This paper is about a field of anthropology which grew considerably in the last fifteen years. Since the early Eighties, several authors have repeatedly denied the existence of a subdiscipline called development anthropology, alleging a lack of theories, methods, and specific subjects which could characterize it. Up to this date, no one has found an adequate answer to this problem. The practitioners of this field of applied anthropology, however, do not seem to be very concerned about this: for them, development anthropology is any group of professionals which practice some kind of work which has to do with questions of "development". Nevertheless, in recent ten years, development anthropology began gradually to distinguish itself from other fields of the discipline by its focus on special scientific topics and on special kinds of practical work.
development anthropology; applied anthropology; practical anthropology