SERICUL TURE AND THE PROCESS OF CHANGE - Institute for ...

new International economic order. In the emerging context, there was a
realisation to tilt the economic growth, towards equality and social
justice.
Thus, the term 'development' has undergone a progressIve
change and corne to imply a set of complex dimensions. In Sinha's
(1989) view, development is the maximisation of employment (in terms
of productive occupation rather than formal wage earning), increasing
income generation by the poor and an improvement in the quality of life
for all. According to Varma.. it is a result of hwnan action, only through
which reorientation of any development process becomes possible. For
him, development itself is a continuous process, requiring constant
response and continuous solutions. In his opinion, development IS
basically a study of social change - a change from one socie.y to
another, as one might call it, from tradition to modernity (1989:34).
Development involves 'deliberate attempts to alter hwnan interaction
with the natural and built environment - through innovations in
agriculture, new energy-exploitation and conversion, the construction of
modem transportation systems, improvement in housing, and so on'
(Chambers 1985: 26, 81). Naik (1993) cautions against the tendency of
equating rural development with the urbanisation of rural areas. For him,
the crust of development is that people living in the rural areas develop
the capability to live.
There are basically two approaches that anthropology employs in
the study of development. These are implied in the specialisation of its
branches, namely, Development Anthropology and Anthropology of
Development. Simon Charsley (1982; 1990) has elaborately dealt with.,
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