ARI Working Paper Series

State-led community-driven development programs invite orang biasa (ordinary people) to become ‘developers’. Located between society and the state, this positioning offers certain possibilities for being and becoming: possibilities that may have been unobtainable to many prior to their involvement. This paper examines processes of self-becoming among volunteers in one such program in Medan, Indonesia. Rather than turn to analytical devices that indicate the disciplining of development subjects, I draw upon volunteers’ own understandings of personhood to reveal the program as a site for the enactment and realisation of a possible self. Volunteers are ‘called by the soul’ (terpanggil jiwa) to undertake this work. They respond to the affective and emotive signals of the heart (hati) that align the diri (self) with the jiwa (soul). In tracing their ‘becoming’ within the program, I hint at the implications for new forms of urban sociality in Medan at a time of shifting state-society relations in Indonesia.