Introduction

‘The field’ and ‘the field trip’ are central tropes in the world of development practice. Whilst some development people work ‘in the field’, most are based in cities and towns, whilst others —visitors from head office or regional offices or consultants visiting for specific purposes— are even further from ‘the poor’ whom the development industry is meant to benefit. But for all, visits to ‘the field’ are highly significant moments where the development professional and the ‘native’ come face to face.

Yet precisely what the point is of these visits to ‘the field’ remains unclear. The trips by expatriate or foreign development personnel to urban slums or rural villages obviously have an importance to those who undertake them, but what can be gained through a few hours in a slum or a few days visiting remote fishing villages in Southeast Asia is uncertain. After all, such visits are carefully orchestrated and usually closely controlled, ‘development tourism’ of the most extreme sort. To an anthropologist even calling such jaunts ‘field visits’ is clearly to imbue them with qualities which they lack. And the clear contrast is made between ‘fieldwork’ —the sort of thing anthropologists do over long periods of time and which generate ‘authentic’ knowledge', and ‘field visits’— the sort of thing which development people do and which simply reinforce stereotypes and prejudices.