Muneera Salem-Murdock - Anthropology And Development In North Africa And The Middle East

Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East

MONOGRAPHS IN DEVELOPMENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Under the General Editorship of DAVID W. BROKENSHA MICHAEL M HOROWITZ and THAYER SCUDDER

Sponsored by the Institute for Development Anthropology

Anthropology and Rural Development in West Africa, edited by Michael M Horowitz and Thomas M. Painter

Lands at Risk in the Third World: Local-Level Perspectives, edited by Peter D. Little and Michael M Horowitz, with A. Endre Nyerges

Anthropology of Development and Change in East Africa , edited by David W. Brokensha and Peter D. Little

Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East, edited by Muneera Salem-Murdock arid Michael M Horowitz, with Monica Sella

African River Basin Development, Thayer Scudder (forthcoming)

Edited By
Muneera Salem-Murdock
and Michael M Horowitz ,
with Monica Sella

First published 1990 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1990 by the Institute for Development Anthropology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthropology and development in North Africa and the Middle East/
edited by Muneera Salem-Murdock and Michael M Horowitz, with Monica
Sella.
p. cm.(Monographs in development anthropology)
ISBN 0-8133-7688-2
1. Applied anthropologyAfrica, North. 2. Applied anthropology
Middle East. 3. Rural developmentAfrica, North. 4. Rural
developmentMiddle East. 5. Africa, NorthEconomic conditions.
6. Middle EastEconomic conditions. I. Salem-Murdock, Muneera.
II. Horowitz, Michael M, 1933 . III. Sella, Monica.
IV. Series.
GN397.7.A357A58 1990
307.14120961dc20 90-32325
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01287-8 (hbk)

We are grateful for the assistance of IDA staff members, present and past, who spent many days in editing the manuscript. Two former senior research assistants provided careful critical readings of many of the papers submitted for the book: A. Endre Nyerges, now of the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, and Douglas Gritzinger. The IDA editorial staff, Sylvia Huntley Horowitz and Vivian Carlip, assisted by Kim Munson and Vera Beers-Tyler, copyedited the entire manuscript, proofread the text, and guided its transformation into copy suitable for computergenerated typesetting.

We wish especially to thank our contributors, who took time from their busy schedules to respond to numerous revisions and requests for additional information and clarifications. They have been graciously patient in seeing this book through to completion.

Muneera Salem-Murdock
Michael M Horowitz
Monica Sella

Muneera Salem-Murdock , Michael M Horowitz , and Monica Sella

The first two regionally based monographs in this series on anthropological perspectives on rural development and change focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Black Africa received the vast bulk of development anthropology attention after 1973 when the United States Congress amended the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and initiated a ten-year period during which projects at least rhetorically invoking participatory rural development tended to replace top-down capital-intensive interventions, creating a niche for anthropology among the development professions. Anthropologists became component members of design and evaluation teams, offering their insights on a broad variety of development interventions. In the course of this decade, anthropologists made important, even fundamental contributions to the understanding of involuntary relocation, colonization of new lands, and resettlement; the operation of the "informal" sector; the relevance within households and communities of socioeconomic differentiationincluding age, class, ethnicity, and genderin rural production, exchange, and consumption; the diversification of rural production systems and the role of wage labor migration in rural economies; the nature of urbanization and urban social organization; the structure of user associations in the distribution and control of water; the development potential of river basins; on- and off-farm rural employment generation; marketing and rural-urban linkages; the significance of open-range access in pastoral production systems on communal lands, and common property management, especially in "fragile" lands; the relevance of local organization to recurrent costs and debt repayment; natural resource management and afforestation; the nature of elites (international, national, regional, and local, governmental, corporate, military, and religious); and a host of other areas.

Anthropologists were invited into the arena of Third World development when the international development agenda favored local-level participatory interventions. They have remained active in development through recent changes that shifted the agenda to an interest in "policy-based financial assistance," including concern for exchange rates, balances of trade and payments, debt service, adjustment and structural readjustment, decreases in public-sector expenditures, privatization, trade liberalization, and programmatic rather than project funding.

As the utility of social science perspectives for understanding local communities in Africa has come to be well-established, anthropologists' contribution to the development process in other areas of the world has grown considerablyhence this volume on North Africa and the Middle East.

Yet high per capita GNP, oil, industry, wage labor migrants, and sizeable cities notwithstanding, large numbers of Middle Eastern and North African peoples remain rural and, with few exceptions, rural and agricultural development in the region since the end of colonization has been unimpressive. In those countries whose economies are primarily agricultural, such as Yemen, the Sudan, Somalia, Morocco, and Mauritania, rural income levels have for the most part remained constant or have deteriorated, and the economic gaps between their rural and urban populations and between their national economies and those of the northern industrial countries (often former colonial powers) remain large (World Bank 1989:17).