Funding Success: The Social Life of Achievement and Competitiveness in Vietnam and Indonesia
The UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has recently awarded £99,573 to two Cambridge social anthropologists, Dr Susan Bayly and Dr Nicholas Long, to conduct research on ‘The Social Life of Achievement and Competiveness in Vietnam and Indonesia’.
This project, which will run until October 2013, will investigate the changing ways in which Indonesian and Vietnamese individuals of divergent backgrounds and experience have understood the idea of ‘achievement’ over the course of their lives. What conceptualisations of achievement have been historically significant in both Vietnam and Indonesia? What conceptions of ‘achievement’ are emerging today – in a world where global performance indicators, such as the UNDP’s ‘Human Development Index’, measure the attainment, capacities, and ‘global competitiveness’ of whole populations and nation-states? In what ways might these ideas be contested, or countered through innovative new deployments of what it might mean to ‘achieve’? And what is the significance of these shifts for the lived experience of ‘achieving’?
Based in Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi and Indonesia’s borderland province of Kepri, the project will focus on the experiences of four particular groups: policy makers, who are devising strategies to increase achievement orientation and levels of attainment within their populations; teachers and pupils at high-profile ‘achievement schools’ which have been indicated as the birthplace of a more globally competitive generation; export workers, who have historically contributed to each nation’s economic growth but are now frequently being reclassified as ‘unskilled’; and religious and ritual professionals, who are variously seen as operating in a domain that lies outside parameters of ‘achievement’ or touted as a valuable ‘export commodity’ sporting unique forms of human capital such as psychic abilities.
Further details are available here.