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Learning about Power: Development and Marginality in an Adult Literacy Center for Farm Workers in Zimbabwe
Author(s) -
Rutherford Blair,
Nyamuda Rinse
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2000.27.4.839
Subject(s) - literacy , ethnography , power (physics) , sociology , gender studies , postcolonialism (international relations) , gender and development , development studies , center (category theory) , farm workers , race (biology) , economic growth , social change , anthropology , geography , economics , social transformation , pedagogy , physics , chemistry , crystallography , quantum mechanics , agriculture , archaeology
In this article, we critically examine the rise and fall of an adult literacy center that we helped establish for farm workers during the course offieldwork on a commercial farm in Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe. We raise questions about the emerging conventional wisdom in the anthropology of development and postcoloniality more broadly that characterizes development primarily as a mechanism to impose Western agendas and control targeted peoples. Our tale of the "Night School" suggests that anthropologists and social scientists need to pay attention to the power relations of development and the varied hierarchies and arrangements "in the margins" of development that cross‐cut wider interventions and relations of rule. [development, discourse, power, Zimbabwe, postcolonialism, gender, race, ethnography]