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

Srivastava, Sanjay

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