Anthropology Seminar | “Self-improvement” and bifurcated experiences of social change in contemporary urban China
This paper discusses the relationship between practices of self-improvement and social change in China, particularly how pedagogies of self-making configure and reproduce certain experiences of “modernity”. It draws on fieldwork in workshops that foster interpersonal “soft” skills, showing how self-improvement, on the one hand, reinforces demands for self-reliance and market productivity, and, one the other …