Events

PROGRAMME

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Michelle Ann Miller, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Methods of Desire offers an innovative understanding of neoliberalism by locating its production in novel ways of using language. Focusing on how people desire and on the methods they use to voice their expectations within Indonesia’s emergent democracy and neoliberal restructuring, the book examines the transition from a moral regime centred on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to the new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork in the Toraja highlands, the author argues that the proliferation of specific genres of discourse, which pivot on new metrics of desires, emerging standards of accountability, and on a novel emphasis on personal intentions are a key yet largely overlooked aspect of post-Suharto Indonesia. Customer satisfaction surveys, electoral mission statements, checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams play a key role in the consolidation of neoliberal rationalities. The book examines how these foreign protocols are received, absorbed, and readapted in a self-identifying traditional community, and explores the dynamics of collusion and collision underlying their uptake. Marked by the social avoidance toward the expression of personal desires and by a political culture based on social hierarchy, secrecy, and fatalism, Toraja offers a salient context where to examine the transformations currently ongoing in Indonesia. Combining a telescopic perspective on the systemic dynamics of our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices in an area of the global South, the book argues that neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER & DISCUSSANT

Aurora Donzelli is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in upland Sulawesi and undertook a multi-sited project on the postcolonial Lusophonic imagination in Portugal and East Timor. Her published work concerns political oratory and ritual speech; the intersection between grammar and local theories of moral and political agency; language, race, and ethnicity in insular Southeast Asia. She received her BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Pavia and her PhD in anthropology from the University of Milan Bicocca. She held research and teaching appointments in Singapore (ACM), London (SOAS), Lisbon (ILTEC), and Milan (Bicocca) and is the recipient of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His current research explores the subjective and ideological dimensions of language in the political economy, with a focus on the context of neoliberalism and transnationalism. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton, 2009), Markets of English (with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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