Re:Wiring Bodies
http://editors.cis-india.org
Asha Achuthan initiates a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. Tracing the history from nationalist debates between Gandhi and Tagore to the neo-liberal perspective based knowledge produced by feminists like Martha Nussbaum; Asha’s research offers a unique entry point into cyberculture studies through a feminist epistemology of science and technology.
daily12011-07-28T03:29:13ZRe:wiring Bodies: Call for Review
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review
<b>Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India.</b>
<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.</p>
<p>Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Her work at the Centre for Contemporary Studies (IISC, Bangalore) gives a further context to unpack Internet Technologies in a larger context of Technology-Society interface. This original monograph draws from Gender studies, STS research, extand policies, empirical data, Cultural Studies and Feminist epistemological of Sciences, to build a new knowledge framework to address the Internet questions which popular cybercultures or mainstream media studies have ignored.</p>
<p>The monograph by Dr. Asha Achuthan, has emerged out of the "Rewiring Bodies" project which started nine months ago. The project has involved many public entries available at http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.</p>
<ul><li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/re-wiring-bodies.docx" class="internal-link" title="Re:wiring Bodies Word">Word</a> [word file, 339 kb]<br /></li><li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/re-wiring-bodies.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Re:wiring Bodies PDF">PDF</a> [PDF, 712 kb]<br /></li></ul>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyborgsHistories of InternetResearchers at WorkInternet Histories2015-04-03T10:50:15ZBlog EntryAlternatives? From situated knowledges to standpoint epistemology
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology
<b>The previous post explored, in detail, responses to science and technology in feminist and gender work in India. The idea was, more than anything else, to present an 'attitude' to technology, whether manifested in dams or obstetric technologies, that sees technology as a handmaiden of development, as instrument - good or evil, and as discrete from 'man'. Feminist and gender work in India has thereafter articulated approximately four responses to technology across state and civil society positions - presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The demand for presence of women as agents of technological change, the demand for improved access for women to the fruits of technology, the demand for inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by technological amendments, and a need for recognition of technology’s ills particularly for women, and the consequent need for resistance to technology on the same count. Bearing in mind that women’s lived experiences have served as the vantage point for all four of the responses to technology in the Indian context, I will now suggest the need to revisit the idea of such experience itself, and the ways in which it might be made critical, rather than valorizing it as an official counterpoint to scientific knowledge, and by extension to technology. This post, while not addressing the 'technology question' in any direct sense, is an effort to begin that exploration.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One should
expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces,
on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural
objects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>
(Haraway 1991: 163)</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>On the question of experience. This one statement
subsumes several questions, on politics, on knowledge, that I have been trying
to raise in this project. What I have been calling the old ideological model of
critique – the possibility of critique from the vantage point of a coherent set
of material interests – was also tied to a model of knowledge, a model that
said – <em>I know, you do</em>. This
constituted the rationale for the vanguard, this constituted the knowledge of
oppression. For a feminism having drawn from Marxist legacies of politics, this
then was the model to be adopted, and </strong>the politics around
women’s lives that gave birth to this entity, feminism, and has nurtured it
ever since, definitionally became that benevolent umbrella, that liberatory
tool, that protects those lives and inserts itself into them (the personal must
be politicized). Having identified the problems of vanguardism during the
post-nationalist, subaltern turn, however, a portion of the rethinking Left<strong> <em>and</em> a global,
universalist feminism may consider that what remains for us to do or think is a
turn to experience. The slogan changed; it became – <em>we all know, together</em>. Both these moves were, however, hyphenated
in the premise of ‘one knowledge’. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>There were several moves critical of ‘one
knowledge’. Those that took the ‘Third World’ route either proposed a
‘different reason’, a different canon, an alternative system (as postcolonial
scholars sometimes did), or articulated a politics of complete heterogeneity that
held knowledge as necessarily provisional and separate from a rationale for
politics (as did those that took on the name ‘third world feminism’). A third
position here was of <em>I know mine, you
know yours, there can be no dialogue</em>. For this school of knowledge, the
experience of oppression was necessary, and sufficient. The consciousness of
oppression, which was ex-officio, offered knowledge. The community of knowers
here was a closed community. Asserting that the ‘one knowledge’ claim rested on
the active exclusion of other knowledges, it suggested a remaking of ‘low
knowledge’ through the <em>experience of
oppression</em>. This is the impulse </strong>that starts, and ends, with
the embodied insider, speaking with[in] and for itself, a complete closed
community. This impulse we have seen with respect to sexual minorities, women,
the subaltern – an impulse also tied to the organic or pastoral as opposed to
the technological, an impulse sometimes tracing direct connections with a
cultural past, and often offering a choice <em>between
systems of knowledge</em>. The above mentioned third worldist positions
sometimes tied up with this third position, proposing a politics of coalition
while keeping knowledge bases separate (as in third world feminisms), or
realizing implicit connections between ‘low knowledge’ practices and an
alternative system of knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While I have made no
