4 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 29 NO 2, APRIL 2013 Bengt G. Karlsson The author is Associate Professor at Stockholm University. His work concerns mainly indigenous peoples issues in India and questions relating to the politics of nature and identity. His most recent book is Unruly hills: A political ecology of India’s northeast (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). His email is beppe.karlsson@socant.su.se. The anthropology of development seems increasingly to be moving beyond critique and condemnation towards a more dispassionate approach to development as a ‘social phenomenon’ (de Sardan 2005). The recent work of David Mosse is a good example (Mosse 2005, 2011; Mosse & Lewis 2005, Lewis & Mosse 2006). I am presently engaged in a study of development expatriates that can be placed within this emerging field; a project exploring the work and aspirations of the nomadic elite group of interna- tional aid professionals that move from place to place with the aim of improving the lives of others. 1 In this paper the focus is on what aid workers spend most of their time doing, that is; writing. To be sure, this is also what anthropologists are said to be doing. As I argue, there are good reasons to look closer at the (voluminous) textual production within development. Anthropologists have done it before. For example, James Ferguson draws extensively on a critical reading of World Bank and other project documents in The anti-politics machine (1994), a pioneering study of the development industry. My interest here, however, is different. What concerns me is the rationale and modality of development writing. How are these texts being made and circulated? Why or what is the overall purpose of this massive generation of written documents? These are some of the questions that I raise in this exploratory paper. I will discuss development texts in a generic sense and hence dodge the more subtle issues relating to different types of texts and their respec- tive style. I have reasons to return to such issues in later publications. Textual practices In Writing culture (1986), James Clifford famously points to the lack of concern with the anthropological practice of writing and the making of texts, despite the fact that writing is ‘central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter’ (ibid: 2). In Writing culture and a number of other related studies (notably Said 1978; Fabian 1983) that have critically engaged with how anthropolo- gists represent or construct others, textual practices have figured prominently. Yet when anthropologists have ventured into the field of development, they seem to have failed to grasp that this move also implies entering a different literary universe. Being able to write (and read) development is not only a critical skill for the aspiring aid professional, but more importantly, to engage with the textual production in the aid industry is a critical vantage point in studying the world and work of development professionals. Legal anthropologist Annelise Riles describes how her fieldwork in Fiji on international development networks – where she, like her informants, ended up spending most of her time writing funding proposals and drafting docu- ments – significantly altered her ways of engaging with texts. She writes, …, I initially experienced no sense of discontinuity between work in the field and the academy. Slowly, however, I began to notice my colleagues’ puzzled reactions to my prose; to the way I took too much care in matters of procedure and too little in matters of substance; to my excessive interest in punctuation and formatting when I read their drafts. Without ever realizing it, I had been assimilated into the patterned quality of Network communication, … (2000: 17). Producing documents in the development networks, Riles argues further, was all about the ‘production pro- cess’, the language and what eventually would come out of it (ibid). In a similar fashion, I will point to some of the key characteristics of textual practices in the world of devel- opment. With this I do not primarily think of the much discussed circulation of key terms in development like sustainability, empowerment or accountability, but rather the more structural and enduring aspects of writing devel- opment. Clifford (1986: 6) points to six ways in which ethnographic writing is determined and I will do the same Writing development Fig. 1. A collage of development documents. BENGT G. KARLSSON