COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: Role of Biological and Social-cultural Anthropology

 

‘Applying Anthropological Knowledge for the Development of People’

Sequence of the Reading: 

Introduction - Definition and perspectives of the term Community - Community Development Process - Importance of Social Capital - Role of anthropology in community development (bio-cultural perspective) - Anthropology in Public Health - Contribution of Anthropology in Public Health Policy Development - Case Studies - Essential features of community development -  Theories in community development - Steps in Community Development - Requirements and Judgement - Concluding remarks - References

“Using community perception and decision to help or empower them to develop their own self ”

Introduction :

Anthropology has undergone significant theoretical and pragmatic changes over the past half-century. As a discipline, anthropology has been criticized for its role in imperial conquest. During colonial times, anthropologists often accompanied colonial explorers and military in order to facilitate their work, this is often referred to as 'the handmaiden era' in the history of anthropological development. It is said that in this role, anthropologists gained the trust of natives using their linguistic proficiency and cultural awareness in order to assist the colonial state in the implementation of policies that ultimately led to further oppression and disempowerment (Pels, 2011).

Such critiques, among others, have led to a significant redirection of anthropological thought and theory (Lewis,1998). Biological anthropology and Social-cultural anthropology have turned towards a more critical, reflexive and holistic approach since that time. This 'reconstruction' of anthropology has resulted in an increase in criticism of those structures that had previously been assumed as 'right' and inherently 'good'. Scheper-Hughes writes about how social scientists have typically been blind to the unequal power relationships that have been harmful to informants. She calls for anthropologists to take a critical stance against such structural and institutional violence (Nancy, 2020).

Holism has also become an important hallmark of modern ethnography. Even the most basic concept of classic anthropology, culture has been rethought: "the modern view of culture is to stress the importance of always seeing it within its particular context that “culture cannot and should never be considered in a vacuum” (Helman,2015)

There is no absolute way of how to develop any community. The process of community development bases on different aspects of a society. The context and situation matters the most while planning for any community development program. Anthropologists are closely linked with people and their developmental activity in respect to various biological and socio-cultural dimensions. Before moving towards the contribution of anthropology towards human development, it is important to understand certain definitions related to this area which will help to understand the process of development in a better way.    

Community :

The term community has different expressions. Generally it is a set of group of people who have a common geographical space, territory and boundary, shares common goal, common interests, values and ideas.  The term community has two perspectives based on place and Interest. Where,

◦         Common geographical territory reflects upon the place based approach and

◦         When the members of a group shares common sharing and psychological ties and mutual aids, it reflects upon the interest based approach.

Community Development Process :

For a long time anthropologists were just being concerned with small scaled little,  rural or urban communities, where the goals of community development can be seen through 4 lenses. Those are –

1.      When the researcher is acting as the agent or their goals matters.

2.      When the researcher’s assessment of the community goals matters.

3.      When the community’s understanding of it’s own goals matters. And

4.      When the need of the community matters the most.

One of definition of community development states that community development helps in reviving critical agencies in times of crisis, especially when the state policy initiatives, economic initiatives  and civil society initiatives fails. Community development refers to both the process and outcome of the process. Where Process in community development is the involvement with the people in decision making to resolve a problem and Outcome is the product of that process. Here it is also important to mention that,

ü   Community development enables citizens to address the problem by group decision making in respect to their social, economic, cultural and environmental context. And  

ü   Community development is also appeals to be as a outcome when situation improves.

Social Capital and its importance :

Social capital refers to the ability of the residents to organize and mobilize their resources for accomplishment of consensual defined roles using the resources which are embedded in social relation for cooperation and collaboration. It is divided into 2 types, such as –

Bonding Capital , which is a set of relationship within a same group of community or same ethnicity.  And

Bridging Capital which is a set of inter community relationship which refers to the relationship among 2 or more communities. 

There are 4 kinds of social capital, those are –

1.      Human resource capital which includes the labour supply, people’s skills, abilities, talents, interests and experiences.  

2.      Physical capital, includes infrastructure, land , area etc.

3.      Financial capital, includes loan, NGOs, banks etc. and

4.      Environmental capital, which includes natural resources, common social resources etc.

All these social capitals are related to the capacity building of any community. Enhancement among these capitals leads to the Social capacity building of any particular community. Now it is necessary to look into the essential features that are included in any developmental process.