attempt here to directly examine the complex of phenomena often referred to by
the short-hand ‘globalization’, I will now refer back to my first mention of
development as a practice and to the gender work that involves itself with
disaggregated description as part of this phenomenon. The reaction to the
ideological has meant, in this frame, a shift from politics to self-help, from
the ideological to the intuitive, where the intuitive is taken as a flat
description of immediate reality as experience. While it might be tempting to
read this immediate everyday reality as organic, whole, feminine, and often
able to escape an overdetermination by patriarchal norms,<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
the new gender analyses do not necessarily rely on organicity. Rather,
politics, or the politics of representation, have shifted, as Haraway notes
with deadly precision, to a game of simulation in what she calls the
“informatics of domination”, and the new gender analyses are as much part of it
as any other (recall Van Hollen’s terms – culture-in-the-making, “processural”,
etc). While none of this new critical scholarship addressing development or
technology actually denies domination or power, it has contributed to making it
so increasingly difficult to define or identify, as to make counter-hegemonic
attempts appear very nearly anachronistic.<strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>What, then, of alternatives? After a rejection of
those feminist strands that seek to build a common, sometimes homogenous <em>narrative of</em> <em>feminine experience</em>, and of gender analysis that thrives on the
heterogeneity of <em>women’s experiences</em>,
but yet agreeing with the need to “speak from somewhere”, as against older
models of one knowledge that offered a “view from nowhere”, a neutral view,
what could be the nature of this critique?</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>I would suggest that it will have to be a <em>re-turn to experience, </em>a re-cognition, <em>rather than a turn</em>.<em> </em>That we pay attention not only, or not even so much, to the
fractured narrative offered by the wide variety or heterogeneity of experience,
as to its possible <em>aporicity</em></strong><a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a><strong> in dominant frames, so as to enact such a re-turn
treating the perspective of the excluded, aporetic experience as momentary
resource – not authentic, fixed, or originary, but appropriate.</strong><a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a><strong> Drawing on Haraway’s suggestion of a gift of
vision, of situation as a visual tool, this would mean a momentary cognizance,
a momentary gift of ab-normal vision – abnormal by way of not making sense in
dominant frames – that could describe the dominant in terms different than its
own, as also point to other possibilities. This would mean, most importantly
for a notion of the political, a shift from marginality to aporicity as a
vantage point for critique.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Perspective, here, would therefore take on the third
of three possible meanings,</strong><a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> <strong>as the fantastic spur within the dominant, </strong>as
a moment of seeing, of ‘possession’,<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><strong> </strong></span>that can be lost in the
looking. In this sense, it is also not possible to map perspective onto
identity or individual taste. Perspective as that moment of possession not only
gives a completely different picture of things, it also gives a picture not
available from anywhere else – that makes visible the dominant as such, as that
which had rendered invalid other possibilities. This invalidation, this
exclusion, could then be understood differently from a removal from circulation
of that which is disobedient – “At my heel, or outside”, as Le Doueff puts it;
it is better understood as a constitutive or primary exclusion with an entry
later on the dominant’s terms. As Le Doueff puts it again, “Outside, or at my
heel.”<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> <strong>Here I find useful, as a beginning, the model of the
excluded available within feminist standpoint theory, of the woman as ‘outsider
within’.</strong><a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a><strong> </strong>While this formulation evokes a
degree of unease about whether this social location can be enough as a starting
point (whether women then always have to be the outsiders within to be able to
speak from this space), it offers, I think, valuable clues for working toward a
possible model of feminist critique. To understand this, we need to understand,
also, that the issue here is not only that of recognizing hierarchies, nor is
it about building a stand-alone alternative system of knowledge that may be
called feminist. The very first example I gave in this post, of the clinical
consultation that turned into a conversation, tries to demonstrate this.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The very notion of a
feminist standpoint would be then the act of interpretation that puts this
positioning, this transient possession, to work, not a place already defined,
as earlier understandings of standpoint would have; this process involves the
production of an attached
model of knowledge that begins from perspective, one that requires a
speaking from somewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Such a speaking from
somewhere obviously requires a conceptualization of this ‘somewhere’; in other
words, a fidelity to context. Here context, I would suggest, is not (only)
about date-time-place, such that a concept of ‘one knowledge’ can be critiqued
from a situation. It is most importantly about relationality, the space between
you and me, both intra-community and inter-community. Once we take cognizance
of this, we realize that that space does many things – it induces a porosity of
boundaries (body, community), it creates attachment, it also creates
separation. With this in mind, we then have to talk of building a story from
perspective, where it is the <em>turning from
within outward</em> (from attachment to separation) that does the work of
building the story. Such a standpoint ‘is’ only in the <em>constant interrogation</em> of both dominant discourse – masculinist
Marxist discourse, <em>and of the category of
resistance</em> – feminism – within which it may be named. (This will have
resonances with the monster album of feminist stories that we began writing last
year).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What we may have to gain from an attention
to either consultations or conversations, then, is not so much the shift in
form that we have made in moving from one to another, but the recognition of
the fantastic perspective as a visual tool.
