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THE WILL TO IMPROVE: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. By Tania Murray Li. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. xii, 374 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4027-0.
The Will to Improveis a perceptive ethnography of "improvement," a receding horizon, continually strived for and redefined by colonial and postcolonial experts. In the name of development, conservation and community empowerment, these "trustees," as Tanya Murray Li calls them, engage in government, which Foucault described as the "right manner of disposing things" (6) . Li examines both the work of trustees and the imaginations and desires of those on the receiving end of their initiatives. The outcome is no romance of resistance; nor is it simply another piece of evidence that Foucault got it right.
Li's lucid introduction lays out the analytic commitments that inform her approach (27). Not only Foucault, but also Marx and Gramsci loom large in her discussion. Beginning with Marx's account of enclosure - the forced transition from common to private property rights in land - Li provides a creative synthesis of these thinkers' concerns. The commodification of land leads to the emergence of newly "improved" kinds of subjects who find themselves forced to "maximize" to survive. It exposes these subjects to new forms of violence, often sanctioned by the state. It also leads to the...