Culture and Development: Taking Culture Seriously in Development for Andean Indigenous People

Abstract

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which ‘culturally appropriate development’ is thought and practiced in the Andes.