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What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.
“The Social Life of Achievement is a very interesting and engaging collection, made up of 10 essays covering a very wide range of social achievement. The purpose of the book is to explore some forms of achievement rather than define what achievement is, and in this it succeeds by being thought-provoking and inspiring.” • Social Analysis
“The range of ethnographic settings is dazzling… there is something here for everyone and a veritable cornucopia for the lover of ethnographic diversity.” • American Ethnologist
“We measure our lives in terms of success without questioning what it actually means to achieve it. The essays in this groundbreaking book show that what we perceive as achievement is highly influenced by culture and that… for some people coming close to a desired goal can be rather traumatic. This compilation of highly original essays truly achieves in presenting a radically new view on the term that has dominated public discourse in today's society, but the meaning of which we too often take for granted.” • Renata Salecl, Birkbeck College, University of London
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Achievement and Its Social Life
Nicholas J. Long & Henrietta L. Moore
Chapter 1. The Achievement of a Life, a List, a Line
Kathleen Stewart
Chapter 2. Against the Odds: A Professional Gambler’s Narrative of Achievement
Rebecca Cassidy
Chapter 3. Men of Sound Reputation: The Passionate Aurality of Achievement in Guyanese Birdsport
Laura H. Mentore
Chapter 4. Political Dimensions of Achievement Psychology: Perspectives on Selfhood, Confidence and Policy from a New Indonesian Province
Nicholas J. Long
Chapter 5. Directive and Definitive Knowledge: Experiencing Achievement in a Thai Meditation Monastery
Joanna Cook
Chaqpter 6. Autism and Affordances of Achievement: Narrative Genres and Parenting Practices
Olga Solomon
Chapter 7. Achievement and Private Equity in the UK: A Game of Abstraction, Sociality and Making Money
Sarah F. Green
Chapter 8. For Family, State, and Nation: Achieving Cosmopolitan Modernity in Late-Socialist Vietnam
Susan Bayly
Chapter 9. Practicing Responsibilisation: The Unwritten Curriculum for Achievement in an American Suburb
Peter Demerath
Chapter 10. Competing to Lose: (Black) Female School Success as Pyrrhic Victory
Signithia Fordham
Notes on Contributors
Index