Amazon Prime Free Trial
FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button and confirm your Prime free trial.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited FREE Prime delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$30.95$30.95
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$16.72$16.72
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: TheMidnightRead
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics Paperback – Illustrated, May 16, 2007
Purchase options and add-ons
Demonstrating that the “will to improve” has a long and troubled history, Li identifies enduring continuities from the colonial period to the present. She explores the tools experts have used to set the conditions for reform—tools that combine the reshaping of desires with applications of force. Attending in detail to the highlands of Sulawesi, she shows how a series of interventions entangled with one another and tracks their results, ranging from wealth to famine, from compliance to political mobilization, and from new solidarities to oppositional identities and violent attack. The Will to Improve is an engaging read—conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and alive with the actions and reflections of the targets of improvement, people with their own critical analyses of the problems that beset them.
- Print length392 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 16, 2007
- Dimensions6 x 0.98 x 9 inches
- ISBN-109780822340270
- ISBN-13978-0822340270
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Magisterially linking the contradictions of peripheral capitalism with the limits of governmentality, Tania Murray Li offers a view of developmental rule that draws productively on Gramsci and Foucault. She provides perhaps the most brilliant account to date of neoliberal development in action. A tour de force.”—Michael Watts, Director, Center for African Studies, and Class of 1963 Professor of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
“Tania Murray Li brilliantly combines the analytic rubrics of Foucault, Marx, and Gramsci to explain ‘the will to improve’ as an essential though poorly understood component of rule in Indonesia. This is not your grandmother’s ethnography: the well-written chapters are packed with the conflicts, contestations, and uncertainties that characterize power relations. Deeply engaged with the processes and practices that shape peoples’ lives, Li’s book should be required reading for scholars interested in how power works and for development practitioners everywhere.”—Nancy Lee Peluso, author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java
“Insightful and engaging, this is a fascinating book. Drawing on an impressive array of historical and ethnographic sources, including her own fieldwork, Tania Murray Li offers a brilliant account of ‘expert’ interventions that, since the end of the nineteenth century, have endeavoured to improve the welfare of a number of communities in Sulawesi (Indonesia).”―Dimitri Tsintjilonis, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology and Senior Canada Research Chair in Political Economy and Culture in Asia-Pacific at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy, and Ideology and the editor of Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE WILL TO IMPROVE
Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of PoliticsBy TANIA MURRAY LIDuke University Press
Copyright © 2007 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4027-0
Contents
List of Acronyms............................................viiGlossary of Indonesian Terms................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................xiIntroduction: The Will to Improve...........................1Contradictory Positions.....................................31Projects, Practices, and Effects............................61Formations of Capital and Identity..........................96Rendering Technical?........................................123Politics in Contention......................................156Provocation and Reversal....................................192Development in the Age of Neoliberalism.....................230Conclusion..................................................270Notes.......................................................285Bibliography................................................337Index.......................................................367Chapter One
CONTRADICTORY POSITIONSThis chapter explores two of the contradictions I outlined in the introduction, contradictions deeply embedded in the will to improve. The first is the contradiction between the promotion of capitalist processes and concern to improve the condition of the dispossessed. I examine how this contradiction played out through a series of governmental assemblages, each with its characteristic diagnoses and prescriptions, its preferred way of balancing profits, native welfare, and other "specific finalities." The second is the way that programs of improvement designed to reduce the distance between trustees and deficient subjects actually reinscribe the boundary that positions them on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. This boundary is the contradictory foundation that makes colonial and contemporary improvement programs thinkable, anxious and doggedly persistent. Yet it is not self-evident. It is produced through situated practices that can be critically explored.
My examination in this chapter takes the form of a history of government, teasing out the problems that various authorities sought to address, the techniques they deployed, their contradictions, and their effects. It is an overview, covering in schematic form a period of two centuries (1800-2000), with particular emphasis on the island of Java, the focus of colonial attention before the Netherlands East Indies Empire was "rounded out" in the period 1900-1910. Subsequent chapters, focused on the highlands of Sulawesi, examine governmental programs of the colonial and contemporary periods at much closer range.
