Since the 1990s, training programs for service-sector jobs have proliferated in India. Frequently referred to as “skills training,” these programs aim to overcome the perceived cultural and professional “deficiencies” of youth from the poorest sections of society. They focus on “soft skills” and “personality development,” teaching body etiquette, time discipline, and emotional control; introducing students to “global” cuisine and commodities; and developing English-language skills. How do the students in these programs make sense of attempts to train them in new dispositions? An ethnography of Indian skills training finds that capitalism's most marginal subjects creatively engage with its possibilities, in ways unaccounted for in arguments about the making of “neoliberal subjectivity.” For contexts like this—in which neoliberal processes may not necessarily produce neoliberal subjects—a more productive account is found in anthropological writings on split and partitioned selves as deliberate acts of self-making. Among Indian skills trainees, this may be conceptualized as “relational flexibility.” [skilling, soft skills, personality development, youth, selfhood, neoliberalism, work, India]

中文翻译：

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关系灵活性

自 1990 年代以来，针对服务业工作的培训计划在印度激增。这些项目通常被称为“技能培训”，旨在克服社会最贫困阶层青年的文化和专业“缺陷”。他们专注于“软技能”和“个性发展”，教授身体礼仪、时间纪律和情绪控制；向学生介绍“全球”美食和商品；和发展英语语言技能。这些项目中的学生如何理解训练他们新性格的尝试？一项关于印度技能培训的民族志发现，资本主义最边缘的主体创造性地参与其可能性，其方式在关于“新自由主义主体性”的形成的争论中未得到解释。” 对于这样的背景——新自由主义进程不一定会产生新自由主义主体——在人类学著作中可以找到一个更有成效的解释，即分裂和分裂的自我是有意识的自我创造行为。在印度技能培训生中，这可能被概念化为“关系灵活性”。[技能，软技能，个性发展，青年，自我，新自由主义，工作，印度]