Green and Anti-Green Revolutions in East Timor and Peru: Seeds, lies and applied anthropology

Since the 1950s, the international development industry has brought agricultural modernisation programs or Green Revolutions (GRs) to many parts of the so-called Third World. In many cases, GRs have spawned post-development resistance anti-GRs that urge the affirmation of culture and the revalorisation of lost or existing local or Indigenous knowledge. Comparing the mature post-GR, post-development of Andean Peru with stifled post-development practice in East Timor, it is shown that the knowledge politics surrounding development and post-development can be understood as a struggle for legitimacy. Through the authors personal research experience in the field as well as his problematic dealings with applied anthropology development consultants, it is shown that researchers of development and postdevelopment not only witness such struggles, they also become embroiled in them. In a context where development industry actors have grown increasingly chary of critical research, advice is offered to ethnographers of development and post-development in practice.