Development as pedagogy: On becoming good models in Japan and Myanmar

Abstract

Development as pedagogy:On becoming good models in Japan and Myanmar A B S T R A C TA key approach to development aid in Japan has been hitozukuri (making persons), which refers not only to the transfer of skills but also to the holistic cultivation of people. The Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), which emerged from a Shinto-based religious group, has been one of the leading NGOs in hitozukuri aid, training people in sustainable agriculture around the Asia-Pacific region. A central aspect of OISCA's activities consists of imitative practices such as "leading by example." Aid workers' efforts to become and adapt "good models" show how modeling practices are not standardizing but can, rather, be a lens through which to understand development work as a process of learning and making ethical subjects, a process that transforms both aid workers and aid recipients.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Paragi labels this cycle “aid for pain” and “pain for aid.” Similarly, Shea McManus () notes that humanitarian NGO work relies on the mutual dependence of exchange between “moral experts” and “suffering subjects.” Jenna Grant () takes up related questions about forms of exchange in aid work, emphasizing how technology configures different kinds of relationally produced publics. Chika Watanabe's () essay on a Shinto‐based development organization similarly considers forms of exchange, but, crucially, she demonstrates that pedagogies of modeling as an active intersubjective process at the organization's training centers aim to “make persons” and enact mutual, multidirectional transformation by embracing uncertainty. We gain additional tools to think through how people navigate unequal exchange from Mareike Winchell () in an essay that demonstrates how Quechua people in Bolivia find ways to address inequality through the terms of patronage obligations.…”

Aging in digital

“…Much of this is driven by assumptions about where neoliberalization actually takes place. Anthropological research linking neoliberal forms of agency and anxiety to practices of cultivating “entrepreneurial” or “corporate” selves frequently privileges sites of early‐career training and professional audits (Kipnis 2008; Matza 2012; Watanabe 2017). Critical assertions that anticipation and its associated affects should be treated as a looming hegemonic formation often assume that such spaces are crowded with young adults.…”

Being harmed while doing good: affective injuries in a community development programme, Medan, Indonesia

“…The difference between what I am suggesting and the ways anthropologists have examined moral dilemmas faced by development practitioners is modest, but has critical implications. The anthropology of morality has been generative of ethnographies exploring the competing moral logics that characterize the development arena, and the consequent moral uncertainties and dilemmas faced by aid practitioners (Arvidson ; Fechter ; ; Shutt ), and how these can be generative of new ways of being (Eyben ; Hoffman ; Watanabe ). Much of this literature takes Foucault's (; ) ethics and ‘care of the self’, or Giri and Quarles van Ufford's () normative reading of it, to unravel the reflective practices that aid practitioners do, or should do, as part of their work.…”

“…For BKM members, social and development activities can be a valuable means to practise the ‘care of the self’, or ethical self‐cultivation, in the sense used by Foucault: ‘an exercise of the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being’ (: 282). Foucault's formulation of ethics has proven useful for understanding the motivations and practices of volunteers and development practitioners (Allahyari ; Arvidson ; Hoffman ; Watanabe ). The moral ambiguity that is characteristic of humanitarian and development arenas (Hilhorst & Jansen ; Long ; Shutt ) makes them particularly fecund sites for reflexive practices as part of ethical self‐cultivation.…”