Abstract
What role do development interventions play in bringing about agrarian change? Tanya Jakimow’s Decentring Development: Understanding Change in Agrarian Societies explores this question through a novel approach which focuses on the ‘self’ in development encounters. Jakimow intervenes in debates on the effects and consequences of development processes in the Global South. Research on development, she argues, needs to ‘decentre development’ by shifting attention to individuals whose lives and livelihoods are transformed (or not) within what she calls ‘development contexts’. In this book, Jakimow decentres development by building a concept of the ‘self-in-process’. Individuals who are targets of development interventions are constantly in a process of ‘becoming’ (p. 8). Their selfhood is thus always ‘provisional’ (p. 7) and their self-making is a continuous process. In other words, there is no a priori self that exists prior to the development encounter, and individual selves constantly ‘come to be’ within development contexts. According to the author, selves ‘come to be’ in three different ways: (a) through a dialectic between self and the institutional landscape of development; (b) through the possibilities for change that development interventions offer and the future orientation that they engender among the subjects of development; and (c) by providing moral spaces for self-cultivation for developers and ‘developees’. She points out that a political economy of personhood, which revolves around the ‘self-in-process’ and how this ‘self-in-process’ interacts with institutions and discourses of development, can thus offer us a new theoretical apparatus to understand agrarian change.
Centring the self in the study of development is a very important analytical move and Jakimow presents us with a well-worked out conceptual framework to make this move. She thoroughly engages with Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian ideas of the self. Most notably, she brings recent work on selfhood and social change (Chandra & Majumder, 2013; Pandian & Ali, 2010) in conversation with the scholarship on the anthropology of development. She places herself within and contributes to the emerging scholarship on the anthropology of development, which does not treat development merely as a violent imposition by states and aid agencies. This scholarship urges us to pay attention to the myriad ways in which the subjects of development might respond to its discourses and practices (Li, 2007; Mathur, 2012; Sharma, 2008; Yarrow & Venkatesan, 2012). Jakimow takes a step further by shifting attention from the outcomes of development interventions to the processes of self-making triggered by development interventions. Such a shift helps us identify how development interventions might be demanded from below and feed into the aspirations of ordinary women and men. In such a scenario, anthropologists of development ought to study the role of development interventions in the everyday self-making of the subjects of development. An attention to the ‘self-in-process’ thus enables us to study the consequences and effects of development (intended and unintended) beyond the binaries of success and failure.
Jakimow builds her argument based on fieldwork among agricultural labourers in Telangana, India and Central Lombok, Indonesia. Her research was conducted as part of a project on agrarian livelihoods in these locations. She primarily relies on life-history narratives, collected through interviews, to study changing selves in these contexts. The book unfolds in three parts, each of which have two chapters each. The chapters in Part I lay out the conceptual framework of the ‘self-in-process’. In doing so, the author engages with the existing scholarship on selfhood and development institutions. In Chapter 1, she contends that a focus on the self is helpful in moving beyond the subject–agent distinction. If we focus on the self-making of development actors, then we are no longer preoccupied with categorizing them either as agents or victims of development (p. 37). The ‘self-in-process’, which is constantly being made and remade, offers an ideal focal point to analyse transformations initiated by development processes. In Chapter 2, she argues that the ‘self-in-process’ is positioned vis-à-vis multiple institutions, discourses, ‘affective experiences’ and cultural meanings, and selfhoods emerge through this dialectic between the self-in-process and the institutional landscape of development (pp. 48, 57). Processes of the self and development institutions shape and even transform each other. Therefore, there is no unencumbered self that exists outside of the institutional landscape of development. Jakimow then applies the analytical framework built in Part I to her empirical data in Part II and Part III. In Part II, she introduces us to her research sites and how the concept of the self informed her fieldwork and theorization. In Chapter 3, she explains that her fieldwork involved tracking livelihoods of agricultural labourers and in Chapter 4, she emphasizes that the self-in-process in development contexts is also a ‘self-in-transit’ because development might bring on a capacity to aspire (p. 96).
In Part III, Jakimow goes on to explore how self-becoming in development contexts is closely tied to institutions like the state as well as to the moral and ethical frameworks of affect in a given local milieu. This part of the book is particularly noteworthy for the insights that emerge from bringing the theoretical arguments in conversation with the empirical material. Chapter 5 takes up the significance of the state in helping individuals envision new possibilities of the self. The state as a development actor, she posits, plays a key role in shaping the selfhood of her respondents. Three ways in which the state influences processes of self-becoming are highlighted: (a) individuals self-recognize themselves as subjects of an abstract state; (b) everyday encounters with state actors and the social practices of the state lead people to recast their selfhood in particular ways; and (c) individuals draw upon the multiple discourses of the state to cast themselves as citizens (pp. 125–128). Self-becoming of individuals draws upon the practice and discourses of the state and hence we ought to take the state seriously to study the ‘self-in-process’ in development contexts in India, Indonesia and other parts of the Global South. In Chapter 6, Jakimow deals with the role of affect and ethics in development contexts. Here, she considers development as a moral space where individuals build ethical selves by engaging in good conduct and affective relations with others. Development, she argues, is a site in which ‘the virtuous life is lived, challenged, reconfigured, with implications for selfhood and the broader institutional landscape’ (p. 165). Overall, Chapters 5 and 6 ethnographically illustrate the multiplicity of institutions, practices, norms and discourses that come together in processes of self-making in development contexts.
The author must be commended for building an excellent conceptual framework of the self-in-process. Centring the self in development contexts is a significant analytical move in the development studies literature, and the notion of the ‘self-in-process’ offers a fresh perspective to examining the kinds of transformations that development interventions beget in targeted individuals and societies. The solid conceptual framework, in my view, is the biggest strength of the book. The book also stands out for bringing together empirical data from two distinct locations: Telangana, India and Central Lombok, Indonesia. Insights from two different agrarian societies are useful in substantiating the wider argument of the book about studying agrarian change through a focus on the self-becoming of individuals. Moreover, life-history narratives from two different fieldsites serve to compare different development contexts and shed light on the parallels and contrasts between processes of self-becoming across geographical locations. Additionally, the book is commendable for the manner in which the author connects the empirical and theoretical material. However, even as she does a great job of making her theoretical framework and empirical material speak to each other, one wishes that the book had greater ethnographic depth. Jakimow conducted fieldwork in Telangana for five months and in Central Lombok for three months. A longer fieldwork stint or a longitudinal engagement with the fieldsites would have provided a richer account of her respondents’ processes of self-becoming. To be fair, Jakimow does acknowledge this limitation and presents her arguments as tentative conclusions, which invite further analytical debates and new research projects on the self in development contexts (p. 170). This limitation, however, does not take away the value of Jakimow’s contribution of foregrounding the self in the study of development and agrarian transformations. In so far as we understand development and self-cultivation as processes rather than events, the ‘self-in-process’ provides an effective conceptual lens to study the practices and discourses of development. In fact, I think that the ‘self-in-process’ framework can be deployed in the study of social change more broadly. After all, each one of us is always a self in the making.