Book Review: The Will To Improve

Dear all,

I’ve just finished a fantastic book, and in order to keep my writing skills sharp, I’ve decided to write a review for you all. For those of you who are not anthropologically inclined, parts of the review may seem very boring or technical, and for that I do apologize. Still, I encourage you to read it (or at least to skip to the end) because the book has left me with some big questions and as always, I’m dying to hear what your thoughts are. (What can I say? I’m addicted to the opinions of the many brilliant folk I’m fortunate enough to know. Can you really blame me?) So, on to the review!




The Will To Improve
Governmentality, Development , and the Practice of Politics
By Tania Murray Li
Published by Duke University Press, 2007

As the subtitle states, Ms. Murray Li’s work focuses on the immense realms of Governmentality, Development and Politics, taking as her specific focus several communities located in the Central Sulawesi Highlands in Indonesia. Her work begins with a discussion of the concept of Governmentality, which she grounds very firmly in Foucalt’s theories. While Murray Li devotes a great deal of technical discussion to this term, (a choice I will discuss in more detail below), I feel a basic concept would have sufficed for her discussion, and would have made this work more accessible to a broader audience. Very simply, following Foucalt, Murray Li holds that government is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of its subjects conforms to a “right” way of doing things which will lead to a very specific set of goals. The sum of these goals, is a utopian or “good” society in which the government needs only to provide minimal direction (as opposed to continuos direct intervention). She goes on to point out that this definition of government also applies to the way most development programs function, and thus labels development programs as functioning under an idea of Governmentality. (Murray Li, pg 5-6)

With these concepts in place, she goes on to discuss the history of development in her fieldsites from both official government bodies and development programs. As she describes it, Murray Li’s fieldsite is made up of several distinct communities, all of whom are currently plagued by problems of landlessness, poverty, and inter-community conflict. According to Murray Li, the Central Sulawesi Highlands have also been the sites of countless development and improvement projects for over 200 years. As the discussion of this history unfolds, several trends begin to emerge.

The first trend Murray Li elucidates is the way in which different programs overlap and intersect, producing unexpected and often, negative consequences for the very communities these programs were designed to help. The most striking example of this is related to the history of relocation of certain communities and the effect on livelihoods and perceptions of indigineity that resulted. Murray Li explains that in the earliest phases of development, the Dutch government resettled villagers from the highlands to the lower hills, in order to bring them closer to infrastructure benefits (like roads) and to enable them to take advantage of new agricultural techniques which were more economically beneficial, techniques like cacao farming. But resettlement proved difficult, for a host of reasons, ranging from insufficient land to epidemics caused by the villagers’ lack of immunity to the strains of diseases found in their new home. However, the government continued the practice of resettlement in the face of these challenges, right up until a new concern emerged, bio-conservation. As bio-conservation became a national agenda item, and international donors pressured for the creation of a protected national park, the government and development institutions began new programs. Eventually, a park was established, after which villagers were denied access to the land they had originally been relocated to, instructed not to practice the farming techniques that were previously encouraged (as they were deemed environmentally unfriendly), and often denied the status of indigenous people because they had not occupied an ancestral homeland from time immemorial (a major condition of indigineity in development definitions of the term). Yet despite the fact that many of the conditions the new development agenda sought to correct were in fact created by previous development initiatives, the new development agenda stated firmly and repeatedly, that it was the behavior and practices of the villagers which needed to be rectified. The resulting hardships for villagers, including an increase in landlessness and poverty, continue even today.

The second trend, which was of particular interest to me, was the way in which development discourses defined and reshaped the structure of communities. Repeatedly, development agendas took the stance that a “traditional” community structure existed within these villages, which would be conducive to the goals of development programs, but which needed to be guided or perfected by outside “experts”. Not only did this supposition rest on some very outdated ideas of “traditional villages”, many of which can be directly traced back to old ideas about the “Noble Savage”, but they also neglected the agency of the villagers. The programmers assumed that the villagers would use the new skills and ideas provided them in exactly the way the developmental institutions had intended them to, which rarely proved to be the case. This point was most clearly demonstrated in the section, “The Case of Katu”. (pg 145). This section discusses how a particular community facing eviction from their land in order to facilitate the creation of the State Park used their new understandings and abilities to successfully lobby against eviction. The Katu community used their knowledge of NGOs and development discourse to enlist the help of a non-park affiliated NGO to produce a variety of documents providing technical information on the sustainability of their farming techniques, documenting their history in that particular area, and even producing GPS maps detailing the land they were currently occupying. Rather than recognize the agency and legitimacy of the Katu community’s activities, even as they had conformed to the technical processes of development, the pro-park NGOs and governmental organizations assumed the Katu had been manipulated and encised by outside sources. In the end, the Katu were allowed to remain in the park on the grounds that they had sufficiently proved themselves to be indigenous, but other communities were not afforded similar treatment.

