| Summary: | "In 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba. It told the story of a self-sustaining and gender-equal community, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called 'Harmful Traditional Practices' did not exist. The narrative radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place. Soon, Awra Amba became a model for gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and well beyond. Based on ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Europe, the United States, and via the Internet, Marit Østebø uses the Awra Amba case as a point of departure to examine the widespread circulation and use of models and modeling practices in an increasingly transnational policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models--policy models that become 'viral', that spread widely across different localities through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organization to the Internet--this manuscript critically examines how the model paradigm plays out in contexts governed and informed by the politics of metrics and result-driven sustainable development goals. Østebø shows that while a model as a policy or policy tool may appear emancipatory from a global or national perspective, the consequences of being a model may be more ambivalent locally, increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. Village Gone Viral ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation and use of models as instruments for social change, that explores the power-knowledge effects of models, particularly those that offer themselves as liberatory, at multiple scales and in relation to various actors and media"--
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