement basée sur l’anthropologie dans le développement ». Aujourd’hui, l’anthropologie du développement s’est transformée en une exploration ethnographique de l’ingénierie sociale globale.

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Development anthropology or anthropology of development?1

  • 1 This is a shortened version of T. Bierschenk (2021, forthcoming), which contains more references an (...)

1This paper pursues the question of what impact the engagement with “development” has had on anthropology as an academic discipline in Germany and neighbouring German-speaking countries. I will show that the history of anthropological engagement with development in Germany can be subdivided into three phases: from rejection by most chair holders (until about 1980), to a subfield of anthropology (since 1980) and to mainstreaming within the discipline (since about 2000). The anthropological examination of development has given important impulses to the discipline in Germany in recent decades: in the modernisation of German anthropology – that is, in the turn towards the contemporary world and current global problems as a topic, as well as the internationalisation of disciplinary practices – the engagement with development has played a pioneering role. In this process, development anthropology, which began as a subfield of anthropology, has become differentiated on the one hand, while also spreading into general anthropology.

2However, this history can be written from neither a purely discipline-based nor a purely national perspective (as suggested by Spittler, 1994; Antweiler, 2004; Bliss, 2004). The modernisation of anthropology in Germany – a field that is almost exclusively practiced at universities, with the one major exception since around 2000 of the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research – was largely initiated from the margins of the discipline, if not actually from outside anthropology: many of the central actors identified in this text represented, and still represent, a broad concept of anthropology, and often hold transdisciplinary identities, usually combining anthropology with sociology. Likewise, interdisciplinary institutions and networks beyond anthropology played an important role.

3Secondly, this story played out in a context of international – especially European – networking among a (then) younger generation of anthropologists, particularly those who defined disciplinary boundaries relatively broadly. Together with their European colleagues, they developed an “anthropology of development based on anthropology in development” (Crewe and Axelby, 2013: 40 ff.; see also Mosse, 2013b), an approach that represents a specifically European trademark of anthropological engagement with development. As a result, new fields of research have emerged in the last twenty years, ranging from the analysis of new forms of “neoliberal” projects to the ethnography of development institutions and experts (increasingly including anthropologists themselves) to the exploration of global structural policies. However, the “new” anthropology of development in Germany remains primarily interested in local dynamics “on the ground” in the Global South, more than it does in the US and the UK, for example.

4Development is a fundamental term in the political-social language of the modern era. It is a characteristic of such terms that they are located at the interface of political practice and normative evaluation on the one hand, and scientific analysis on the other, and that their respective uses oscillate (Hauck, 1996; Kößler, 1998). The vanishing point of these different understandings of development is the idea of social engineering, which shaped European modernity: the conviction that social change can be controlled applying criteria of reason.

5Within this context, several, often normative, understandings of development can be distinguished. However, the focus of this paper is on more concrete meanings of the term: first as a historical epoch; second as a policy field; and third as a series of individual projects.

6“Development” in the first of these senses can be used to refer to the period after 1949 when “developing countries” became objects of global social engineering.

7During this time, development became a policy field (the second meaning), which its actors used to call “development aid” and now usually term “development cooperation”. Since the term obviously has strong ideological grounds, insofar as it suggests an encounter at eye level, it may be preferable to speak of “development policy”. Development policy encompasses a series of specific policies that have expanded over the course of history: a recent example of this is the attempt to implement universal primary education around the globe (under the catchphrase Education for All).

8In this policy field, relevant institutions have been established internationally since the late 1940s, and in Germany since the 1950s, including the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) in 1961 and other institutions such as GTZ (today GIZ), KfW and DEED, as well as the international departments of the foundations linked to political parties (named after Konrad Adenauer, Friedrich Ebert, Friedrich Naumann, Heinrich Böll, Rosa Luxemburg, etc.). This created a network of interrelated institutions, actors, practices and discourses, which, analogous to the art world, for instance (Danto, 1964; Becker, 2008), can be called the “development world”. The development world (or, in a deliberate allusion to Lewis Carroll’s “wonderland”, also called “aidland”, see Mosse, 2013a; see also the analogous notion “developmentist configuration”, Oliver de Sardan, 2005: 25) is a network of institutions and actors held together by practices and discourses that are directly or indirectly involved in the production of “development”. Anthropologists can participate in the production of discourses or in concrete policies, for example as consultants, but they can also study the configurations and processes of this institutional world, including the production of a normative concept of development.

9Global structural policies have become increasingly important since the 1980s, without, however, displacing specific “development projects”, which is a third empirical dimension of the concept of development (for example, the construction of water retention basins to promote local animal husbandry). Anthropologists can be actively involved in such projects, but they can also make these projects the subject of anthropological analyses. Indeed, since C.C. Reining’s pioneering efforts (1966), project ethnographies have become an established genre in the field of the anthropology of development.

10The idea of the practical applicability of anthropology has accompanied the discipline (mostly implicitly) since the early 20th century. However, this aspect often represents a blind spot for authoritative self-representations of the discipline, and its importance for theory-building and academic teaching is still underestimated by many academic anthropologists. This practical interest in the modern world has been expressed very differently according to the different national styles of the discipline, an aspect that cannot be developed here. In the USA, which is by far the largest producer of anthropological knowledge worldwide, the situation has been characterised by two clearly differentiated positions. On the one hand, we have a technically very mature applied anthropology with a rich historical tradition that insists on anthropology’s practical contribution to improving development policy (Cernea, 1984, 1996; Horowitz, 1996; Nolan, 2002). On the other hand, we find a radical “please-don’t-touch” position that primarily deals with development as a discourse rather than as a set of practices (Escobar, 2010). This often amounts to a Foucault-inspired critique of ideology in which, however, the practices within the development machine largely remain a black box, and the social situatedness of knowledge practices is not inquired into (Hobart, 1993a).

