UC San Diego

In this dissertation I approach international development ethnographically as an ongoing fact of life for its subjects in the Hunza Valley of Northern Pakistan. Development in this context is not only a top-down project or set of institutions but as an arena for individual and collective critical and ethical engagement with a set of material possibilities and moral ideals. Through ethnographic examinations of particular ethical practices of giving or sharing labor in the context of the village, neighborhood and religious community; seeking education; and producing locality in the context of material heritage, I explore the ongoing, active negotiation of diverse temporalities, agencies, demands and possibilities associated with development. These practices offer sites to address questions central to the anthropology of ethics, including questions of freedom and reproduction; ethical subjects and their relations with others; and the temporality of ethical orientations. Seeing development as a structure of interaction between agencies (NGOs, governments, donors) and subjects. Such a perspective allows development to be seen as multiple projects rather than one and opens up the space to see what happens 'in the meantime' of development; to see it as a lived and changing set of relations between diverse external and internal agencies