Role of anthropology in community development (bio-cultural perspective) :

Anthropology and community development are mainly linked through the thread of public health and medical perspective. Where public health policies, nutrition and epidemiology are mainly dealt by the physical anthropologists, medical anthropology is more inclined to the social and cultural dimension of any particular community. Anthropologists with their bio-cultural understanding have been interested in medical and nutrition-health practices for many decades. However, medical anthropology, epidemiology and public health and nutritional anthropology, as some of the distinct subfields are relative newcomer in the world of academia. The identification of the field of medical anthropology is generally attributed to William Caudill in his paper from 1953 entitled "Applied Anthropology in Medicine" (McElroy,1996). Since that time Medical Anthropology has established a degree of independence from its parent discipline of social and cultural anthropology. Despite this autonomy, medical anthropology's disciplinary evolution has been greatly affected by the changes in social as well as biological anthropology.

Anthropology in Public Health :

Hans Baer defines critical medical anthropology as that which "aspires to merge theory and praxis in a desire to promote experiential health as opposed to the functional health associated with contemporary political economics around the world" . Since the emergence of critically applied medical anthropology, several anthropologists have brought this brand of anthropological enquiry to the world of public health policy.

This is not to say that medical anthropology is new to public health. Anthropologists have been involved in public health for many years. However, prior to Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA), many medical anthropologists played the role of 'cultural brokers'. They were often involved in mediating between populations and policy makers in much the same way in which medical anthropologists mediated between clinician and patient, or social anthropologists between colonizer and colonized. Scholars often weaken their contributions to an understanding of infectious diseases by making "immodest claims of causality." These claims are immodest because they are wrong or misleading. They are immodest because they distract attention from the modest interventions that could treat and often enough cure people. And they are immodest because they distract attention from the preventable social disorder that exacerbates biological disorder.

Clearly, there was a need for the anthropology of public health to adopt a similar perspective to that of critical medical anthropology. Van Willigen defines a dichotomy between 'anthropology in policy' and 'anthropology of policy'. This semantic technicality differentiates between anthropologists who assist policy makers (reminiscent of clinically applied anthropology) and those who critically appraise the work of policy makers and their policies' unintended negative effects upon the target population. Parker and Harper describe the anthropology of public health as that "which remains passionately concerned about ill-health and deprivation and the need for public policy; but also remains committed to a rigorous and critical analytical perspective". With its new critical and reflexive perspective, anthropology has a lot to contribute to the development of health policy. The field of public health  and more generally, policy development requires research contributions from a multitude of disciplines. Williams states that "a multidisciplinary approach could best address the public health needs of a population" (Williams, 2001).

Public health's primary concern is to improve the health of a population. This broad scope approach has brought epidemiology to be the most influential discipline in health policy because by using methodical sampling methods one can theoretically extrapolate conclusions about the state of health of entire populations. Turnock states that there are "five basic sciences of public health: epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental science, management sciences and behavioural sciences".

 

Contribution of Anthropology in Public Health Policy Development :

“The discipline, anthropology concentrates on what is actually happening and looks to 'the root' of where things come from”

-  John Porter

The first and foremost contribution of the anthropologists in the field of public health and policy making is the ‘Integrated Perspective of Culture’. When striving to understand disease etiology among a given population, public health specialists and human ecologists often use a 'multifactorial model of disease' (Curnow and Smith, 1975). This is a model in which there are a number of distinct factors that are thought to contribute to disease in the population. Culture is one of these factors, alongside many others, including: genetics, environment and so forth. The factorial model seems consistent with earlier medical anthropological research, relating to the method of the clinically applied anthropologist. By involving anthropologists on a clinical level it is possible to reduce the impact of the culture 'factor' on disease prevalence.

Then comes the implication of the perspective of ‘Holism’. The new medical anthropology's "inclusion of 'the whole'" (Porter,2006) is another important tool that has the potential to be of great use in policy development. Anthropology is involved in seeing the entire situation in a given community. This involves participant observation in order to capture the smallest details in the events of individuals' lives. This also involves study of the macro-level forces and structures that are acting on people that cause them to behave the way they do. It is important to utilize a holistic approach to illness in order to identify all pertinent factors that contribute to a given pandemic.

