For many years I have been waiting in vain for someone else to write this book. While it is common knowledge that so many of the assumptions on which rural development economists base their work are thoroughly unrealistic, owing to their general lack of experience of the tropical world, no one seems to be prepared to assume the role of outside professional critic. Given the failure to appreciate the significance of professional division of labour, it is generally believed that there is no role for a mediator who seeks merely to build bridges between economic anthropology and development economics. But just as an art critic seldom gives artists practical advice on how to improve their work, so it would seem the height of arrogance for an anthropologist like myself to make practical suggestions on working methods or subject matter to economists. Nothing like that is to be found here.

My approach is at once polemical and constructive: my polemical purpose is to expose what I see as the old-fashioned, stereotyped, Western-biased, over-generalized crudity and conceptual falsity of so many conventional economic premises, as well as economists' complacent attitude to bad official statistics; my constructive purpose, which takes up much more space, is a practical demonstration that many of the findings of the less esoteric branches of economic anthropology ought to be regarded as highly relevant to development economics although, as any glance at economists' bibliographies shows, they are habitually ignored.