The aim of this chapter is to cast an anthropological eye over the issues of local knowledge, famine relief, and development theory, using the case of southern Sudan to reveal structural weaknesses in the ways local people are seen and represented in conventional development discourse. Information produced by anthropologists has often been praised but subsequently ignored by development practitioners (Saleem-Murdock 1990). Anthropologists have done little to resist being pushed aside on matters of policy as a result of the increasingly introspective direction that overtook the subject in the 1970s and 1980s. However, that period of introspection did produce a heightened awareness of the structures of power that lie behind the production of anthropological knowledge and subsequently gave anthropology the opportunity to examine the power structures that lie behind development discourse (Gardner and Lewis 1996).