Hope, agency, and the 'side effects' of development in India and Papua New Guinea : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Manawatu campus, New Zealand

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of exceptional women organising for social change through grassroots-level development initiatives in education and incomegeneration in urban poor areas of Howrah and Kolkata (West Bengal, India) and Lae (Papua New Guinea). It explores the relationship between hope, agency, and development by investigating the historically specific circumstances and practices of women organising collectively as they struggle to create more meaningful lives for themselves, their families, and the larger communities in which they live. Research for this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with four grassroots organisations: two led by Muslim women in Howrah and Kolkata, and two led by Christian women in Lae. Data was gathered using a diverse portfolio of qualitative methods and analysed with a common conceptual framework that draws on Bourdieu’s theory of practice. This study combines analyses of historical processes, habitat, and structured social space with in-depth, place-based ethnography to show that as socially embedded beings, the culturally constructed ways in which we hope and act for development are lodged in social relations. It illustrates the dialectic relationship between structure and agency by showing how these active, articulate, intelligent women living in poverty sometimes reproduce the structural inequalities they are working to transform. This thesis identifies a number of ‘side effects’ of development, including collective hope and collective agency, which serve to sustain collective action in the face of adversity, hardship, and failure to achieve social change. It increases our understanding of development by offering a critical, comparative mode of scholarship that focuses on people’s hopes and agency and allows for a reading in terms of possibilities as well as success and failure.