ASAA Southeast Asia Series – serie

Development promises higher incomes, better livelihoods, social justice and emancipation, but decades of good intentions have left hill communities in Northern Thailand with high rates of drug addiction and poverty, and a loss of traditional knowledge and values.A former volunteer and development specialist who spent much of her childhood in the region, Katharine McKinnon set out to consider what has gone wrong by studying professionals involved in development work. How, she asks, did the highlands come to be seen as needing development? And why did the presence of well-intentioned developers still leave behind so much apparent misery and hardship?Returning to the region to conduct an ethnography of development professionals, McKinnon found that the majority were dedicated to ideals of altruism, emancipation and advocacy for local people, and resigned to the inevitable failures and shortcomings that emerge when development efforts are co-opted by geopolitics.Her book is an account of the everyday efforts and struggles of those who 'do' development - consultants, researchers, government officials, NGO workers and village partners. Taking a critical approach to post-development theory, she argues that politics and ideology are an intrinsic part of development work, and argues that an active engagement with the politics of development is essential for professionals hoping to make a difference.

This is a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual, an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch-educated, Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a conservative society. This biography delves into its subject's interior life: the fears, doubts, confusions; the issues of sexuality, the mental breakdown, the jailing, the later success, joys and celebrity, as a historian, public intellectual and famous cook.This biography breaks out of the Indonesian Chinese category. It is primarily an Indonesian story. In its early chapters this biography reveals much about the 'sugar king' Chinese aristocracy of Indonesia, from the inside. In its later chapters this book shows much about the development of Indonesians writing their own post-colonial history, and the intellectual influences on this writing.Onghokham was a senior public intellectual with over 300 writings over 50 years, containing original insights into many varied Indonesian topics, including colonial history and its effects on modern politics and society; the Indonesian Chinese; 'outsiders' -- marginal people; the jago or brigand as people's champion; sexuality in Indonesia past and present; food; the Oedipus complex; painting; traditional Javanese beliefs from the palace to the peasant.