Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the long-term implications, resonance, and reverberation of international development interventions. Going beyond projects’ official blueprints and stated objectives, scholars and development practitioners alike increasingly approach such interventions as living, complex, and non-linear processes that can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. In this article, I offer a conceptual guide—reinforced by methodological suggestions—for studying the representational and material ‘afterlives’ of development interventions in the global South, which overflow projects’ official timelines and life cycles. Inspired by phenomenological ideas and by the ‘material turn’ in anthropology, as well as by work on temporality and spatiality, I recognize target populations as repositories of non-hegemonic knowledge, skill, and agency, who creatively re-appropriate development’s remains and legacies. While such local perspectives may have been kept under relative control throughout the project itself, they come to the fore upon the project’s termination, as formal scripts loosen their grip. The result is a cumulative, site-specific, and grassroots-based ethnographical approach aimed at studying post-intervention sites in their totality, with emphasis on the intertwinement of the palimpsest-like multilayers of interventions.

摘要

近年来，人们对国际发展干预的长期影响、共鸣和反响越来越感兴趣。超越项目的官方蓝图和既定目标，学者和发展从业者越来越多地采取干预措施，如生活、复杂和非线性过程，这些过程可能会产生深远和意想不到的后果。在这篇文章中，我提供了一个概念指南——通过方法论建议得到加强——用于研究全球南方发展干预措施的代表性和物质“来世”，这超出了项目的官方时间表和生命周期。受现象学思想和人类学中的“物质转向”以及时间和空间性工作的启发，我将目标人群视为非霸权知识的宝库，技能和机构，他们创造性地重新调整发展的遗骸和遗产。尽管在整个项目本身中，这种本地观点可能一直处于相对控制之下，但随着正式脚本的松动，它们在项目终止时脱颖而出。结果是一种累积的、特定于站点的和基于草根的民族志方法，旨在全面研究干预后的站点，重点是像翻版一样的多层干预的交织。