11These opposing positions each have their own institutional anchors in the USA and are barely in conversation with each other. Both positions can also be found in Germany (for a similar situation in Sweden, see Hagberg, 2011; for Vietnam, see Culas et al, in this issue). Furthermore, in Germany, as in other European countries, a third position of “anthropology of development on the basis of an anthropology in development” can also be found that has no real equivalent in the USA.

Rejection and desire: Anthropological engagements with development and the emergence of a subfield of anthropology in Germany (1970-2000)

12From the beginning, “German university anthropology was also […] oriented towards practice. It actually began with commissioned work, for the military: shortly after the founding of the Leipzig Institute [of Ethnology] in 1914, some of its anthropologists (H. Plischke and M. Block) conducted field research in Romania among the Roma groups. The reasons why the Imperial Army Command for Southeast Europe financed and supervised such research would have to be investigated in more detail” (Mischek, personal communication, 4 September 2013).

13However, the fact that many anthropologists in Nazi Germany also advocated for practical relevance – for example in the search for Lebensraum in the East (Hauschild, 1995; Streck, 2000) – led to a fierce backlash after 1945. German academic anthropologists virtually completely abandoned the present in the societies they studied, as well as references to their own society (Gingrich, 2005; Haller, 2012; Bierschenk et al., 2016), as impressively demonstrated in the interviews Dieter Haller conducted with representatives of this generation.2 Against the backdrop of National Socialism, it seems not too far-fetched to understand this rejection as an attempt to escape all political entanglements.

The rejection of the present by German anthropologists after the Second World War

14As a result, German-speaking anthropology largely isolated itself from disciplinary developments in the USA, Great Britain and France for several decades, developing into a “relatively self-sufficient world of its own, […] more cut off from the international mainstream than, for example, sociology and philosophy in Germany” (Gingrich, 2005: 137). International academic contacts were rare, and international careers were even rarer.

15This “plunge into intellectual insignificance and […] stagnation” (ibid., 139) was only reversed gradually from the 1970s on. Research on “development” played a pioneering role in this gradual modernisation of the discipline in Germany – that is, the turn to modernity as a subject and to current global problems – just as it did for its gradual internationalisation. The growing anthropological interest in development shifted the discipline towards greater interdisciplinarity and multifactorial explanations, brought social change, social practices and forms of power (instead of a statically conceived “culture”) into focus and led to the expansion of the arsenal of methods, such as the introduction of various forms of teamwork. Finally, this interest in development also increased sensitivity to ethical issues that German-speaking academic anthropology thought it could avoid by remaining in its academic ivory tower.

16As early as the 1950s, isolated voices could be heard in German anthropology calling for “anthropology [to] also take on the practical tasks located in the present, the most important of which is to contribute to the understanding of other cultures and people and to help avoid misunderstandings and the violent solutions that arise from them” (Westphal-Hellbusch, 1954: 185). However, this position met with vehement rejection from the majority of the established chair holders, who warned of the “visibly more threatening” danger for anthropology of being appropriated by development aid.

17Somebody like E. Schlesier, who represented a German variant of action anthropology, remained a lone voice. He postulated as early as 1957 that “the anthropologist has the high ethical obligation to help those people with whose life, culture and past he is scientifically concerned, to survive in the modern age, which they find themselves unexpectedly confronted with through no fault of their own, and to find the transition from their world into that of steel, the motor, nuclear technology and unrestrained economic competition without damage that threatens their existence” (Schlesier, 1957: 98). This position, which is reminiscent of Sol Tax’s (1975) action anthropology, does not seem to have caught on (any more than it did in the USA) but rather to have spread into general anthropology in Germany after 2000. The majority of chair holders at the time, on the other hand, agreed that the real task of anthropology was not to interfere in day-to-day politics, but to “illuminate universal history” (Baumann, 1962: 256, 263; similarly, Rudolph, 1961).

The Arbeitsgemeinschaft Entwicklungsethnologie (AGEE, Working Group on Development Anthropology) of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (DGV, German Society for Ethnology)

18In the 1960s and 1970s, German-speaking anthropologists published isolated studies on “current problems” such as “guided cultural change” (Köhler, 1971) and “anthropological questions of development planning” (Adrian, 1975; see also Müller, 1962). At the same time, heated discussions began in the German Society for Ethnology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, DGV) about the discipline’s lack of relevance to the present, a debate that almost destroyed the association (Haller, 2012: 203 ff.). Against the backdrop of a massive increase in the number of students in the 1970s, the Völkerkundetag (ethnology conference) in Münster in 1981 was – for the first time – partly dedicated to diverse fields of potential anthropological practice and the career perspectives of students. At the same time, “development” now also found its way into the conference programme in the form of a “symposium with four papers on the topic of ‘Contributions of anthropologists to the design of overseas development projects’” (Bliss, 2004: 208; see also Haller, 2012: 254 ff.).

19However, the founding of a DGV internal working group on Entwicklungsethnologie (development anthropology) was initially rejected by the board and general assembly because of “ethical concerns”. The applicants were caught in the pincers, as it were, of established representatives of the discipline who located the “object [of anthropology] in a completely different time, [as] not part of our present” (F. Kramer in an interview with D. Haller, 2012: 205) on the one hand, and left-wing students who denounced the involvement of anthropologists in development projects as handmaiden service for neo-colonialist strategies on the other. Finally, at the 1985 DGV conference in Lübeck, a group of young anthropologists, formed around F. Bliss, C. Antweiler and M. Schönhuth, applied for recognition as an official “working group” of the DGV. Some of the established professors felt so provoked by this that they threatened to leave the association. As a compromise, it was agreed that the group should first set down its mission statement in writing, and by so doing, above all address the particular ethical problems of an anthropological preoccupation with “development” (as if these ethical questions did not concern the “pure” academic ethnologist…). The working group was accredited in 1987 as Arbeitsgemeinschaft Entwicklungsethnologie (AGEE).3 At the end of the 1980s, the AGEE was one of the few permanent DGV working groups to regularly invite foreign colleagues to the periodic Völkerkundetag (including the only anthropologist at the World Bank at the time, M. Cernea). Until 2015, there was a panel on development anthropology organised by this group at every DGV conference (Antweiler, 2004: 28; own research). The AGEE also published a journal (Entwicklungsethnologie) from 1992 to 2014 that has since been turned into a book series.4 In addition, development policy consulting was a focus of the activities of many of its members.

