What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Achievement and Its Social Life
Nicholas J. Long & Henrietta L. Moore

Chapter 1. The Achievement of a Life, a List, a Line
Kathleen Stewart

Chapter 2. Against the Odds: A Professional Gambler’s Narrative of Achievement
Rebecca Cassidy

Chapter 3. Men of Sound Reputation: The Passionate Aurality of Achievement in Guyanese Birdsport
Laura H. Mentore

Chapter 4. Political Dimensions of Achievement Psychology: Perspectives on Selfhood, Confidence and Policy from a New Indonesian Province
Nicholas J. Long 

Chapter 5. Directive and Definitive Knowledge: Experiencing Achievement in a Thai Meditation Monastery
Joanna Cook

Chaqpter 6. Autism and Affordances of Achievement: Narrative Genres and Parenting Practices
Olga Solomon

Chapter 7. Achievement and Private Equity in the UK: A Game of Abstraction, Sociality and Making Money
Sarah F. Green

Chapter 8. For Family, State, and Nation: Achieving Cosmopolitan Modernity in Late-Socialist Vietnam
Susan Bayly

Chapter 9. Practicing Responsibilisation: The Unwritten Curriculum for Achievement in an American Suburb
Peter Demerath

Chapter 10. Competing to Lose: (Black) Female School Success as Pyrrhic Victory
Signithia Fordham

Notes on Contributors
Index