The third distinguishing features of the anthropology is its tendency to be critical especially of the hegemonic structure of biomedicine. Critical Perspective is unique to the anthropology making it a valuable contributor to public health practice is its freedom from the theories and views of western biomedicine. Biomedicine, epidemiology and the other contributing sciences are inherently reductionist and hence have a very narrow scope in which to view the phenomenon of illness or epidemic. Everything is expected to have an explanation grounded in biology or 'science'.

The fourth significant contribution that anthropology makes to the development of public health policy is its qualitative approach to data collection. This is also makes unique to anthropology among all of the sciences that inform public health policy. The qualitative methodology of ethnography separates anthropology from all of the natural sciences and many of the social sciences. Porter explains the importance of qualitative ethnographic research in policy development through the use of the statistical concept of the outlier. He states that as an epidemiologist, outliers skew data in ways that don't seem to make sense. Therefore oftentimes epidemiologists will seek for rational, explainable reasons to exclude outliers from datasets. He goes on to explain that it is important to look "for ways of supporting the outlier to speak". He has found that narratives derived through qualitative anthropological research methodologies allow him to discover this voice - the voice of "those who are normally unheard in the current international political climate".

Case Studies :

When we talk about planning a policy or program and we ultimately have to take it to the purpose of community, there should be an acceptance of the policy or program by the community members, which we have to take into consideration. So after identification of the problem, we plan a policy and implement that into community level, it has to be accepted by the members in general. Like it took a longer time for people to accept the polio, folate supplementation and other vaccination programs. When we talk of milk supplement under the nutrition policy, when tribal communities, specially the Andamanese, they were given the milk packets, it was not accepted by them, they stand walls out of those milk packets, they build houses over those packages. So the acceptance by the community members of any program or policy to be successful, is foremost importance to take into consideration.

Involvement of the community members is another essential consideration, unless and until the members of the concerned community is involved in any of the national or local policies, all policies are going to fail in some or larger extent. For example, in the state of Punjab, a huge prevalence of stroke is there. People in spite taking into consideration the public health facilities or the help from the private health centres who are very active there, they don not turn to those public health facilities or the private sectors. They go to the alternative  traditional or native methods, they go for indigenous medicinal system and even to some extent sorcery. So by the time when this alternative system is used for long time, there is a crucial time period of the treatment of the strokes, within 4 to 5 hours of attack, if the person is taken to the hospital, specific measures are being taken,  which can control the amount of injury to the brain and heart to a larger extent. But when they switch on to the alternative medicine system, that crucial time period of treatment is lost and the patient is never able to recover. So involvement of people in certain programme and policies specifically those are life threatening are really important.

In the north east of state of Assam, there is a very common tradition of consuming salt-tea in form of black tea, for this reason lot of cases of haemorrhagic stroke is found to be informed . In case of this kind of stroke, immediately the patient need to a CT scan to be done rather than clot dissolving medication but this facility are not available there, even it is available somehow, people are unaware of it. Even the clinicians themselves are unaware of this facilities. So apart from looking into all these 3 factors, we also have to look into the fact that involvement of the people in controlling the risk factor is also important.

So 3 aspects is important while developing any community, that is IEC - Information, Education and Communication. These activities should be taken up rigorously among the communities, so that members get involved in the implementation of programmes and policies. IEC activities have to be developed  and taken up seriously by the different stake holders at the community level. One side have to be from community who will receive that activity and the other side will be the providers like health care workers like Asha members, INM members and public policy makers. So in order to successful any program there has to be a synchronization between the community members and the providers.      

Essential features of community development :

Essential features of the anthropological way of developing any community includes the values and beliefs of why do we believe that a community has the capability to develop their own selves ?

1.      People have all the rights in decision making

2.      People have all the rights to know all the decision taken by the government for them

3.      People can initiate dialogue with the initiators .

4.      People can be the owner

5.      People are independent and have potential to think and work for their own.

Theories  in community development :

There are 8 anthropological theories which can be used to back up the operationalization of the community development process. Although each of them has their own advantages, disadvantages and critiques, they can be followed in respect to the context of any program. These theories are  –

1.      Communicative action; 2.      Rational choice theory; 3.      Structuration theory;  and 4.      Agency theory;

5.      Functionalism ; 6.      Structural-functionalism; 7.      Conflict theory; 8.      Symbolic interactionism;

 

Steps in Community Development Process :

Community development includes 5 basic steps –

Organising; Visioning; Planning; Implementation and Evaluation.

