Social reproduction, situated politics, and The Will to Improve

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Focaal.The definitive publisher-authenticated version Li,Tania M. 2008. Social reproduction, situated politics, and The Will to Improve. Focaal 52: 111-118. is available online at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/ content/berghahn/focaal/2008/00002008/00000052/art00007In this essay I briefly explore three themes I find important for an engaged anthropology of development. First, social reproduction: Anthropologists have a long track record of examining processes of social reproduction—how it is that particular patterns of inequality are actively sustained through practices and relations at multiple scales (Smith 1999). Unless we understand the social forces responsible for poverty production, schemes for poverty reduction have no hope. Yet development programmers, constrained as they are by the need to find technical points of entry for their programs, seldom do this kind of analysis. Nor do many activists, who are committed to particular icons and issue-based campaigns. An engaged ethnography potentially rounds out their data, keeping issues of social reproduction in the field of vision