The racialization of development expertise and the fluidity of blackness: a case from 1980s Thailand.

This paper is an ethnographer's reconstruction of his experience in Thailand with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the flux of opposing biases he was subject to as a black African on one hand and a farang development expert on the other. The paper discusses how racial thinking affected dynamics in the UN office and in the field, and how and why those dynamics played out differently over the course of the project. It describes racial hierarchies and meanings situated in this particular country and era as a contribution to an unfinished anthropological inquiry: how blackness and whiteness are intimately woven into the everyday practices of development bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]