20The starting point of the anthropological study of development in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s was a critical engagement with the development policy of the time, which was based on modernisation theory, focusing on capital and technical transfers and the state as the central vector of development. Anthropologists accused the institutions and experts in this policy field of lacking both knowledge of their area of intervention and the target groups as well as cultural sensitivity in general. As an alternative, “participatory” approaches in development policy were proposed, including a more or less hidden agenda of promoting the employment of anthropologists in development institutions. Using an argument that is also characteristic of anthropologists who claim expert status in other professional fields (see paradigmatically Mead, 1956), it was argued that the consideration of anthropological perspectives, or even better the employment of anthropologists by development institutions, would humanise development policy and make it more effective at the same time (see Hess et al., 1998; Schönhuth, 2004). Here, a claim by anthropologists to expert status manifested itself as an expertise in culture that would be on an equal footing with other experts such as economists and agronomists.

21That this claim was formulated during a period of considerable expansion in student numbers, when the career prospects of anthropology students, who now suddenly numbered in the hundreds or even thousands at individual departments, became increasingly unclear, is surely no coincidence. Throughout the 20th century, the German debate on the practical applicability of anthropology outside universities and museums always reflected developments in the academic labour market. “Corporate” anthropology in Germany, it can be concluded, had great difficulty with the topic of development until the 1990s.

The “Bielefeld School”: Sociology and anthropology of development

22However, a narrow institutional or corporatist perspective is only part of the story, because outside the AGEE, and to a large extent also the DGV, other German anthropologists were indeed interested in the topic of development – in particular those around H.D. Evers and G. Elwert at the University of Bielefeld, founded in 1969, with G. Elwert in 1986 moving to the Free University of Berlin (Hüsken, 2004). For these anthropologists, the DGV was only one forum among others, and not necessarily the most important one. For their part, the organised anthropologists, including those from the AG Entwicklungsethnologie, strongly opposed the Bielefeld and Berlin groups. Despite all their other conflicts, the AGEE representatives agreed with most of their colleagues organised within the DGV in that the Bielefelders/Berliners were not really anthropologists at all, but “only” development sociologists (personal recollections of discussions in the Institut für Ethnologie at the Free University of Berlin in the late 1980s; echoes of this argument can still be found in Bliss, 2004). For a long time, German corporatist anthropology did not want to admit that leading representatives of the “Bielefeld approach” had either been trained as anthropologists (G. Elwert in Heidelberg) or had taught anthropology in earlier professional phases (H.D. Evers at Monash University in Australia), and that Sozialanthropologie (named as such, i.e. not as Ethnologie) was also taught, with its own professorial chair from 1986, at the Bielefeld Faculty of Sociology (the largest of its kind in Europe). H.D. Evers had published a book on cultural change in Ceylon in 1964 based on long-term field research; he was probably the first German anthropologist of the post-war period to publish in American anthropological journals, which he did as early as the 1960s (Haller, 2012: 218 fn. 140). For his part, G. Elwert had engaged intensively with the work of French Marxist Africanist anthropologists (C. Meillassoux and others) on the articulation of capitalism with other modes of production, and had introduced this discussion into the German-language debate. There it was taken up and developed further under the label of “subsistence production”, which became a key concept of the so-called Bielefeld approach (Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Entwicklungssoziologen, 1979). With the participation of other area specialists such as G. Stauth (Egypt), V. Bennholdt-Thomsen (Mexico), C. von Werlhof (El Salvador, Costa Rica and Venezuela) and J. Augel (Brazil), contemporary issues as discussed in sociology and social theory – for example, the future of work in a globalising world – were comparatively researched using ethnographic methods based on a division of labour and cooperation between area specialists (Bierschenk, 2002). In addition, Bielefeld faculty members conducted sociological research on German development agencies such as the GTZ (Glagow, 1983; Glagow and Evers, 1986).

23A particular hallmark of Bielefeld anthropology was its pronounced empirical orientation. In post-war German anthropology, it had been customary until at least the 1960s for empirical research to be pursued, if at all, after the doctorate or even the habilitation thesis, which was also related to the fact that until the introduction of the Magister degree programmes in the 1960s, the doctorate was the first possible degree in the Fakultät für Philosophie. For their part, the Bielefelders, who taught in a sociology diploma programme, systematically used the Lehrforschung (teaching by research) format in which groups of advanced students undertook field research in countries of the then so-called Third World under the guidance of a lecturer. This format was fiercely opposed by many anthropologists outside Bielefeld until well into the 1990s; by now it has become current practice at many anthropology departments. The Bielefeld anthropologists also conducted postcolonial research avant la lettre in that they placed great emphasis on involving scholars from the countries being studied. In other words, the Bielefeld research and teaching programme represented an offer of modernisation to German anthropology, which the latter rejected for many years. In the 2000s, after the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle in 1999, with a British social anthropologist (Chris Hann) and a “Bielefelder” (Günther Schlee) as founding directors, it became widely accepted in German anthropology (Bierschenk et al., 2016).

24However, despite any other differences, both groups – the AGEE and the Bielefeld/Berlin anthropologists – were united not only by an interest in “development” but also by a certain opportunism in the shared argument vis-à-vis the development institutions of the usefulness of anthropology; significantly, the Bielefeld anthropologists-cum-sociologists were responsible for the Praxisschwerpunkt of Development planning and policy in the sociology diploma course. This argument on the usefulness of anthropology obviously expressed an aspiration for gainful employment.

