4: Design of Development Agendas

I end this book with concrete anthropological proposals for intervention applied to social and technological development. The main considerations of the work are reviewed on based on the discussion about the necessary and urgent dialogue between science and politics, between the ethnographic planning of development, the design of public policies and agendas, and its execution in territories with local and global perspectives.¹

The methodologies of interpretation already described are applied to the analysis of the overarching concepts present in this work (development, territory, progress, heritage, becoming, time, space, policy, agendas) and the results obtained are reviewed in the more general context of the sociocultural dynamics of territorial development. Among the main results obtained, it is arguable that the ‘territorial development’ formula is a clear example of how social imaginaries are constructed on the basis of the spatiality and temporality of the social actors that mobilize them. Another result is the rhythmical characterization of the territory that proposes articulating symbols and practices, imaginaries and rhythmics. In all the cases studied, it was possible to find rhythmics of management, whether patrimonial, political, touristic or agricultural. The existence of these rhythmics of management, which are operative and executive to organize, diagnose and plan, are a concrete result which shows that the observation of rhythmics enables characterizing social groups.