Will to Improve
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.
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.