Interdisciplinary genealogies

25Just like the confrontations between the young Turks of the AGEE and the anthropological establishment in the 1970s and 1980s had a prehistory, the same applies to the anthropologists at Bielefeld and Berlin. If we go back historically to before the 1970s and look at the biographies of the actors and institutional genealogies, two institutional nodes emerge: the Institut für Ethnologie und Soziologie (IES) in Heidelberg and the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut (ABI) in Freiburg (Breisgau). Both had an interdisciplinary orientation, with a particular proximity to sociology, and both were to play a considerable role in German anthropology’s turn towards the modern world.

The Institut für Ethnologie und Soziologie (ISE) at Heidelberg University

26The University of Heidelberg, which had once been the academic home of Max and Alfred Weber, appointed the Mainz anthropologist W.E. Mühlmann to the chair of sociology in 1960. W.E. Mühlmann became a highly controversial figure because of his involvement with the National Socialist regime and his early racist and anti-Semitic ideas, which, however, only became publicly known over time. On the other hand, he advocated a concept of transdisciplinary closeness between anthropology and sociology, which he implemented in Heidelberg in the Department for Anthropology and Sociology that he founded. He also engaged thoroughly with British social anthropology and US cultural anthropology. His interest in the present and in global contexts made him a singular figure in the West German anthropological scene of his time. Significantly, his Festschrift on his retirement was entitled “Development and Progress: Sociological and Anthropological Aspects of Socio-Cultural Change” (Reimann and Müller, 1969). On the other hand, his cosmopolitanism distinguished him from his colleagues in sociology who mostly had little interest in the non-European world. However, he shared a certain uneasiness with conducting empirical research of his own with contemporary German anthropology; the highly-educated bourgeois W.E. Mühlmann was primarily a desk scholar.

27When W.E. Mühlmann problematic pre-1945 biography was made public in 1963, he increasingly withdrew from the department. Until the beginning of the 1970s, this gave the mid-level academic staff a great deal of room for manoeuvre, and enabled them to play a particularly active academic and political role, which was highly unusual for the dominant German format of the professorial university at the time. This formed the background for a rapid political radicalisation in the wider context of the emerging student movement. In 1969, a German variant of the US Camelot controversy (Horowitz, 1974) flared up in Heidelberg when students and staff from the department successfully protested against contract research by Heidelberg scholars for the US military. Heidelberg anthropology students (including G. Elwert, F. Kramer and C. Sigrist) also acted as spokespersons for anthropological “grassroots groups” (Basisgruppen), who threatened to disrupt the 1969 Anthropology Conference in Göttingen if there was no discussion of the “Indian genocide in South America” (Haller, 2012: 203 ff.). The resulting turmoil plunged the DGV into an existential crisis that lasted for years; without it, the conflicts surrounding the founding of the AGEE in 1985 referred to above cannot be understood.

28In the journal Peripherie, which was founded in 1980 by a group of ex-Heidelbergers (including G. Hauck and R. Kößler), the legacy of this tradition can still be detected in its interdisciplinary orientation, its critical-political posture and a certain desk-study heaviness.5 According to its home page, the journal sees itself as “an interdisciplinary discussion forum for development theory and development policy” and explains: “Solidarity with emancipation movements and social movements in developing countries as well as industrialised countries is an important motif of our work.” Originally founded as Zeitschrift für Politik und Ökonomie in der Dritten Welt (Journal for Politics and Economics in the Third World), its subtitle is now Politik-Ökonomie-Kultur, flagging the expansion of the originally dominant political-economic orientation in the direction of anthropology.

29Other important figures for the history of German development anthropology emerged from Heidelberg in addition to the previously-mentioned G. Hauck and R. Kößler. One of them was C. Sigrist, who was a kind of German analogy to M. Sahlins, with his interest in domination-free societies, from which he derived a critique of capitalist society. This critique was then also expressed in political activist terms – with a characteristically German contemporary tinge, in that his dissertation on segmentary societies (Sigrist, 1967) was purely a desk work (which in fact applied to M. Sahlins as well). In the 1980s, with F. Kramer, another former Heidelberg scholar, C. Sigrist translated key British social anthropology texts into German under the title “Societies without State” (Kramer and Sigrist, 1983). This triggered an enormous modernisation drive in anthropological teaching, which at that time was still almost exclusively in German, and where knowledge of English could not be assumed among students, as it is today. After C. Sigrist became a full professor in Münster in 1974, where he taught a pronounced “left sociology”, he tried to actively contribute as a government advisor to the hoped-for social changes after the victory of national liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

30There was a direct link between Heidelberg and the later Bielefeld school through G. Elwert, who had completed his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1973 with an ethnohistorical dissertation on the political economy of slavery in pre-colonial Dahomey (Elwert, 1973), and T. Schiel, who later worked out a theory of strategic groups with H.D. Evers (Evers and Schiel, 1988). Akin to Heidelberg, anthropology and sociology were institutionally coupled in Bielefeld: actors also pursued an ambition to conduct critical (“emancipatory”) social science, although they individually accentuated it differently, for example also as feminist research (von Werlhof et al., 1988). Apart from personal quarrels and animosities, the differences from Heidelberg lay in the previously-mentioned much stronger Bielefeld orientation towards empirical, and above all qualitative, social research, a highly-developed praxis of teamwork (albeit only successful in the initial phase), more self-confident marketing, a more aggressive publication policy, including the systematic use of English, and intensive international networking, which I will discuss later. These were organisational elements of the Bielefeld approach that were probably strongly influenced by H.D. Evers’ American and Australian experiences, but they also corresponded to a contemporary inclination towards the egalitarian “collective” (Bierschenk, 2002). In addition, and unlike the case of Heidelberg, the diploma programme in sociology in which the Bielefelders taught development sociology in a so-called “practice focus” (Praxisschwerpunkt) was oriented towards possible professional outlets for their graduates, a consideration that was very alien to German mainstream anthropologists until at least the 1990s.