I found the work to be enormously insightful and the critiques of development to be particularly enlightening, however, I should acknowledge my own previous bias in this regard. As I find myself continually surrounded by the hundreds of development projects and agendas here in Nepal, I have struggled with an uneasiness with the entire process, and in many ways, I felt as though this work pointed concretely to ideas I’d only begun to flesh out. Murray Li dedicates a large portion of the book to discussing the most basic premise of development, what she terms the trustee - ward relationship. She describes this relationship in this way, “The will to empower others hinges upon positioning oneself as an expert with the power to diagnose and correct a deficit of power in someone else.” (pg 275) Personally, I find this position to be untenable. As Murray Li points out, life is messy and complicated, and even should one attain a level of expertise in a particular area, it would take a lifetime of study to be an expert in all of the relevant fields for even the most basic of development programs. From her research, Murray Li points repeatedly to specific real life examples of how development programs create numerous difficulties and conflicts at the same time they work to rectify others.

However, I do have two critiques of the work. Though I found the work to be a strong academic piece, I felt it lacked ethnographic richness. The communities Murray Li worked with were portrayed as largely homogeneous groups rather than a defined set of individuals, and her sparse use of quotes and individual narratives made the communities seem voiceless in the work overall. Murray Li also neglected to discuss her own positioning within the communities in which she worked, and it was unclear how her own biases and positioning affected the information she collected. Lastly, I was irked by the style of her writing, as she often began and ended chapters with dry lists of what was or would be discussed. Overall, I felt these defects made her work less accessible to a larger audience, which is a great loss considering the importance and validity of many of her critiques. I was also left feeling a bit concerned, because though she had stressed again and again the importance of recognizing agency in these communities, the lack of strong ethnographic writing made the work seem as though once again, these communities were being spoken for by an expert outsider.

But let’s move away from this academic discussion for a minute, so that I can share with you all some of the questions that this book left me with. As I mentioned above, here in Nepal, development seems to be everywhere. In fact, I’ve even done some low-level work on a development project since I’ve arrived, and I foresee requests to do more. But development programs leave me feeling awfully queasy. As the book points out, ideas about the need for development are stubborn in the face of failure. There is a general sense of “yes, the system is flawed, but we can’t just give up.” And it would be difficult to argue that these programs are anything but benevolent in their overall aims. But I’m still left wondering, how can the many sad and injustice circumstances in the world be improved, and who really ought to make the necessary changes? As an anthropologist, I’m firmly opposed to the idea that an individual from one community has the right, or even the necessary knowledge, to tell another community how they ought to live or behave. But as a human being, I feel that we all have the responsibility to help each other and make the world a better place. As of this moment, I’ve come up with no solid answers. For the time being, I simply watch uneasily as my friends and colleagues pursue their various agendas.

Another major challenge I’m facing right now, is how to make sense of differences and perceived “inequalities” without constantly relying on value statements. As I travel back and forth between villages and Kathmandu, and eventually, the US, the people I meet are eager to characterize certain settings as “advanced”, “forward”, or even “good”, while others are “backward”, “not nice”, ect. And while I try to shy away from these types of judgements in my own thinking, sometimes it’s very difficult. There have been times when I’ve tried to convince a villager that I find their community to be very nice, but at the very same time, I’m lamenting the loss of my laptop, or counting the days until my next hot shower. At one point in time, I was anxious to convince my friends in the villages that their way of life was just as good as life in the city, with all its amenities. But even that line of thinking has it’s downfall, as it effectively freezes them in their current way of life, and denies them access to commodities, comforts and ideas which may be highly desirable to them. So how can I fairly balance an appreciation for village life with an appreciation for their right to want something else, and at the same time, remain sensitive to the fact that many villagers have internalized the idea that “village life is bad and city life is good”, an idea ushered in by so many well meaning development workers?

Sigh, well at least my work continues to make my brain tickle, even if I can’t answer every question I ask. It’s just one of the many joys of anthropology I suppose! :)

Love you all!