Incorporating Huli: Lessons from the Hides Licence Area
Laurence Richard Goldman · ANU Press eBooks · 2007
According to Stirrat (2000: 31), the practical or pragmatic impact of reports written by anthropologists working as development consultants 'is in many ways irrelevant' because such reports are assessed on aesthetic criteria generated by the culture of modernity and their structure is pre-ordained by the interests of the client who commissions them.If the point is to attain 'closure' rather than 'dialogue' (Henton 2000: 586), then the author of such reports may come to feel that they are being used much as a drunk uses a lamp-post -for support rather than illumination.For their part, clients often suspect that the consultant anthropologist is more interested in pickling and preserving 'cultures' than in addressing the practical problems of 'development'.The result for both parties may be a portrait of the consultant as 'someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time' (Stirrat 2000: 44).Reticent to adopt the mantle of the social engineer, the anthropologist falls back on the strategy of telling developers or development agencies what they already know or can work out for themselves.