Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Transforming the discourse of development: culture, suffering and human futures -- 2. On cultural studies and the place of culture in development -- 3. Aid, culture and context -- 4. Liberating development from itself: the politics of indigenous knowledge
-- 5. Reframing social economics: economic anthropology, post-development and alternative economics -- 6. Culture and climate justice -- 7. Narratives of suffering: human existence and medical models in development -- 8. Towards a sociology of trauma: remembering, forgetting and the negotiation of memories of social violence -- 9. The aesthetics of development -- 10. Emotions of culture, social movements and social transformation .

Culture, Development and Social Theory places culture back at the centre of debates in development studies. It introduces new ways of conceptualizing culture in relation to development by linking development studies to cultural studies, studies of social movements, religion and the notion of 'social suffering'. The author expertly argues that in the current world crises it is necessary to recover a more holistic vision of development that creates a vocabulary linking more technical (and predominantly economic) aspects of development with more humanistic and ecological goals. Any conception of post-capitalist society, he argues, requires cultural, as well as economic and political, dimensions.