edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton

September 2004

"Culture and Public Action" includes case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which aim to examine the role of culture in arts and heritage policy, community-based development, ethnic conflict, famine relief, gender discrimination, and HIV-AIDS interventions. The editors conclude by proposing how a "cultural lens" can better inform future research and public policy on development. This book is written for anyone concerned with the relationship between culture and economics, and the design and implementation of development policy.

Contributors (In order of chapters in the book):
Amartya Sen, Arjun Appadurai, Mary Douglas, Marco Verweij, Timur Kuran, Arjo Klamer, Lourdes Arizpe, Sabina Alkire, Anita Abraham, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Monica Das Gupta, Carol Jenkins, Fernando Calderon, Alicia Szmuckler, Simon Harragin, Shelton Davis, Vijayendra Rao, and Michael Walton.

From the Introduction
Much of the discussion on the role of culture in Development has either seen it as a primordial trap, a mystical haze, or a source of hegemonic power. These have not proved very useful as guides for public action. In recent years, however, Development thinking has arrived at an interesting crossroads. In the academic world, economists are grappling with models of how social and cultural factors shape human behavior, while academic anthropologists, having grappled with these questions for a long time, are seeing the need to move beyond critique towards a more "facilitatory" anthropology (Sillitoe, 1998).Similarly, in the world of policy, culture is increasingly being viewed as a commonplace, malleable fact of life that matters as much as economics or politics to the process of development. But there remains some confusion about how it matters.

In this introductory essay, [the authors] draw on the contributions in this volume to examine some of thepositive and normative implications of taking culture on-board in improving how publicaction alleviates poverty and reduces inequality in the world's less affluent countries. [They] begin with two case-studies to place [their] arguments in context, go on to review past workon the subject, in the world of both thought and action, and then distill the contributions in this book towards a conceptual and practical overview of the role of culture in reproducing or alleviating poverty.

[They] end the chapter with some thoughts on the normative implications of this - arguing that it suggests a shift from the individually based principle of "equality of opportunity" to a group-based principle that [they] call "equality of agency." [The authors] note that the book is primarily concerned with poverty and inequality, and some important topics at the intersection of culture and Development are not addressed in detail. Globalization is one of them, and the relationship between culture and economic growth is another one. Both, [they] feel, have been adequately treated elsewhere.

Click here for more information and to download a 66-page sample chapter from the book.

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