The Social Life of Achievement / / ed. by Nicholas J. Long, Henrietta L. Moore.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Bayly, Susan,; Cassidy, Rebecca,; Cook, Joanna,; Demerath, Peter,; Fordham, Signithia,; Green, Sarah F.,; Long, Nicholas J.,; Mentore, Laura H.,; Moore, Henrietta L.,; Solomon, Olga,; Stewart, Kathleen,
• HerausgeberIn: Long, Nicholas J.,; Moore, Henrietta L.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology ; 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction Achievement and Its Social Life -- 1 The Achievement of a Life, a List, a Line -- 2 Against the Odds A Professional Gambler’s Narrative of Achievement -- 3 Men of Sound Reputation The Achievement of Passionate Aurality in Guyanese Birdsport -- Political Dimensions of Achievement Psychology Perspectives on Selfhood, Confidence and Policy from a New Indonesian Province -- 5 Directive and Definitive Knowledge Experiencing Achievement in a Thai Meditation Monastery -- 6 Autism and Affordances of Achievement Narrative Genres and Parenting Practices -- 7 Achievement and Private Equity in the U.K. A Game of Abstraction, Sociality and Making Money -- 8 For Family, State and Nation Achieving Cosmopolitan Modernity in Late-Socialist Vietnam -- 9 Practising Responsibilisation The Unwritten Curriculum for Achievement in an American Suburb -- 10 Competing to Lose? (Black) Female School Success as Pyrrhic Victory -- Notes on Contributors -- Index