Is ‘the Third World’, as it is commonly and distantly conceptualised and perceived ‘in the West’, more an invention than a discovery? Development studies persist in construing it predominantly in ‘other‐cultural’ terms. As a result, cultural descriptions of, or by, ‘rural folk’, ‘ethnic folk’, and ‘summit folk’ have become overloaded with a too socio‐centric and culturally‐bound burden of explanation. Both ‘aspectual’ and ‘synthetic’ interdisciplinary approaches to public policy problems only encounter these concepts indirectly if the problems themselves are non‐disciplinary in the first place.