Although I have arranged the parts of the chapter in chronological order, this is not a narrative of governmentality rising. It is not the case that late colonial rule overcame the racism and despotism of earlier regimes, nor did independence bring all citizens into the nation on an equal basis. The governmental assemblage that took shape on Java early in the nineteenth century was far more optimistic about the capacity of Indonesians to develop their own capacities through a "normal" process of self-improvement than the assemblage that emerged under Suharto in the New Order, in which the boundary separating trustees from those they would know and improve was sharp indeed. Arguments about the racial superiority of Europeans, relatively inchoate for more than two centuries while the Netherlands East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) competed with other parties for a share and eventual monopoly of trade in the archipelago, became much more pronounced after 1800 when the Dutch crown assumed sovereignty. They were entrenched in separate legal systems and reached their peak under the ethical policy (1905-30), precisely the moment when the white man's burden of improving Native lives was most clearly enunciated. As I will show, this was also the period when the "otherness" of the Natives, their ineffable difference, was conceptually elaborated, empirically investigated, and made the basis for policies aimed to restore "tradition" and harmonious, Asiatic village life.
THE RIGHT TO RULE
As far as possible, the voc ruled indirectly. It reinforced the powers of local rulers so that they could extract more profits for themselves, and for the company, by intensifying existing systems of appanages, tax farms, forced labor, usury, and trading monopolies. In Java, it used Chinese as agents in its collection system. Its objectives were not governmental-it did not intervene in native lives in order to improve them or make them more secure. It reserved discipline for the population of the territory it ruled directly-a minute proportion of the territory that later became the Netherlands East Indies. Even then, it asserted detailed control only when this was necessary to maximize profits. The predominance of the VOC's extractive orientation is evident from its accounts. It paid stockholders an average of 18 percent per year for two hundred years (1602-1800), a return so high the company was eventually bankrupt.
The bankruptcy of the voc obliged the Dutch crown to assume direct responsibility for the Indies in 1800. Thereafter, Dutch authorities became more deeply involved in the lives of subject populations in some parts of the archipelago-namely Java, parts of Sumatra, and the northern tip of Sulawesi. Over much of the rest of the archipelago, Dutch rule remained nominal, taking the form of treaties and contracts with local rulers to protect Dutch commercial interests. Only in 1900-1910 did the Dutch establish territorial control over the entire archipelago by the extension of existing contracts in some areas, and direct military action in others.
The reasons for the territorial extension and intensification of Dutch rule around 1900 are the subject of debate. Although some historians have argued that the Dutch were obliged to consolidate their hold over territory to ward o competing colonial powers, others argue that the spheres of influence of Britain, France and the United States were stable by 1900, and Dutch interests were sufficiently protected by the British as arbiter mundi. The argument that commercial motives prompted intensification is persuasive for some parts of the archipelago but not others. Many expansionary ventures "made little sense in terms of economic profitability" and some were "financially disastrous." Costs could easily outrun returns. State-owned mines and plantations plus port duties added important sources of revenue, but European corporations paid little tax. Military ventures could be ruinously expensive, the prolonged Aceh War (1873-1903) a case in point.
Decisions about territorial expansion, argues Benedict Anderson, "were made in Batavia rather than The Hague, and for local raison d'etat." What were these reasons? By the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Elson observes, the "right to rule was no longer a function of divine anointing, or possession of the palace or regalia, but rather of secular efficiency, formalized order, and getting things done." Local rulers had always been awkward partners for the Dutch, routinely despised, critiqued, and sometimes unseated for their despotic ways and personal failings. What changed around 1900 was not the conduct of local rulers, but the practices and assumptions of the Dutch. As Dutch emphasis on regulation, enumeration, and bureaucratic compliance increased, so did the range of fronts upon which local rulers were found deficient. Concerns for the well-being of the colonized population, popular fare in the Netherlands, and "bureaucratic concerns about Dutch prestige and law and order" were conjoined in critique of the misdeeds and defiance of local rulers. Colonial archives reveal "the fear of diminishing the prestige of the colonial government, and need to maintain vigorous Dutch authority." Maintaining that prestige and authority came to require a set of practices different from those that had previously prevailed.
