(유)The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics.

 

 

Tania Murray Li. Durham.

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

NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

 

 

 

아래는  BARBARA CRUIKSHANK(2010) 리뷰 글이다.

It is welcome and rare for a scholar to highlight what TaniaMurray Li calls the “witch’s brew” that constrains and poisons efforts to improve the landscapes, lives, and livelihoods of people and communities targeted for reform in Indonesia. The relentless land resettlement, unplannedmigration, boundary disputes and indigenous claims, development development schemes and violence, corrupt officials,missionaries, politically conscious and compliant villagers, economic interests and conservation schemes, and the multilayered histories of improvement schemes are the “witch’s brew” from which new improvement schemes draw their inspiration and into which they are just as likely to fall. It is even rarer for a scholar to embrace and effectively utilize those same constraints imposed on the scholar’s own wish to make the world a better place. Li makes a surprisingly strong claim for “scholarship that is not constrained by the telos of programming” (p. 282), that is, for scholarship that does not consult, judge, or aim to improve this or that improvement scheme; scholarship that does not have “real world” applications and ethnography that does not speak out in the voice of others can be, as it is in this case, profound and insightful. The messiness of actualities on the ground in the context of relations of rule, she argues persuasively, should be intrinsic to studies of government and development. The complexity andmessiness of politics on the ground not only confounds, it also illuminates the will to improve.

The Will to Improve will be taught and read alongside the works of James Scott, James Ferguson, Aiwha ong, and Timothy Mitchell, and others who weave ethnography, theory, and history together, for it is similarly crafted in many respects, clearly and well written. Li’s ethnography stands out for its careful study of governmental interventions inspired by Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose combined with illustrations of their entanglement in the historical ground on which they are enacted inspired by Antonio Gramsci, and for brutal accounts of their sometimes contradictory effects inspired by Marx. Instead of belaboring these inspirational currents, Li illustrates their uncertainties and their powers in the flow of a historically compelling and ethnographically detailed narrative of the will to improve. She reveals that while there is no unitary purpose driving the will to improve and no singular effect, there is a surprising continuity between colonial rule and contemporary development regimes. Without saying they are the same, because they vary in their methods, purposes, and effects, improvement schemes from colonial times to the present inevitably have winners and losers. This is not another study of governmentality that treats government broadly conceived and politics as conduct so much as it is about the conduct of politics per se.

The will to improve has, she argues, asserted itself in Indonesia for two centuries without cease, with only a
brief interruption under the ham fisted rule of Suharto’s New Order, from missionary Christianizing and civilizing missions to the introduction of liberal ideas to colonial projects of resource expropriation and state development plans and internationally funded development designs to empower villagers and protect natural resources. More often than not, improvement meant returning the people to their “natural” state of egalitarianism and harmony with nature, but that return was conceived as a technical and governmental project. Over that long stretch, billions have been spent, and countless lives and landscapes have been destroyed, uprooted, resettled, replanted, and improved with similar disastrous effects.

The brutal history of the will to improve in Indonesia is told with lively concision in the first three chapters, which seamlessly supplement the later ethnographic chapters, making the book useful for undergraduate teaching. Li is particularly careful in the next four chapters to transform the technical rendering of the targets of reform, people, and landscapes into ungovernable and unruly elements even when they are ordered and compliant. For example, the carefully drawn and well policed boundaries of Lore Lindu National Park by the World Bank and Indonesian state to preserve natural resources are traversed and invaded by other forces, including migrants, international agencies, natives, unruly officials, the forces of capitalism (commodities, production, distribution), and overcome by mudslides and competing environmental NGOs, among other forces. Similarly, villagersmight comply with resettlement schemes and countenance corrupt officials, but they also invade protected areas, profit, revolt, and organize. It is less that there are no clear forces of good or bad in her narrative than that all these forces are constrained by the “witch’s brew.” Li artfully combines the narratives of organized resistance such as the Free Farmers Forum with close readings of development plans and documents with practices of NGOs by documenting their mutual contention.

Extreme political and economic inequality in Indonesia is as long lived as the will to improve. At its most idealistic and pernicious, Li argues, the will to improve is a method of government aimed at restoring the targets of improvement to their natural state, imagined romantically as an egalitarian and cooperative tribe or an unspoiled and unchanging landscape. To bring back or bring out naturally present qualities, the will to improve imposes a technical solution. Li leads the reader to seek political solutions to problems, for a landscape that cannot be protected without destroying its ecology; for settling land disputes with no natural, legal, or indigenous claimant to land; for empowering communities with little in common and divided by land ownership, religion, history, gender, allegiance, among other divisions. Li does not aim to improve improvement. While there is no singular cause and, hence, no technical solution for the unintended consequences and failures of improvement schemes and no authoritative voice wemight use to command them more justly, we need desperately to understand the practice of politics. The Will to Improve rings with the promise held in the practice of politics even in the landscapes and lives of people devastated by two centuries of improvement.