In Pursuit of Progress

Narratives of Development on a Philippine Island
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, In Pursuit of Progress explores myths, meanings, and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It does so by recognizing that, as a cognitive tool for organizing relationships between people, development is personal.
How are meta-narratives of development entangled in peoples identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit peoples histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for the future? The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinized as a Western metaphor ordering global difference and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. But how is development assimilated into the worldviews of developments subjects? How does it reshape identities and in what way