With a more elaborative manner, the steps includes are -  

ü  Establishing an organizing group

ü  Creating a mission statement

ü  Identifying community stakeholders

ü  Collecting and analysing information

ü  Developing an efficient communication process

ü  Expanding the organization

ü  Creating a vision statement

ü  Creating comprehensive strategic plans

ü  Identify leadership position and management team

ü  Implement the plans

ü  Review and evaluate the planning outcome

ü  Celebrate the success of the plan

ü  Create goals and plans whenever needed.

Requirements and Judgement :

To develop any particular community in respect to their social-cultural or biological dimension, both requirements for developing and organizing the plan and program and appraising values for judgment of the program and implications is important to take care.  There are some of the requirements before organizing any community development program. These are…

1.      Community assessment ; 2.      Strategic planning; 3.      Organizational development;

 

4. Leadership development; 5. Economic development; and 6. Financial development (public and private).

Now the appraising values through which any community development program can be judged are,

1.      Contextualization

2.      Incrementalism

3.      Minimum participant profile

4.      Spread effect

5.      Motivation

6.      Duration

7.      Communication

8.      Promotion of indigenous knowledge; and

9.      Designing of extension work

Concluding  Remarks :

All the above accounts has sought to underscore the importance, role and contributions of anthropological knowledge for the development of the communities. The general definitions, perspectives related to the different aspects of community development, it’s various steps and requirements were also added for the better understanding of the whole concerned area. It would seem that despite great anthropology's potential for informing health policy, its actual contribution is quite small seeing that it is grouped with a half-dozen behavioural sciences as one of the five informants of policymaking. The reason for anthropology's minimized role in health policy development is likely founded in its primary methodological approach: ethnography. Thanks to an unabashed focus on individuals and small groups, many involved in the process of policymaking have argued that the data that generated by anthropological research is less valuable because it does not lend itself to broad 'scientific' extrapolation, as does epidemiological data. Ethnographic research involves observing and conducting interviews with a small group of people. With such small numbers, it is possible to argue that these individuals could easily be unrepresentative of the general population.

Despite the uphill battle that faces anthropologists in the public health sector, it is imperative to continue the work, as ethnographic inquiry has the potential to generate a great deal of rich information which can influence policy development. In the latter part of the account  four ways were described through which anthropology can influence public health policy that other methods and disciplines cannot and those are (A) The ability to see culture in its proper context in the social world and how culture affects all research. (B) The ability to pick up on minute and seemingly irrelevant details. (C) Independence from biomedical goals and hegemony allows medical anthropologists to add a critical voice to the public health discourse. And last but not the least (D) Provision of objective, qualitative data in an otherwise quantitative field. All the above descriptions gives us an holistic idea on how both physical and social anthropologists are continuously contributing and applying their knowledge  in the field of community development.

References :

1.    Curnow R, Smith C. 1975. "Multifactorial Model for Familial Diseases in Man.". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.

2.    Kenny, Sue. et al. 2018. “The Routledge Handbook of Community Development”. Routledge, New York and London.

3.    Helman, Cecil. 2015. Culture, health and illness.

4.    Lewis, Herbert S. 1998. "The misrepresentation of anthropology and its consequences". American Anthropologist : Journal of the American Anthropological Association.

5.    McElroy A. 1996. "Medical Anthropology."Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. New York.

6.    Nancy, Scheper-Hughes. 2000. "Coming to Our Senses: Cultural Anthropology at the Millenium.". Teaching Anthropology.

7.    Pels, Peter. 2011. Colonial Subjects: essays on the practical history of anthropology. Ann Arbor, Mi: Univ. of Michigan Press.

8.    Porter J.D.H. 2006. "Epidemiological Reflections of the Contribution of Anthropology to Public Health Policy and Practice". Journal of Biosocial Sciences.

9.    Turnock, Bernard J. 2004. “Public Health: What It Is and How It Works”. Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

10.                  Williams, Holly Ann. 2001. Caring for those in crisis: integrating anthropology and public health in complex humanitarian emergencies. Arlington, VA: National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.

11.                  Willigen J. 2002. “Applied Anthropology: An Introduction”. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Yeasmin Rosy, Sabiha. 2015. "Contributions of Anthropology in Bringing Forth Local Perspectives and Challenges in Development Processes". Anthropology.