31Traces of “Heidelberg” can also be detected in Mainz. W.E. Mühlmann, as already mentioned, had been appointed from Mainz to Heidelberg. E.W. Müller, who had been a research assistant to W.E. Mühlmann in Heidelberg from 1960 to 1967, was appointed full professor of anthropology in Mainz in 1969, where he built up what is now the Department of Anthropology and African Studies based on the core idea of an interdisciplinary African Studies department that integrated anthropology with other academic disciplines, above all sociology. The first representative of such a “sociology in anthropology” was G. Grohs in 1975, who was the first in Germany to engage with Franz Fanon’s work (Grohs, 1968, 1970), and who also stood out because he had already been teaching at an African university in the 1960s, in Dar-es-Salam, then a flourishing international centre of African studies, with illustrious colleagues such as T. Ranger, L. Cliffe and W. Rodney. He also defined his academic role in terms of a political-activist (in his case Christian-based) orientation (Bierschenk, 2016).

The Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut (ABI) in Freiburg

32Another interdisciplinary hub that was to help open up German anthropology to the topic of development from outside the discipline was Freiburg, where A. Bergstraesser was appointed professor of Sociology and Political Science in 1954 after his return from the US. A. Bergstraesser argued for a “synoptic” conception of political science that was highly unusual in Germany at the time. It took economic, historical, political and cultural perspectives into account, with the objective of exploring reality in terms of practical problems, and was decidedly cosmopolitan. It was a kind of interdisciplinary-oriented comparative politics, for which the then so-called developing countries were of particular interest. A. Bergstraesser sought to realise his conception of global studies avant la lettre in an Arbeitsstelle für kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung (Working group for cultural research), which was renamed the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut (ABI) after his death. This perspective enjoyed considerable political resonance around 1960, when many African countries became independent and today’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and other German development agencies were founded. The institute was intended to be interdisciplinary: A. Bergstraesser envisioned “young scientists working together in a centre for cultural studies research”, where “people from different cultures […] should come together for scientific work”. The centre was also planned to employ anthropologists, and A. Bergstraesser was able to temporarily recruit R. Schott, later Professor of Anthropology in Münster, and U. Köhler, who became Professor of Anthropology in Freiburg. The idea was to combine different regional expertise around common research topics. It is not difficult to discern a core idea of the later Bielefeld research approach here: after all, H.D. Evers was a student assistant to A. Bergstraesser, and did his doctorate under him in 1963. A similar organisational logic underlies the Max Planck Institute in Halle.

Sektion Entwicklungssoziologie und Sozialanthropologie (ESSA, Sociology of Development and Social Anthropology Section) of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS, German Society for Sociology)

33Since the 1980s, the Section of Development Sociology and Social Anthropology (ESSA) of the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, DGS) has become an institutional platform where these circles from Bielefeld, Berlin, Freiburg and Heidelberg have increasingly overlapped.6 The section was founded in 1972 by G. Grohs as the “Section of Development Sociology”. In the 1980s, it began to integrate anthropologists, and with inspiration from G. Elwert and others, it was renamed ESSA (i.e. including Sozialanthropologie in its title) in 1988. At the time, it was understood to be a counter-project to the AGEE, and was not part of the German Society for Ethnology (DGV, now DGSKA) but rather of the German Society for Sociology (DGS). ESSA sees itself as a “central link […] for research that is often regionally oriented (in the sense of research on Africa, Asia or Latin America) […] with the debates in general sociology and current shifts in sociological theory”, with “intensive cooperation of colleagues from anthropology”.

34ESSA principally organises conferences every six months at different university locations, as well as regularly at the congresses of the German Society for Sociology. The fact that, since 2011, it has also been regularly organised an own panel at the biennial conferences of the German Society for Ethnology (DGV, DGSKA) can be taken as proof of the extent to which the personal animosities and tensions of the founding generation have subsided.

European genealogies and a particular research style

35The international networks of the Bielefelders have already been briefly mentioned. H.D. Evers had been appointed from Australia, and G. Stauth from France (after working in Egypt for several years). All the Bielefeld Development Sociology staff had intense relationships with their field research countries. During their time in Bielefeld, many of them also taught, in some cases for several years, at universities in the Global South, primarily in Southeast Asia, but also in Egypt as well as in Australia and Great Britain. At the same time, guest researchers and doctoral students from the partner countries regularly found their way to Bielefeld funded by large PhD programmes. The Bielefelders also developed long-standing working relations with the leading dependency theorist I. Wallerstein, the Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University in New York, bringing world system and subsistence production approaches into a dialogue (Smith et al., 1984). As already mentioned, English was regularly used as the language of publication.

36In addition, two European networks were important for the development of a particular style in the anthropology of development in Germany: EIDOS and APAD.

EIDOS, APAD and the German connection

37EIDOS (the European Inter-University Development Opportunities Study Group) was an informal and relatively small network of European anthropologists from the Netherlands, the UK and Germany who were “actively engaged in the study of development” (Lewis and Mosse, 2006, preface). It held about ten major conferences between 1985 and 2008 in the Netherlands, the UK and Germany that often led to topical edited volumes (e.g., Hobart, 1993b; Quarles Van Ufford and Giri, 2003; Mosse and Lewis, 2005; Lewis and Mosse, 2006). In regional terms, the research – in line with the empirical interests of its core members – focused on Asia. Its exclusive working language was English. The network was founded in 1985 by P. Quarles Van Ufford (Amsterdam), together with H.D. Evers (Bielefeld) and M. Hobarth (SOAS London) who had met through their regional interest in Southeast Asia. F. von Benda-Beckmann, W. Van Binsbergen and N. Long (M. Gluckman’s last doctoral student) were also temporarily involved. In around 2000, H.D. Evers and M. Hobarth withdrew, after which EIDOS was carried forward by a new generation of anthropologists such as D. Mosse (SOAS London), D. Lewis (LSE London), O. Salemink (Copenhagen), M. Nuijten (Wageningen) and, in Germany, R. Korff (Passau) and H. Schrader (Magdeburg). No major meetings have taken place since 2008.

