[Linganth] Aurora Donzelli's book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today Setrag Manoukian asks Aurora Donzelli about her book, Method of Desire
on the CaMP anthropology blog:

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb:

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone
a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal
reforms. In *Methods of Desire*, author Aurora Donzelli explores these
changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production
of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect
display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes
how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming
the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions,
and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and
restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely
overlooked aspect of the *Era Reformasi *concerns the transition from a
moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden
to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations.

The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that
followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives
and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja
highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of
audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the
deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The
spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction
surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising
auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists,
flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship,
political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the
longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge
and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these
foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a
peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago.

Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a
microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that
the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial
morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the
working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete
communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and
inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all
domains of life.
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