Intimate Economies of Development

A highly original and sometimes heartrending book. Lyttleton reconsiders the ways development projects and the global market are changing people's lives in remote corners of Southeast Asia through the lens of intimacy and desire. In the context of development and migration, sex and affect are usually treated as epiphenomena of health, economics, or crime. Lyttleton places them at the centre, showing that intimate entanglements between strangers are crucial to understanding how contemporary globalisation actually works, not just in "global cities" but also along rural byways. Based on a deep understanding of the subject and written with palpable empathy, this is anthropology at its full potential.
-Pal Nyiri, Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam,

Simply outstanding. A real wakeup call demonstrating the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of poor people in Southeast Asia searching for a better life
-Peter Aggleton, Professor in Education and Health, University of New South Wales,

An original, provocative account of how individuals' desires and aspirations map onto and shape global circuits of value, development and modernization projects. Based on intensive, long-term fieldwork in places as diverse as rubber plantations to massage parlors located throughout the Greater Mekong sub-region, this "emotional" economy of development, where the material and the intimate intersect, provides rich theoretical insights and innovative methodological models for understanding the production and consumption of "progress."
-Peggy Levitt , Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College and Harvard University

This book offers fresh insight from the author's long years of field research in Southeast Asia. The path-breaking connections between material and affective aspects of development allow us to probe deeper than is customary to understand the 'side effects' of development and clearly explain why many good projects failed miserably.
-Yos Santasombat, Professor of Anthropology, Chiang Mai University

As a theoretical achievement illustrating the role of emotion, pleasure and desire in
processes of peasant dispossession, Intimate Economies of Development is remarkable.

- Barbara Andersen (2017) Intimate Economies of Development: Mobility, Sexuality and Health in Asia, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology