The Existential Status of the Pakistani Farmer: Studying Official Constructions of Social Reality
Dove, Michael R. 1994.The Existential Status of the Pakistani Farmer: Studying Official Constructions of Social Reality. Ethnology, 33, (4), 331-351
22 Pages Posted: 10 Feb 2014
Date Written: 1994
Abstract
A great deal of work in development studies has documented how the process of development tends to make the poor and their poverty "invisible"; and in anthropology, there have been many studies of the importance of the construction and contesting of social categories. Where the current study will attempt to add to this picture is in showing how managers of development projects affirm or deny categories of appropriate development subjects, and how they represent the contest over these affirmations and denials not as a contest over power but as a contest over the performance of development participants and the validity of development designs. We know that it is difficult for governments to deliver services to small farmers; the current study will attempt to show how this difficulty is misrepresented as a question of small farmer status or behavior and how, in this guise, it dominates development discourse.
Keywords: development subject, development discourse, social forestry, community forestry, Pakistan
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