Abstract
Tanya Jakimow’s book, Decentring Development, makes an ambitious contribution to our understanding of social change in rural societies. It is built upon two main claims. First, she makes the case for ‘decentring development’, which she describes as an orientation to research that ‘makes peripheral the predetermined questions, objects of analysis, and expected impacts of research’ about specific development objectives in order to appreciate a broader range of ancillary and second-order effects that emerge from development in practice (p. 1). Of course, attention to unexpected impacts of development is not itself novel, but what is novel is how she uses this orientation as a basis to articulate an agenda for how anthropological enquiry can be uniquely influential in generating knowledge to improve development practice. This contribution is informed by her own experience as a postdoctoral researcher working on an interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research programme on rural livelihoods and climate adaptation. This project is also the basis of the empirical material described in the book.
The book’s second main contribution—which, in my opinion, is far more interesting of the two—aims to lay out a theoretical terrain for centring the ‘self-in-process’ as an object of anthropological enquiry. Development, Jakimow suggests, does not just affect what people do, or their opportunities and resources; it reshapes their very sense of self. As she describes, in her empirical material:
[P]eople were seemingly not becoming disciplined ‘subjects’, but reconfiguring their social imaginary to arrive at a different sense of self in relation to the social whole .… The location of change was not in actions, or new manoeuverings within structural conditions, but rather in the process of becoming. People were not doing different things, they were becoming different people. (p. 6)
These processes of becoming, she argues, have important implications for how people relate to, and sometimes challenge, structural conditions of poverty and marginalization.
By focusing on the ‘self-in-process’, Jakimow leads us to a set of questions that I believe are potentially very fertile for understanding social change in the context of development. I have, in my own research, heard first-hand accounts of self-realization resulting from individuals’ engagement with the development state in its various forms. These intangible, but very real, experiences do at times propel new forms of political expression—for example, when a low caste man challenges a village elite by drawing on discourses of social and political ‘rights’, or when a woman, emboldened by serving in an elected position in the village council (often through affirmative action quotas), seeks to position herself as a leader among other established elites. These transformations are no doubt meaningful in and of themselves, but important questions remain: When and how do changes in personal subjectivities and social-positioning result in meaningful redistributions of social and political power?
Jakimow’s book does not offer conclusive answers (nor could any book by itself), but it goes a long way in elaborating a basis by which we might approach such questions. Chapter 1 describes a Foucauldian-inspired approach for conceptualizing processes of self-becoming. Chapter 2, thereafter, seeks to develop an analysis to understand how self-becoming is situated within a broader institutional landscape and how it may, in turn, lead to transformations in that landscape. Chapters 3–6 form the empirical heart of the book, with chapters on livelihood trajectories, individuals’ hopes and aspirations of the future, interactions with the state, and the role of development practitioners themselves. Jakimow’s emphasis on individuals’ agency takes us beyond well-worn questions about how development makes subjects and implores us to consider how individuals actively engage development—its discourses, its institutions, and its material and symbolic resources—as a part of their personal projects of self-improvement and realization. I believe that this reframing has the potential to yield a much richer and more nuanced understanding of the ways that development functions to transform rural societies.
The book, however, has clear limitations, especially its rather limited empirical material. It lacks the longitudinal data that would be needed to establish robust evidence of how the ‘self’ actually evolves. Material is drawn from only three study villages—two in Telangana, India and one in Central Lombok, Indonesia—a sample that, when spread across such diverse contexts, limits the possibility of meaningful comparison. That is not to say that the empirical material is not compelling; it most certainly is. I found her narratives of long-term changes in the study village, as revealed through extensive and often intimate quotes of her research subjects, to be truly valuable. Nevertheless, the material provides neither the depth needed to really understand the fraught and often contradictory processes of selfbecoming nor the breadth to untangle the drivers of different patterns of institutional change that might emerge as a result. Beyond the personal narratives provided by her subjects, I really wanted a more concrete and detailed description of the institutional landscape in which these narratives are situated—what exactly is the set of relationships that constitute power hierarchies in the village? How do these hierarchies reproduce themselves and under what conditions are they actually challenged? Her material provides important glimpses into such events. Ultimately, however, I believe that there is a nexus of political, social and economic relationships that would need to be more substantively mapped if we are to truly understand how personal understandings of self are constituted in relation to a broader social whole and the extent that the ‘self-in-process’, in turn, provides avenues for substantive material and political change.
Nonetheless, I believe that the line of enquiry that Jakimow has begun has great potential to change how we think about social transformation in the context of development. Even quite influential arguments have often been built on limited data, only to be later elaborated and nuanced through additional empirical work. Jakimow’s contributions are well worth such attention. I think that the set of concerns she raises will provide fertile avenues for discussion and debate in development studies in the coming years.