Life/History: Personal Narratives of Development Amongst NGO Workers and Activists in Ghana

Abstract

Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes.

Qualitative Life Course Methodologies: Critical Reflections from Development Studies

“…7 7 Yarrow (2008) applies a similar approach to present life histories of NGO workers in Ghana, providing a single detailed case before moving on to more general, thematic analysis. …”

Your Shelter or Mine? Romantic Relationships Among the Homeless

“…Unstructured qualitative interviews and focus groups have been important methods of study in various social worlds such as religion, feminist movements, activist movements, criminology, and sobriety (Gilgun 2008;McAdams et al 2008;Mohatt et al 2008;Sampson et al 2006;Yarrow 2008). As noted earlier, there are surprisingly few studies that document the love life of homeless individuals.…”

Dialogical subjectivities for hard times: expanding political and ethical imaginaries of subaltern and elite Batswana women

“…Recent research in Africa has begun to look at the role of contemporary African elites, intellectuals, civil society pioneers and activists (e.g. Yarrow 2008, R. Werbner 2004, Hodgson 2008. 42 To conclude this article, I want to defend my argument, put elsewhere, that in a cosmopolitanising world of increased mobility and so-called space-time compression, there can be working-class cosmopolitans too who share a global subjectivity.…”