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Title:Life/history: personal narratives of development amongst NGO workers and activists in Ghana
Author:Yarrow, ThomasISNI
Year:2008
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Volume:78
Issue:3
Pages:334-358
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:NGO
values
group identity
External links:https://doi.org/10.3366/E0001972008000211
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_the_journal_of_the_international_african_institute/v078/78.3.yarrow.pdf
Abstract:Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as 'activists' is examined in terms of the related concepts of 'ideology', 'commitment' and 'sacrifice'. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the 'life-history' as a way of introducing 'agency' that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as 'history' and 'society' and their own more 'personal' lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes. Bibliogr., notes, ref. sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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