The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics

• Published in: Anthropologica 2010, Vol.52 (1), p.210-212
• Main Author: Gururani, Shubhra
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activism; Book Reviews / Comptes rendus; Colonialism; Farmers; Government; Government agencies; Governmentality; Health problems; Inequality; Intervention; Li, Tania Murray; Longevity; Migrants; Negotiation; NGOs; Nonfiction; Nongovernmental organizations; Oppression; Political economy; Politics; Population growth; Public officials; Rationality; Reading; Settlers
• ISSN: 0003-5459; 2292-3586

In order to understand why a place like the highlands of Central Sulawesi, unlike other sites in Indonesia, strikingly becomes the target of repeated governmental intervention, [Tania Murray Li] takes us through a layered landscape in which the histories and everyday Uves of swidden farmers, new and old settlers, migrants, traders, development officials, NGOs and activists are intertwined and historically sedimented in colonialism, capitalist expansion, agrarian political economy, development and reforman. Taking us through different regimes of rule in practice, Li uses a critical Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to track the "benevolent and stubborn" will to improve the lives of those who are deemed to be in need of wetfare. The objective of governmental power, as Foucault argued, is not disciplinary, but is to secure the "wetfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc" (p. 6). Li buUds on this insight and identifies two key related practices of "problematization," that is, 'Identifying deficiencies that need to be rectified" and of "rendering technical," as central to the workings of governmentality. Rendering "a set of processes technical and improvable [means that] an arena of intervention must be bounded, mapped, characterized, and documented; the relevant forces and relations must be identified; and a narrative must be devised connecting the proposed intervention to the problem it wül solve" (p. 126). While Li systematically takes the reader through the "multiform tactics" which render the problems of Central Sulawesi technical and repeatedly exclude the questions of political economy, landlessness and structural relations of law that support inequality, what makes Li's volume stand apart from other studies of governmentality are two important departures. In inflecting Foucaudian governmentality through a Gramscian lens, Li takes the question of agency - of humans and non-humans - seriously, and painstakingly describes when and how "situated subjects mobilize to contest their oppression." In this careful exposition of governmentality in action, the subjects of improvement appear not as mere targets of governmental rationality but as critical actors who negotiate, accept, incorporate, reject and resist the governmental interventions aimed to improve their lives, livelihoods and landscapes. She argues that "engaging with the 'messy actualities' of rule in practice is not merely an