Intimate Economies of Development

Chris Lyttleton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia.

• Introduction  1. Ethnicity, Captical and the Architecture of Mobile Hopes and Dreams  2. Frontiers and Embodied Ambitions  3. Special Zones - Anomalous Spaces  4. Intimate Safeguards and Affective Politics of the Precariat  5. Poiesis of the Intimate Encounter: Dormitory Exchanges and Bed-sit Affairs  6. First do no Harm

A highly original and sometimes heartrending book. Lyttleton reconsiders the ways development projects and the global market are changing people’s lives in remote corners of Southeast Asia through the lens of intimacy and desire. In the context of development and migration, sex and affect are usually treated as epiphenomena of health, economics, or crime. Lyttleton places them at the centre, showing that intimate entanglements between strangers are crucial to understanding how contemporary globalisation actually works, not just in "global cities" but also along rural byways. Based on a deep understanding of the subject and written with palpable empathy, this is anthropology at its full potential.–Pál Nyiri, Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Simply outstanding. A real wakeup call demonstrating the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of poor people in Southeast Asia searching for a better life–Peter Aggleton, Professor in Education and Health, University of New South Wales, An original, provocative account of how individuals' desires and aspirations map onto and shape global circuits of value, development and modernization projects. Based on intensive, long-term fieldwork in places as diverse as rubber plantations to massage parlors located throughout the Greater Mekong sub-region, this "emotional" economy of development, where the material and the intimate intersect, provides rich theoretical insights and innovative methodological models for understanding the production and consumption of "progress." –Peggy Levitt , Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College and Harvard UniversityThis book offers fresh insight from the author’s long years of field research in Southeast Asia. The path-breaking connections between material and affective aspects of development allow us to probe deeper than is customary to understand the ‘side effects’ of development and clearly explain why many good projects failed miserably.–Yos Santasombat, Professor of Anthropology, Chiang Mai University