38No presentation of APAD (Association pour le développement et le changement social) is necessary here (see the introduction to this thematic issue by P. Lavigne Delville). It should be mentioned for the record, however, that APAD has spawned two other organisational formats, a European PhD summer school for the anthropology of development and social dynamics, which has been held every two years since 1997 and involves eleven European universities7, and the Laboratoire d’études et de recherche sur les dynamiques sociales et le développement local (LASDEL), a social science research institute in Niamey (Niger) and Parakou (Benin), which was founded in 2001 (Olivier de Sardan, 2011).8

  • 9 The main issue here was the Anglophone scientists’ lack of knowledge of French (and not vice versa) (...)

39There has been some overlap between the actors in APAD and EIDOS (N. Long was the keynote speaker at the APAD meeting in Bamako in 1994, and APAD members occasionally attended EIDOS meetings, including T. Bierschenk in Wageningen 1985, J.P. Olivier de Sardan in The Hague 1997 and P.Y. Le Meur in London 2003). Given the close proximity of their perspectives (see, for example, Bierschenk et al., 2000; Lewis and Mosse, 2006, which deal largely with the same issue of development brokers), this relatively frail connection is somewhat surprising, but it can be largely explained by the language boundary between French and English.9

40This overlap between EIDOS and APAD coincided with the evolving relationships between both networks and German development research. T. Bierschenk (who was then working with G. Elwert at the Free University of Berlin after a doctorate at Bielefeld supervised by G. Stauth and H.D. Evers) was a founding member of APAD in 1991 and later its Chairman (président). Another founding member was G. Lachenmann (Berlin/Bielefeld); in a later period, A. Reikat (Frankfurt) and S. Fichtner (Mainz/Bordeaux) were board members, as were P.Y. Le Meur and N. Bako-Arifari when they were based in Germany (Stuttgart-Hohenheim, Mainz). The fourth international APAD conference was held in Germany, at Stuttgart-Hohenheim in 1996.

41These international connections between German researchers in Bielefeld, Berlin and Mainz and EIDOS and APAD were based on elective intellectual affinities and mutual inspirations. These researchers had developed an interest in an actor-centred anthropology of development independently of each other. This invisible college was presented in two influential publications: a thematic issue of the journal Sociologia Ruralis on “Aid and Development” edited by T. Bierschenk and G. Elwert (1988, with contributions by T. Bierschenk, J.L. Amselle, G. Lachenmann and J.P. Olivier de Sardan, to name only the APAD contributors).10 The second publication to be mentioned in this context is Entwicklungshilfe und ihre Folgen: Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen in Afrika (Development Aid and Its Effects. Results of Empirical Research in Africa, Bierschenk and Elwert, 1993), with contributions by the APAD members T. Bierschenk, G. Lachenmann, J.P. Olivier de Sardan and EIDOS members P. Quarles Von Ufford and N. Long, as well as others. The institutional context in which these two publications were produced was a comparative research project in West Africa that G. Elwert and T. Bierschenk carried out together with D. Kohnert, with financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation, first in Bielefeld in 1984 and 1985, and then at the Free University of Berlin.

Anthropology of development on the basis of anthropology in development

42Within the framework of these networks, approaches with a strong focus on practices have been developed that can be described as the hallmark of a specifically European style in the field of anthropology of development. The premises and approaches of this European anthropology of development have been described at various times, and do not need to be recalled in detail here: they include non-normativity, actor and praxis orientation, development as a field of social action constituted by multiple realities and “encounters at the interface” (Long, 1989), openness to new methods (e.g. ethnographic teamwork, cf. Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997) and interdisciplinary orientations (Olivier de Sardan, 2001, 2005; Quarles Van Ufford, 1988; Hobart, 1993b; Lewis and Mosse, 2006; Mosse and Lewis, 2005; Bierschenk, 2007, 2008).

43Consequently, the term “anthropology of development” is more appropriate than “development anthropology”, in the same sense as one can speak of the anthropology of politics, kinship, migration or ethnicity. Anthropology of development means looking at “aidland” (Mosse, 2013a) from an anthropological perspective: that is, from a perspective that takes all the groups involved – experts and bureaucrats, farmers and herders, poor and rich, men and women, etc. – with their respective strategies for action and cultural interpretations of the world equally seriously. The term “development anthropology” should therefore remain reserved for applied approaches: that is, research in which anthropologists contribute directly to the solution of concrete problems formulated by actors in the development world. This corresponds to academic teaching of competencies that can be directly applied in development practice. Academic teaching from the perspective of an anthropology of development, on the other hand, focuses on a theoretically guided reflection of this practice. However, applied and basic anthropology can be combined in the field of development research.

  • 11 In Germany, for example, this applies to T. Bierschenk, H. Drotbohm and R. Rottenburg, among others (...)

44E. Crewe and R. Axelby (2013, 40 ff.) have coined the felicitous term “anthropology of development on the basis of anthropology in development” for this style of research, in which fundamental questions and applied perspectives are reflectively combined. The European style of critical engagement with practice was certainly also shaped by the fact that many of the anthropologists working in APAD and EIDOS had their own practical experience in development organisations, and often kept a foot in the field of practice alongside their academic careers.11

45Initially, this ethnographically-based development research focused on development aid projects, which were conceived as “interventions in ongoing social processes” with principally unpredictable consequences, and “as heterogeneous fields of action” by different strategic groups, each with their own interests, resources and strategies and which, in the course of their implementation, experience multiple processes of selective appropriation, “unpacking” of models and their recoding (Bierschenk and Elwert, 1988, with contribution by T. Bierschenk, K. Crehan and A. von Oppen, Lentz, and J.P. Olivier de Sardan; see also Beck, 1990). The vernacularisation of development institutions – such as the Verbäuerlichung (peasantisation) of a development bank – has also been described from a similar perspective (Beck, 1997). Another focus was the local, mostly contradictory, effects of development aid (Bierschenk et al., 1993).

