(Assignment 3) Corruption and Development - Mrinalini Badrinarayanan

1.     If society is not ‘really’ a system, nor anything approaching a system, it is still possible to play with the idea of using terms that vaguely suggest that this is the case. (de Sardan 2005, 49)

2.     The gap between what society is and what we may consider it to be leaves room for a nice semblance of precision.  (de Sardan 2005, 49)

3.     Viewed in the somewhat linear perspective of the ‘history of ideas’, Western conceptions of Africa – on the topic of rationality – passed through four stages: following an initial stage denying that Africans had any kind of rationality whatsoever, there was a second phase opposing African ‘religious’ rationalities to Western economic rationalities.  (de Sardan 2005, 54)

4.     This was followed by the discovery of technical and economic rationalities within the African peasantry, before the fourth and current phase of multirationality was reached. (de Sardan 2005, 54)

5.     On one hand, a tempered optimism gives rise to a kind of history of ideas in which anthropology of development is seen as a progressive advance, albeit chaotic and uncertain, towards an increased awareness of the complexity of social phenomena. (de Sardan 2005, 55)

6.     On the other, a disillusioned relativism observes the constant need to restage old battles which were supposed to have been won, and finds it deplorable that the pet exercise of the world of development and of research seems to be a constant reinvention of the wheel. (de Sardan 2005, 55)

7.     After all, this kind of tension is probably inherent in the assessment of social science, and might just be the shape assumed by a combination of the ‘pessimism of reason and the optimism of will’, evoked by Gramsci. (de Sardan 2005, 55)

8.     Own sentence: The social sciences have borrowed vocabularies from other disciplines over time, and these both reflect and reinforce ways of thinking (about Africa). 

Works Cited

de Sardan, Olivier. "Anthropology, Sociology, Africa and Development: A Brief Historical overview." In Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Social Change, by Olivier de Sardan, 42-57. London: Zed Books, 2005.