Anthropology of Development: Theory and Practice

Why do development projects succeed or fail? This course examines how to design a human-centered development project using anthropological theory and methods. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from the vantage in North Africa, students learn the relevance of kinship, power, religion, and ontologies. Students will also work with local organizations in the High Atlas Mountains as a way to study development in practice.