Emma Crewe

The elephant in the room: racism in representations, relationships and rituals

Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized representations of ‘racial’groups are pervasive and can be trivial in impact. But when combined with exclusionary social networks and rituals, and used to justify white-dominated power structures, the result can be systematic discrimination against people based on their racial identity. With examples from encounters between staff working in development in international agencies, networks, governments and national organizations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we illustrate how racism is played out. We suggest that such observations emphasize the need to decentralize power to the South and that the subject deserves more thorough investigation.

Gujurati migrants' search for modernity in Britain

In this article we consider international migration by drawing on the life stories of Gujaratis presently living in Wellingborough, to illustrate the varied and complex reasons for migration, and the contrasting experiences of men and women migrants.

Ethnographic research in gendered organizations: the case of the Westminster parliament

An account of undertaking ethnographic research in the House of Lords and the House of Commons and contrasting the findings. Ethnographic methods could be valuable for feminist scholars of political institutions in encouraging them to pay more attention to their own assumptions and their informants’ cultural specificity and context, to diversity between informants and within social groups, and to social change. Universal models should be treated with caution, as rules are embedded within the specific cultural meaning making and social relations in that particular place, time, and organization. Gendered differences may be universal, but the forms they take are endlessly varied.

An Anthropology of the House of Lords: Socialisation, Relationships and Rituals

This study addresses the puzzle of conformity in the House of Lords; why do any peers attend regularly and usually obey their party whip? Rational choice theory struggles to explain this when you bear in mind that peers tend to be unambitious and do not rely on re-election to stay in parliament. The reasons can be found in a close study of their culture and social relationships; in particular in (a) socialisation in the Lords, (b) the social status of peers, (c) the ritualisation of debate, and (d) their relationships to their party. Each is explained in turn, as part of a dynamic interplay of social and political relations, relying on the findings of an ethnography compiled during 1998–2000. This is offered as an example of why and how such anthropological perspectives on parliament can complement the approaches of political science.

Flagships and tumbleweed: A history of the politics of gender justice work in Oxfam GB 1986–2015:

This article contributes to scholarship on the political nature of feminists’ work in international development NGOs. The case study of Oxfam GB (OGB) is contemporary history, based on compiling a brief history of gender justice work between 1986 and 2014 and 18 months of part-time participant-observation fieldwork during 2014–15. I describe funding pressures and imperatives, contestations of meaning and power struggles within OGB and argue that gender justice becomes entangled in both internal and the external politics of international development. This is part of a wider research programme about how ideas on gender equality norms travel between and around development organizations, so I finally draw conclusions about how norms are contested and embodied. The shapeshifting political nature of feminist work challenges prevailing theories about how norms and ideas travel and take hold within organizations.

Doing development differently: Rituals of hope and despair in an INGO

Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights reformed various rituals and created different management practices internally, as well as maintaining its long-established solidarity approach with partners, but only managed to challenge the donors’ controls to a limited extent.

The science of a good childhood: a review of Volume 2 of the Journal of Children's Services

This article reviews the contents of the previous years editions of the Journal of Childrens Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journals editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prevention and intervention services on child well‐being; what the evidence says about how to implement proven programmes successfully; the economic case for proven programmes; the urgency of improving childrens material living standards; how to help the most vulnerable children in society; and, lastly, the task of measuring child well‐being.

Ethnographies of parliament: culture and uncertainty in shallow democracies

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges, advantages and limits of ethnographical approaches to the study of parliament. Challenges in the study of political institutions emerge because they can be fast-changing, difficult to gain access to, have starkly contrasting public and private faces and, in the case of national parliaments, are intimately connected to rest of the nation. Design/methodology/approach Ethnography usually tends to be difficult to plan in advance, but especially so when parliament is the focus. Findings Research in parliament requires clear questions but an emergent approach for answering them – working out your assumptions, deciding on the most appropriate methods depending on what wish to find out, and continually reviewing progress. Its great strengths are flexibility, ability to encompass wider historical and cultural practices into the study, getting under the surface and achieving philosophical rigour. Rigour is partly achieved through reflexivity. Research limitations/implications One implication of this is that not only will each study of parliament be different, because each is embedded in different histories, cultures, and politics, but the study of the same parliament will contain variations if a team is involved. Originality/value Ethnographical research is a social and political process of relating; interpreting texts, events and conversations; and representing the “other” as seen by observers.

Parliamentary Socialisation: Learning the Ropes or Determining Behaviour?

The modern political science of government coalitions can be traced to Williams Riker’s 1962 book, The Theory of Political Coalitions, though its intellectual history begins somewhat earlier, with what we now think of as cooperative game theory. Three basic themes have dominated the literature: the formation of coalition cabinets; the allocation of payoffs (mainly cabinet portfolios) within these; and the stability of coalition governments. Research programmes in each of these subfields typically involve the confrontation of theoretical models, both formal and informal, with ‘field’ data on real government coalitions. Riker’s original assumption of purely office-seeking politicians, implying minimum winning coalitions, has been expanded to include politicians with policy preferences on one or more dimensions, yielding models that can account for minority governments, ‘surplus’ majority governments, and other important empirical regularities. Perhaps the most important substantive development in the field over the past decade or so has been a growing interest in coalition governance as opposed to coalition governments. If we want to understand the making and the breaking of governments then we have to understand what happens in between these defining events. Politicians forming governments will anticipate the coalition governance that is implied. Coalition governments that fail mid-term do so because of some failure of coalition governance. Building on their highly-regarded work in the journal literature, Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg have now produced an important book-length study of coalition governance. They take as their starting point assumptions about coalition governance made by ‘portfolio allocation’ models of government formation that emerged during the 1990s. These assert that cabinet ministers have both the incentive and the ability to shift policy in their jurisdictions towards their own personal preferences, and that pressure of work and division of labour in the cabinet leave other cabinet ministers with little they can do about this. The ‘problem’ is that this is sub-optimal for the cabinet as a whole, whose members might well prefer a policy agreement that did not cede control over each policy area to the minister with jurisdiction over it. Confining themselves to policy initiatives that require legislation, and this is of course a big restriction, Martin and Vanberg solve this problem by modelling the ability of legislators to scrutinise and amend legislation. The minister retains a privileged position in drafting legislation, and may claim that the agreed coalition policy is simply not feasible for reasons that only the technical experts can see. However, other politicians can test such claims by scrutinising legislation in

Anthropology and Development: The elusive poor

The reduction of poverty has come to be understood as the key object of the development enterprise. It is one of the taken-for-granted, ‘silent traditions’ (Bourdieu 1977: 167) of development professionals that the goal of international aid and development is to free the poor from poverty. But who are the poor? What defines them? And who gets to decide? Key points covered by this chapter Predominant perspectives in development bureaucracies characterise poverty as absolute (rather than relative), such as living on less than