Perspectives are made fantastic by their positioning in an imbrication
of power <em>and</em> meaning; and unless the
position is required to be static through any counter-hegemonic exercise, they
cannot be the source of a permanent identity, nor an alternative system. I
present my report on the <em>dai</em> training
programme, then, in a different detail and from a different perspective than as
a look at indigenous systems of health or as a lesson to be learnt from women’s
experiences, or indeed as an essentially feminine perspective. What I call the
allegory of women’s lived experience serves, for me, as a test case, an example
of the fantastic perspective that both helps provide a different picture of the
dominant, and a glimpse of other possible worlds. I will attempt to delineate
this in more detail now, but would like to put in a statutory warning prior to
the attempt.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Min(d)ing
the turn</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Does this re-turn to experience that I have
talked about show up in individual <em>dai</em>
experience? Is this a concrete turn, something that can be applied in
straightforward ways? We turn to the Bengali Marxist who tried to find a
subaltern Lenin –</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The concept
of the outside as a theoretical category is rooted in the concept of abstract
labour as opposed to concrete labour. Concrete labour, located within
particular industries, is within the sphere of production; abstract labour is
not. … It is situated where, as Lenin puts it, all classes meet – outside the
sphere of production.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (Chaudhury 1987: 248)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chaudhury is using the concept to gently
remind the Subaltern School of the difficulty of positing a ‘subaltern
consciousness’ as a separate domain, or the equal difficulty of speaking of
inversion, in other words revolution, from this vantage point. For my purposes,
the turn from within outward faces the same difficulty. It is a turn that has
to be mined for its possibility, not one that offers, straightforwardly, the
description of a different world.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Marking the turn: returning to the conversation</em></strong><strong><em></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In what might perhaps be an unwarranted dissection of events, but one
useful for our purposes nonetheless, let us go back to the <em>dai</em> training programme, mapping onto my narrative of it the
paleonymies and possible difficulties of such a narrative. I have refrained
from relating to this exercise as either participant observation (in
anthropological mode) or as case study (the qualitative approach in medical
parlance). Both of these, positioned at the same end of the methodological
spectrum, were efforts that came up to serve a need for ‘qualitative’ analysis
– the latter from within the scientific establishment, the former from within
the social sciences. In its acting out, however, there is an effort to capture
the microcosm that is a stepping away from earlier structural analyses; and a
meshing of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, a moving away from complete objectivity,
that all self-respecting qualitative analyses undertake. These analyses are
also an attempt to either expand or critique complete objectivity. This is what
I have in mind when I refer to that time as ‘conversation’ rather than
‘consultation’. What I am attempting here is a further<em> bracketing of that effort</em>, a bringing to bear, on the
conversations, the weight of my identification of the problems with existing
frames of critique that I have identified in the project. This is so that what
I have been laying down as a different contour of critique, finds its
possibility. To perform such a bracketing, I use the narrative of my experience
with the <em>dais</em> as a template within
which I identify moments of the anthropological narrative, and from which I
move towards a different possibility.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This exercise will involve, therefore, as I have stated, through a
re-turn to experience, a re-examination both of dominant discourse and of the
category of resistance within which it has been named. Such a re-turn will mean
an attention to experience – not as narrative, resistant or otherwise, nor as
fractured and unpredictable, but as aporetic – as affording a fantastic
perspective on the dominant that had hitherto appeared as normal. An attention
to the fantastic perspective will result in a turn from within (a community)
outward – a different notion of the political from that of either
organizational, organic, or individual responses. It is, however, a notion that
is hardly structural, a notion of the political as interpretation, but one that
will have to be done each time. With these telegraphic steps in order, let us
proceed. <strong>We had started the classes
from the <em>dais’</em> voices – what they had
written or what they had to say regarding their experiences with the births
they had attended. The attendant presumption on both sides was that these