Since 2000: The anthropology of global social engineering at the centre of the discipline

46From the 1990s onwards, the structures of the development world changed significantly. In short, development policy was transformed into global structural policy under the guiding concepts of good governance and new public management. The “project” as the preferred tool of development policy did not disappear, but it became embedded in or supplemented by so-called “sector approaches”, such as poverty reduction or in the areas of education, health and “human security”, which are often realised through budget support rather than through direct project financing.

47With this change in development policy, the older anthropology of development has been expanding into an ethnographic study of global policies. It is becoming an anthropology of global social engineering (Münster, 2012; Bierschenk, 2014). This production of the world through global social engineering takes place through “travelling models” or “travelling blueprints” (Behrends et al., 2014; Olivier de Sardan et al., 2017). The methodological conclusion to be drawn from such an approach is that all actors in the translation chains need to be considered in research. Anthropology of social engineering is not only about local actors who are the addressees of these blueprints and who adapt and recode them on the ground, as it was in the older anthropology of development. Multinational, state and private development bureaucracies, state apparatuses and private organisations (NGOs) in the “recipient countries”, experts, development brokers and norm entrepreneurs acting in these organisations, as well as the “revenge” by local contexts on the original project design become equally interesting objects of ethnographic exploration (Olivier de Sardan, 2021).

48Against this background, “participation” has become a major buzzword in the development world, so that so-called “participatory approaches”, to which anthropologists lay strong claim, are booming (paradigmatically Chambers, 1994; in Germany, Hess et al., 1998, and Schönhuth, 2004; for an ethnographically based critique, see Spies, 2009). Parallel to this, international and national development agencies have begun to recruit anthropologists on a larger scale. In this context, the job description of the anthropologist in development policy is changing from an expert on local culture to a cultural engineer – an expert who takes culture seriously in order to reconfigure it in a process of “cultural engineering” (see for example Feuerbach, 2011; the notion of cultural engineering is taken from Kunda, 1992; see also the related concept of “religious engineering” in Spies and Schrode, 2021). In development agencies today, there is widespread agreement that policies must be “culturally adapted”, and therefore based on detailed knowledge of the social dynamics in which development policies intervene. For many countries in the Global South, it is mostly anthropology that produces such knowledge.

49Today, therefore, the struggle of development anthropologists for recognition by development agencies that has been fought since the 1970s can be considered to have been won, even though we know little so far about what anthropologists actually do in these agencies. In fact, beyond development, this is true for the entire expanding non-academic labour market for anthropologists. There is a new field of research here that has not yet been taken up by German anthropologists (and not much by their international colleagues): the ethnography of practically active development anthropologists, which would be a kind of anthropological metanalysis of (non-academic) anthropological practice.

50After 1990, against the backdrop of these real-historical developments, but also driven by the reorganisation of the scientific community with the increasing importance of large-scale, multidisciplinary research programmes, German anthropology opened up to the modern world and its problems. Nowadays, a large part of anthropological research is de facto structured by the concept of global social engineering, albeit often only implicitly. At the same time, anthropological research on the Global South remains a particular hallmark of German anthropology, while in many other countries we observe an increasing turn by anthropologists towards their own societies under the notion of “cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986). About 80% of the research funding applications approved by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) between 2000 and 2010 concerned regions outside Europe (Bollig, 2013). A large block of these addressed Africa, just as Africanists still represent the largest block among German anthropologists.

51This turn towards an anthropology of global modernity and social engineering in the German-speaking world can be substantiated by other figures. For example, if we look at the approved DFG funding proposals in the field of anthropology between 2000 and 2013, the following picture emerges: in the period from 2000 to 2005, about half of all approved proposals still had a purely local focus (along the lines of “religion/kinship/myth – among the xyz”). In contrast, only two projects were in the field of development anthropology in a narrow sense (that is, with the term “development” in the title). However, if one defines the term “development” more broadly and includes new fields of research such as the ethnography of global structural policies, then a further 7% of the projects were in this area. In turn, 20% of the projects dealt with globalisation in other dimensions, outside “development” (market, religion, consumption, etc.).

52If we now compare these figures with the period between 2006 and 2010, we first notice that there were no more projects at all with “development” in the title. On the other hand, the share of projects in the broader sense of global structural policy expanded from 7% to 20%, a trend that intensified after 2010: in this most recent period, about a quarter of all approved DFG projects concerned the thematic field of “development”, but without the term appearing in the title. The topic of globalisation in its various facets, including but beyond “development”, is now of interest to about a third of all projects, while the proportion of projects with a purely local focus has fallen to below 20%.

53These figures are only rough approximations. However, they are supported by other observations, such as the cursory evaluation of the panel topics at the conferences of the German Society for Ethnology (DGV). For example, if one leaves out professional policy and methodological issues, only one event (organised by the AGEE) at the DGV conference in Mainz 2013 concerned “development” in the narrower, explicit sense.12 However, if one applies the broader concept of development as advocated here, then almost 40% of all panels referred to it, and another 40% referred to other processes of globalisation. In contrast, only 13% of all panels had a purely local reference.

54If we look at the topics of the two leading anthropological journals in the German-speaking world – Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ZfE) and Sociologus/Journal for Social Anthropology – a similar picture emerges, although it is more pronounced in Sociologus with its “ethno-sociological” tradition than it is in ZfE.13 The key terms in the thematic issues of Sociologus since 2010 have included bureaucracy, urban protest, the Global South, transnational spaces of belonging, femininities in the global economy, globalisation, world society, modernity, global regulations on the protection of cultural property, development, history and social change. The massive level of interest of young anthropologists in “development” becomes even clearer in the topics chosen for Bachelor’s and Master’s degree theses. For many students, interest in development policy is a main motive for taking up studies in anthropology. In the 2010s, an estimated 25% of our graduates in Mainz went into the professional field of development policy.

