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Against Three “Cultural” Characters Speaks Self‐Improvement: Social Critique and Desires for “Modernity” in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in Contemporary China
Author(s) -
Hizi Gil
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1111/aeq.12366
Subject(s) - modernity , performative utterance , sociology , china , performativity , aesthetics , soft skills , socioeconomic status , interpersonal communication , gender studies , late modernity , social psychology , social science , psychology , epistemology , history , philosophy , archaeology , population , demography
Despite recent socioeconomic transformations, young adults in China construe local social norms as inhibiting their individualized selfhood. Based on a study of pedagogies of interpersonal “soft” skills, this article describes an apparatus of self‐improvement where self‐ and social critique play a pivotal role. Through comparison with Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” I illustrate that self‐improvement in China is largely oriented toward performative expressions that counteract the “local” rather than the habituation of virtues or skills.