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Why be Different? Teaching Development and Gendered Diversity

Gender and Practice: Insights from the Field

ISBN: 978-1-83867-384-0, eISBN: 978-1-83867-383-3

Publication date: 30 September 2019

Abstract

Teaching about development contains a basic contradiction. The issues are even more stark when we consider that gender disruptions are always a part of the discontinuities in any development process. Students and text books often assume that women are being suppressed and it is a task of development workers to “free” women from “traditional” oppression.

Here the author explores some of the contradictions inevitably part of Development Anthropology. On the one hand, the development worker’s etic vision of problems to be solved by “development” controls discussion in the classroom and the transfer of resources to the field. On the other hand, ordinary villagers’ or urbanites’ emic vision of what is happening in the socio-­cultural system as it faces pressures to “develop” hold sway in field contexts, as well as in their classroom analysis. The author needs to bring the realities of field settings into the pedagogical setting.

Application and pedagogy tend to interpenetrate; there is no clear boundary. Relying on discussions of the pedagogical problems, the author explores some of the discontinuities to be found in a gendered vision of development. The author stresses the problems highlighted by the educational environment in which students frequently first encounter these issues. The ultimate goal of this study is to make clear that teaching about or engaging in development do not have sharp boundaries and cannot be accomplished within the confines of a value-free paradigm. Every decision in this area involves a meeting of emic and etic visions and the value systems that arise from them.

Keywords

Citation

Segal, E.S. (2019), "Why be Different? Teaching Development and Gendered Diversity", Demos, V., Segal, M.T. and Kelly, K. (Ed.) Gender and Practice: Insights from the Field (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 27), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620190000027004

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited