berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of illustrations

Preface: Verbal Sophisms and Problems with Capacity Building
Martha Macintyre

Introduction: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison
Rachel Douglas-Jones and Justin Shaffner

Chapter 1. Professionalizing Persons and Foretelling Futures: Capacity Building in Post-Earthquake Haiti
Kristin LaHatte

Chapter 2. Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
Andrea Ballestero

Chapter 3. Building Capacity in Ethical Review: Compliance and Transformation in the Asia-Pacific Region
Rachel Douglas-Jones

Chapter 4. Corrective Capacities: From Unruly Politics to Democratic Capacitación
Susan Ellison

Chapter 5. Capacity Building as Instrument and Empowerment: Training Health Workers for Community-Based Roles in Ghana
Harriet Boulding

Chapter 6. Personal and Professional Encompassment in Organizational Capacity Building: SOS Children’s Villages and Supportive Housing
Viktoryia Kalesnikava

Chapter 7. Community Capacity Building: Transforming Amerindian Sociality in Peruvian Amazonia
Christopher Hewlett

Chapter 8. ‘Integrating Human to Quality’: Capacity Building across Cambodian Worlds
Casper Bruun Jensen

Hope and Insufficiency

Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

Edited by Rachel Douglas-Jones and Justin Shaffner

180 pages, 4 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-099-1 Hb Published (September 2021)

eISBN 978-1-80073-101-1 eBook

Details

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

Rachel Douglas-Jones is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where she is currently the PI of Moving Data- Moving People, a study of emergent social credit systems in China through the lens of trust. Her recent publications include ‘Committee as Witness’ (The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2021) and she is the editor (with Antonia Walford and Nick Seaver) of Towards an Anthropology of Data (JRAI, 2021)

Justin Shaffner is a Research Associate at the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan where he focuses on issues related to the "future of work" and global commodity chains. He is editor (with Huon Wardle) of Cosmopolitics: The Collective Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperative, Volume 1 (OAC Press, 2017); and co-founder of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Subject: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

Area:

LC: HN49.C6 H659 2021

BISAC: SOC019000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Methodology; SOC002000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/General; SOC026000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/General