Security, improvement, and systematic administration were key, by the late nineteenth century, to how the legitimacy of government and the right to rule were defined. Officials justified military action against the population in these terms. Violence was the prerequisite to welfare. Sovereignty over territory and a concern with the condition of the population emerged together in the colonial situation, and remained entwined there as the focus shifted to the question of how to achieve not one dogmatic goal but a "plurality of specific aims," a "whole series of specific finalities," the problematic of governmentality exposed by Foucault.
GOVERNING WITH ECONOMY
In the areas where secure control over territory was achieved early in the nineteenth century, the question of how to govern, and to what ends, soon followed. The approach of Sir Stamford Raffles, appointed to rule Java during a brief interregnum when control of the colony passed to the British (1812-16), was informed by liberal ideas about individual rights and freedoms, the self-regulating character of markets, and the capacity of the native population to bring about its own improvement once the necessary conditions had been set. Raffles's associate William Colebrooke wrote that the people of Java
possess in aggregate as large a share of natural intelligence and acuteness, of patriotism and enthusiasm, as will be found among the lower orders of any country; & it goes for to confirm the universal doctrine that Mankind in the same circumstances is always the same.... Java might in 30 years or less be elevated into a respectable & eminent free state ... [if Java was established] under the protection of England 'till by introduction of Arts and Education the people might be fitted to govern themselves.
In addition to freeing the peasantry from what he saw as excessive control and exploitation by Native elites, Raffles sought to improve the peasants' capacity to consume the products of British industry, routinize administration, and stabilize revenue. He thought these diverse ends could be achieved through a single strategy: creating the conditions for free trade and free agrarian production. Farmers would prosper simply by following their natural interest. The state would obtain its revenue directly from independent cultivators and ensure it was collected systematically according to law, thus eliminating extortion by local elites. All these changes could be achieved, moreover, merely by adjusting the social forces that were already present. A study of land tenure commissioned by Raffles found, conveniently enough, that all the land on Java was previously the property of the indigenous rulers, from whom it had passed into the hands of the successor sovereign power, namely the British crown. Thus the crown, as landlord, could derive its revenue as rent. Rent would not be alien to Java's peasants, already familiar with concepts of individual land tenure. The intermediaries known as bekel, currently operating as agents of a personalized and hierarchical appanage system, could serve as village Headmen, tasked with collecting rents and taxes on behalf of the landlord state.
Although Raffles presented his policies as the mere confirmation and systematization of existing tradition, they proved difficult to implement with the very limited administrative apparatus at Raffles's disposal. In the areas where his reforms were implemented, they did not produce the expected results because they "assumed a social structure that did not in fact exist." Peasants were indeed tied into personalized extractive systems that did not disappear. Yet Raffles was not simply guilty of bad research. As with other programmers, his knowledge was shaped by the interventions he envisaged, and by the need to represent the domain to be governed as "an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics." The model was India, where the British sovereign claimed the position of superlandlord, and administration was conducted through village Headmen. Thus the historian Furnivall found it "difficult ... to resist the suggestion that in the material collected for this enquiry Raffles found what he wanted, and expected." Other critics, Furnivall observes, put the point more strongly, arguing that "Raffles discovered in Java the economic system which the British had invented for Bengal."
Rectifying the confusion, protest, and impoverishment created by Raffles's new system of land rents was one of the tasks facing the Dutch when the colony was returned to their control. Johannes van den Bosch, assigned to the Indies in the role of Governor General in 1830, found Java's peasants in rebellion, and the colonial state weak. The Netherlands' economy was stagnant, and the costs of running the Indies empire exceeded revenues. Unlike Britain, the Netherlands had no industrial manufactures to export and was interested in the Indies principally as a locus for production from which revenues could be obtained. Van den Bosch's task was to make the Indies both profitable and secure. To this end, he instituted the Cultuurstelsel (Culture System or Cultivation System) in Java and in Minahasa (the northern tip of Sulawesi), intervening to organize production as well as monopolize trade in key products: sugar in the lowlands and coffee in the hills. Working through "traditional" authorities and village units reconfigured for the purpose, the Culture System conscripted land and labor from around 70 percent of Java's households, supplying a third of the Netherlands' state revenue by the 1850s. In Minahasa, colonial authorities laid out new villages and roads and subjected the population to an "unprecedented level of colonial surveillance and control."
