The core challenges in contemporary development practice and research are to identify particular groups which struggle for control of available assets and resources (Oakley & Marsden 1984:9) and to categorize community members into specific groups (such as the ‘poor’, ‘marginalized’, ‘disadvantaged’, ‘socially excluded’, etc.) for the purpose of either targeting development assistance or focusi...

Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of mu...