In Papua New Guinea the use of anthropologists as consultants for government development projects has a long and respectable history. From the early colonial period there were official Government Anthropologists to colonial administrations whose ethnographic writings remain ‘classics’ and over the past sixty years many of the anthropologists who have undertaken project consultancies have been also major figures in the academic domain. The work of the Papua New Guinea Research Unit (based at The Australian National University) during the 1970s and 1980s produced some anthropological work that was directed towards dealing with the practical problems of economic development and what is now called governance but was then termed government and administration.

This relationship, in Melanesia and elsewhere, has since the 1960s been the subject of intense criticism within the discipline (Asad 1973; Clifford 1988). The idea that Anthropology as a discipline is tainted when it becomes an instrument in developing strategies for administering aid or working out sustainable development projects jostles with the criticisms that many anthropologists make of projects that they fail because they do not take into account the cultural specificities and deeply-rooted values of the people. Accusations of complicity with oppressive policies or exploitative economics are commonplace. In this paper the author examines a few of the ways that her work as a consultant impinged my academic research and inspired some criticisms of my academic discipline, but she also argues for the usefulness of anthropology in undertaking social research that has practical aims.