55We can conclude, in a first step, that the number of projects, texts and workshops by anthropologists that explicitly refer to “development” in their title has decreased since 2000. However, this initially surprising statement is deceptive. If one understands the concept of development in the broad sense of global structural policies and global social engineering, and if one assumes “anthropology of development” instead of (applied) “development anthropology” in a narrow sense, then we are, in fact, dealing with a process of differentiation and dissolution of boundaries. Alongside the differentiation of development policy, particular global policies are now being researched instead of a uniform object called “development”: they include agricultural and environmental policies (Münster and Münster, 2012; Weisser et al., 2013); education policies (Fichtner, 2012); immigration policies (Drotbohm, 2011); gender policies (Feuerbach, 2011); health policies (Hardon and Dilger, 2011; Kroeker, 2012; Park, 2012); children’s policies (Alber, 2012; Fay, 2019); cultural policies (Pelican, 2010; Röschenthaler and Diawara, 2011); legal policies (Eckert et al., 2012; Kolloch, 2021); resource policies (Hoinathy and Behrends, 2014); security policies (Kirsch and Grätz, 2010; Beek, 2017; Göpfert, 2020); administrative and organisational policies (Rottenburg, 2009; Hüsken, 2006; Werthmann and Schmitt, 2008; Bierschenk et al., 2014). German anthropologists remain primarily interested in the local effects of these policies in the Global South, and much less to date in other stations of these translation chains.

56At the same time, the anthropology of development has also become unbounded: it is no longer a particular subfield of anthropology, but has arrived at the core of the discipline, so to speak, where it defines a research perspective within the anthropology of the global.

Conclusions

57In the post-Second World War period, most anthropologists in Germany (or at least those who dominated the professional association in their capacity as professional chair holders) adopted a “don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole” stance with regard to “development”. When this initially fierce resistance finally lost steam in the 1980s, “development anthropology” was gradually accepted as a sub-field of anthropology; the change of generations, but above all dynamics from outside the discipline and from outside Germany were decisive for this. Today, a large number of German anthropologists work in the field of an anthropology of development without necessarily calling it that. They pursue an anthropology of global social engineering.

58In this process, the boundaries between the anthropology of development and the sociology of development, which were still the subject of heated debate in the 1980s and 1990s, are increasingly dissolving. Development sociology emerged in the 1950s as a kind of sociology of the rest of the world: that is, of “developing countries”. This concept sees development sociologists as regional experts who are supposed to be knowledgeable about “their” region in as many sub-areas as possible at the same time, while for the study of the societies of the Global North, sociologists in the German Society for Sociology (DGS) are distributed over 35 different thematic sections. The sociology of development subsequently oscillated between this original definition in terms of a particular object (developing countries) and the analysis of global development processes spanning South and North. The full-scale adoption of the latter perspective would, however, also require the mainstream of sociology to detach itself from its still narrow perspective on the Global North, and adopt a globally comparative perspective (Schrader, 2010; Neubert, 2020). From this standpoint, not only does the separation of a sociology of development from the rest of sociology no longer make sense, but the boundary between sociology and anthropology also becomes questionable. As far-sightedly recognised by W.E. Mühlmann and A. Bergstraesser in the 1950s and 1960s, E.W. Müller and G. Grohs in the 1970s and H.D. Evers, G. Elwert and colleagues since the 1980s, this boundary can at best still be justified in terms of research funding strategies, but increasingly less so in terms of epistemology or subject matter. But that would be another story.

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Notes

1 This is a shortened version of T. Bierschenk (2021, forthcoming), which contains more references and sources than can be given here, in particular German ones. For critical and productive comments on previous versions of this text, which is as much an eyewitness account as a piece of research, I am grateful to Sophie Andreetta, Anna Maria Brandstetter, Franziska Fay, Reinhart Kößler, Andreas Mehler, Udo Mischek, Dieter Neubert, Dieter Oberndörfer, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Emmanuelle Piccoli and Michael Schönhuth.

2 www.germananthrooplogy.de (last access 18 September 2021)

3 In 1991 it was also legally registered as independent association (eingetragener Verein); https://www.ag-entwicklungsethnologie.de/ (last access 18 September 2021); personal communication M. Schönhuth, April 2014.

4 https://www.ag-entwicklungsethnologie.de/publikationen/ (last access 18 September 2021)

5 https://www.zeitschrift-peripherie.de/ (last access 18 September 2021)

6 https://soziologie.de/sektionen/entwicklungssoziologie-und-sozialanthropologie/portrait (last access 18 September 2021)

7 https://download.uni-mainz.de/fb07-ifeas/EDS/01.html (last access 18 September 2021)

8 https://download.uni-mainz.de/fb07-ifeas/EDS/01.html (last access 18 September 2021); https://www.lasdel.net/ (last access 18 September 2021).

9 The main issue here was the Anglophone scientists’ lack of knowledge of French (and not vice versa). The political economy of scientific languages is usually greatly underestimated by native English speakers.

10 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14679523/1988/28/2-3 (last access 18 September 2021)

11 In Germany, for example, this applies to T. Bierschenk, H. Drotbohm and R. Rottenburg, among others, and in the UK to D. Mosse, all of whom moved to an academic career after more or less lengthy professional activities in the development world. In addition, there are many anthropologists in Germany who also write expert reports for development policy institutions or are responsible for small development projects on the side, even though this may not always appear on their CVs…

12 http://tagung2013.dgv-net.de/ (last access 18 September 2021)

13 https://www.dgska.de/zeitschrift-fuer-ethnologie/ (last access 18 September 2021); https://elibrary.duncker-humblot.com/zeitschriften/id/34/ (last access 18 September 2021).

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Thomas Bierschenk

Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany; biersche[at]uni-mainz.de

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