Arturo Escobar (born November 20, 1951) is a Colombian-American anthropologist and professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
He subsequently traveled to the United States to earn a master's degree in food science and international nutrition at Cornell University in 1978.
as professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he taught courses in development theory and social change, often co-teaching with long-time mentee Dr. Michal Osterweil of UNC's Department of Global Studies.
Escobar theorizes that the development era was produced by a discursive construction contained in Harry S. Truman's official representation of his administration's foreign policy.
Escobar encourages scholars to use ethnographic methods to further the post-development era by advancing the deconstructive creations initiated by contemporary social movements (without claiming universal applicability).
Escobar received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1997 to study "Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Late Twentieth Century".