Successful as it was for the Netherlands in economic terms, critics at the time and subsequently have regarded the Culture System as a throwback to the coercive tactics of the VOC, a system out of step with the rising tide of liberal thinking emphasizing market principles. Based on a careful study of Van den Bosch's economic ideas, however, Albert Schrauwers argues that Van den Bosch shared many of Raffles's liberal premises. He too sought to govern through existing social forces, merely adjusting them to produce the desired results. His diagnosis, however, was different. He did not share Raffles's faith that market forces, set free, would be sufficient to reform Native conduct. He recognized that capitalism was contradictory. His analysis of rural poverty in the Netherlands led him to identify a problem-lack of a habit of industriousness-that could not be addressed through market forces alone. Rural paupers lacked industry, he argued, because any surplus they produced was quickly extracted from them by the owners of capital. Wage workers, similarly, were disciplined not by morality but by their lack of access to the means of production. They were wage slaves, not free men and women contracting to sell their labor as a matter of choice. From his analysis, a course of action followed. Rather than seek to displace capitalism, which he regarded as legitimate, or to eliminate poverty, which he regarded as an inevitable feature of a class society, he sought to use disciplinary means to create habits of industriousness, substituting for the incentives the "self-regulating" market failed to supply. His goal was to make the poor more productive, and less threatening to the state.
For the Netherlands, Van den Bosch devised a system of agricultural colonies, the first of which opened in 1818. These were parapenal institutions tasked with instilling discipline in the criminalized poor. Inmates were sorted into categories and permitted progressively more freedoms as their behavior conformed. Eventually, they were expected to graduate to become independent farmers. In Java, Van den Bosch understood the task of government in similar terms: how to discipline underproductive farmers to produce marketable surpluses, which would not only provide for their own limited needs, but also support the edifice of the state and capitalist profit. Since the system of detailed supervision in parapenal colonies he devised for the Netherlands could not be extended to the Indies population at large, discipline must be supplied by other means. Farmers should be obliged to pay rent for the use of land Raffles had conveniently declared the property of the sovereign authority, then British, now Dutch. Rent would take the form of agricultural commodities produced under a regulated system. Payment would be the collective responsibility of village communities, enforced through the "traditional" authority of Native elites. This authority would be strengthened by new administrative techniques, including the demarcation of village boundaries and the registration of populations to prevent flight. Thus emerged the blend of collective and hierarchical features that later came to be regarded as "traditional" village Java.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE WILL TO IMPROVEby TANIA MURRAY LI Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0822340275
- Publisher : Duke University Press Books (May 16, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 392 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780822340270
- ISBN-13 : 978-0822340270
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.98 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,862,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,659 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #10,844 in Political Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2008This book is a stunning job of tracking yet another case of failed development. The main ways this book differs from a long, long literature on such matters are, first, that Li provides a long history (going back through the centuries of colonialism), and, second, that she gives an extremely detailed account of the political processes that led to stagnation in rural Sulawesi over the last 10+ years. A national park to preserve biodiversity, various agricultural projects, and a lot of untapped local potential for top-quality coffee and cocoa exports did not add up to success. In addition to presenting a superb job of reporting, Li writes clearly and straightforwardly, without undue social-science jargon.
The problem was the same old one that we have seen in literally thousands of similar case studies: people with "the will to improve" but not the common sense to listen to what the local communities actually think and want and need. Everybody, from the Dutch of colonial times to the NGO's of today, "knows what's best" (shades of Alice Miller and her revealing the sinister side of "for your own good").
What's best often bears a strange resemblance to what's best for the rich developers rather than what's best for the locals. As indigenous people around the world describe the improving enterprise, "We had the land and they had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and they have the land."
Li is generous to the change agents--the colonial missionaries and developers, postcolonial government agents, and international development banks and conservation agencies. She credits them with a genuine desire to do good. Maybe it's just because I'm older and have seen more, but I suspect something else. It seems odd that all the mistakes are in one direction--i.e., to increase the wealth and power of the change agents or their backers.
Li does point out the role of both power games and unthinking prejudice against the poor, the uneducated, and the rural. Few people who have not lived and worked with rural Third World families know just how extremely sharp, competent, and aware these families are. Their poverty is the result not of their incompetence but of centuries of oppression and disease.
