An ethnography of NGO practice in India: Utopias of development
ISBN: 9781526127549
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Manchester University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Sociology ; Anthropology;

Through an ethnographic study of the 'Barefoot College', an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. Paying particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings and discourses that they act to perform, this book offers a timely and novel approach to how the world of development NGOs and development ideologies work. The author argues that the College, as a prolific producer of various forms of development media, achieves its success through materially mediated heterotopic spectacles: enacted and imperfect utopias that constitute the desires, imaginings and Otherness of its society. The chapters that follow consider the different scenarios through which success was realised at the College.


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