Time: Friday 13 April 3-5pm (in place of the Friday anthropology seminar)
Venue: Rm 1.04, Coombs Ext. Building, ANU
How are meta-narratives of development entangled in peopleâs identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit peopleâs histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for the future? The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinized as a âWesternâ metaphor ordering global difference and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. But how is development assimilated into the worldviews of developmentâs subjects? How does it reshape identities and in what ways is it reshaped in the process?
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, In Pursuit of Progress explores myths, meanings, and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It does so not only by considering development as planned, community-wide interventions aimed at society-wide improvements in living standards, but by recognizing that, as a cognitive tool for organizing relationships between people, development is personal. For Siquijodnon, development, or kalamboan, is also a process of self-transformation concerning changes in knowledge, body, roles, and cultural orientation. Emblems as diverse as skin color, Christianity, infant formula, and infrastructure make statements about development on Siquijor. Kalamboan is bound up with social mobility, consumption, and status, but so too is it imbued with ideals of the âsimple life,â a life of austerity and attention to social relationships, and with other assumptions about how people should live.
Author, Dr Hannah Bulloch, is a Research Fellow at the ANUâs National Centre for Indigenous Studies and a former DECRA Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology. At this paperback launch, Dr Bulloch will give a reading from the book, and perspectives on key aspects of the work will be provided by three speakers:
⢠Dr Anna Cristina Pertierra, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University, with expertise in Latin American and the Philippines.
⢠Ms Regina Macalandag Estorba, a PhD scholar in the ANUâs Crawford School, currently studying citizenship and the Badjao peoples of the Philippines.
⢠Associate Professor Patrick Guinness, a senior lecturer in ANUâs School of Archaeology and Anthropology, whose work focuses on the anthropology of development in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and East Africa.
Copies will be available for purchase at a special price. All welcome!