There are some limits to this book. I am not complaining--the book is long and detailed, and nobody can cover everything. Still, further work on the problems of Sulawesi is needed. First, there is little biology herein. The desperate need for conserving Sulawesi's biodiversity--its highly endemic flora and fauna--does not come through. The people were displaced from the national park, because of oppressive government and incredibly inept conservation NGO efforts; obviously, they had been coexisting with the biodiversity for at least 60,000 years, and may even have created a lot of it (there has been plenty of time for coevolution here). So somebody should have been working with them to find out what they were doing right, and then pay them to keep doing it. One thing they were doing right is growing some of the world's best coffee in the place. (Sulawesi's coffee is up there with the best of Colombian and Jamaican, and some of it--I hope some of the best--was growing in the park area.) Coffee goes well with wildlife, and good coffee deserves support anyway. Yet no one seems to have done anything to develop the organic/fair trade option (as has been done in many other countries).
Second, Li does not deal with the extensive critical literature on development (except for the Indonesia literature). One misses references to Tom Dichter, Joseph Stiglitz, Thayer Scudder, Jim Igoe, or dozens of others who have chronicled the well-meant (?) failures of development and of international conservation efforts. All the same problems have surfaced everywhere else, including the United States, from Appalachia to Alaska. They are endemic to bureaucratized, top-down, distant-office development plans. Li does point out that this point was being made in Dutch colonial literature 150 years ago--famously in the novel MAX HAVELAAR, still a good read, and, alas, still up to date--as Li points out, colonial policies go on. Meanwhile, many areas of the world develop, but only in so far as local people can take the initiative--find something that works for them, and develop it on their own. Where I work in Mexico, for instance, the government brought in citrus, but the locals found the markets and developed the efficient farming systems.
Finally, there is that motivation question. Change agents are often animated by a complex mix of motives. They want the best for "their people," but they also want to increase their own power and/or wealth, to advance their own agendas, to outcompete rival NGO's or agencies, and, alas, they sometimes want to bully the locals, or to cheat and rip and run. Governments, of course, want to assert power first, whatever else they may want. Li draws primarily on Michel Foucault for her theory, and thus is fine on the latter case--she is very aware of the structural imperatives of bureaucracy and the state. But the former is neglected. Max Weber's theories would have been very helpful here. He saw the emergent properties of bureaucracy (indeed, Foucault seems to have drawn on Weber pretty heavily) but Weber always grounded his theories in individual agency and psychology.
Thus, if you are even slightly interested in development and the environment, read this book! Read it along with some general works on development, and something on the biology of Sulawesi and why this is a desperate problem that goes far beyond the unfortunate people of Li's field work site. And, as you read, think how to reverse the decline of coffee there--I haven't had a really good cup of Sulawesi in years.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2008In characteristic style, Gene Anderson has written a great review of a great book. I would add (having read ch. 1-6)--along the lines of his comments on Foucault and Weber at the end--that this book draws upon Ferguson's Anti-Politics machine, and shares some of its shortcomings (see Lipton's review in Development Southern Africa ca. 1992): the accounts of the "developers" rest heavily upon a reading of official documents. Li points out repeatedly that conservation interventions avoid confronting the shortage of agricultural land, and thus "render technical" a set of political questions, but I'd like to hear--in the words of development planners--why they avoid the land issue, and how they justify this omission. Li provides great examples of speaking with villagers about the various interventions put in place, but rarely treats development workers in the same way -- they primarily appear through their documents, rather than as positioned social actors in the field. This asymmetry is frustrating -- it's understandable when she's dealing with historical material, but I had hoped the contemporary ethnography would be less textually-focused in its treatment of "developers."
- Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2014These provocative and ambitious ethnography offers a thick description of development projects in Indonesia. Document analysis, interviews, observations and conversations equip the author with information to form an opinion. Unfortunately, the writing fails to emphasize key examples, events and arguments. The excess of information, examples and focal points obscure the arguments.
Top reviews from other countries
- ÉmanuelReviewed in Canada on June 15, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Great !
- TOm KirkReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2014
4.0 out of 5 stars Bringing politics back in
Murray excellently reveals what is excluded from many past and present development schemes. A sometimes difficult but we'll argued read.