The Rationale of Development Anthropology

The controversy between the ‘academic’ and ‘applied’ parameters of anthropology, has divided the practitioners of anthropology since the discipline became a university science in the last decades of the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anthropology has primarily been concerned with the study of the nature, content, and transformation of social phenomena in general. There is hence, an obvious contradiction between the generality of the subject-matter, and concern with scientific objectivity on the one hand; and the biases inherent within the applicability of the parameters of anthropology to concrete given situations, and the obligation to compensate for the debt owed to the sources that make the study possible, on the other.