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Relation Flexibility: "Personality Development", Selfhood and the Limits of Theorising Neoliberalism in India

Srivastava, Sanjay

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, training programs for service-sector jobs have proliferated in India. Frequently referred to as “skills training,” these programs aim to overcome the perceived cultural and professional “deficiencies” of youth from the poorest sections of society. They focus on “soft skills” and “personality development,” teaching body etiquette, time discipline, and emotional control; introducing students to “global” cuisine and commodities; and developing English-language skills. How do the students in these programs make sense of attempts to train them in new dispositions? An ethnography of Indian skills training finds that capitalism's most marginal subjects creatively engage with its possibilities, in ways unaccounted for in arguments about the making of “neoliberal subjectivity.” For contexts like this—in which neoliberal processes may not necessarily produce neoliberal subjects—a more productive account is found in anthropological writings on split and partitioned selves as deliberate acts of self-making. Among Indian skills trainees, this may be conceptualized as “relational flexibility.”

Citation

Srivastava, S. (2022). Relation Flexibility: "Personality Development", Selfhood and the Limits of Theorising Neoliberalism in India. American Ethnologist, 49(4), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13101

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 22, 2022
Publication Date Nov 1, 2022
Deposit Date Oct 17, 2022
Publicly Available Date Oct 17, 2022
Journal American Ethnologist
Print ISSN 0094-0496
Electronic ISSN 1548-1425
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 49
Issue 4
Pages 1-13
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13101
Keywords skilling, soft skills, personality development, youth, selfhood, neoliberalism, work, India
Publisher URL https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13101

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