voices were constituted by experience, the only prerogative of those
uninitiated into <em>method</em> – <em>mukkhu sukkhu manush </em>(the unlearned
people). I then set about introducing a gentle reworking of the boundaries of
this category “experience” – till its quarrels with “method” had diminished to
negligible levels.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>How did I rework these boundaries? What
were the contexts in which this was made possible? What were the terms of
reference for the exchange between “experience” and “scientific method” that
placed each, firmly, on a particular side of the divide between the untrained <em>dai</em> and the development expert, the body
and the mind, the sensible and the transcendental? </strong>Several notions of the feminist political are at work here, working
vis-à-vis dominant and other responses to the experience question. The
responses may be charted in the following way. In the turn to experience as
narrative, feminism has addressed the representation of the female body. The
“female body”, we have seen, is the site for the understandings as well as
operations of science (with its invisible qualifier Western). In its project of
defining the form and delineating the workings of the female body, this body of
knowledge enjoys the status of a value-neutral, objective method that
purportedly bases itself on solid empirical evidence to produce impartial
knowledge. In the case of the female body, it would then appear that science
has <strong><em>found </em></strong><strong>it<em> </em>exclusively and powerfully fashioned by
<em>nature</em> to bear and nourish children;
in the event, all it is doing is putting the facts before us.</strong><a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a><strong> Feminist engagements have sought to detect several
disclaimers to the purported value-neutrality of science. For one, the standard
body is that of the male, by which the female body is judged small, inferior,
or deviant; and through this a subtle process of othering or exclusion of the
woman is instituted <em>within science</em>.
Further, accounts of the workings of the body, its organs, its reproductive
processes, are strewn with gendered metaphors that privilege the male as
decisive, strong, productive, and the female, as complementarily passive,
wasteful, unreasoning.</strong><a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a><strong> In the event, this part of the feminist project has
been to make explicit the hidden cultural weight of scientific knowledge.
Further, in addressing the methods of science itself, feminism has pointed to
the homogenization inherent in the manner in which the scientific concept of
the “female body” is derived. It is somewhat against this authoritative,
homogenising strain that women’s bodily experiences are posited</strong><a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a><strong> in feminism – as something that is not only missed
in science’s project of objectivity but something that is excluded from or unable
to articulate itself in and through science’s abstractions. In the event, the
experience of the “woman” within science is seen as that which, through the
explicit introduction of an apparently inassimilable, pre-discursive
subjectivity, questions the <em>explanatory</em>
potential of science, while also offering possibilities for agency. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There are certain
collusions in the goals of these two projects, however, that bear looking at.
Both are moving toward a single truth, whether derived from scientific theory
or subjective experience, which they alone can represent. To this end, both
homogenize and both declare the undisputed presence of this ‘reality out there’
that can be represented without mediations. And from here also flows a claim to
objectivity. If science posits a naturalized universal female body, experience
would posit the “woman” universalized through socialization. No experience can
exist here outside narrative history, unless as aporia – the seemingly
insoluble logical difficulty. One would then derive that if scientific theories
are built on exclusions, so is the category “experience”. If science claims
value-neutrality, a simple valorization of experience ignores the “historical
processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experience”.
In the process, both science and experience in turn achieve status as
categories, homogenous and uniform in themselves. Both become discourses that
have the right to regulate entry, so that what counts as science or experience
becomes the qualifying question.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">If we then conclude
that there is in this separation a certain essentializing of categories that
ignores their very constitutions by the other, as also their constructions
through cultural intelligibility, several questions arise. Can experience be
that essential outside of Science that can grant agency? Or would it be also
explicable as reflective of hegemonic norms that grant the sensible body as
“women’s generic identity in the symbolic” while retaining a masculine topology
for Science? This brings us to another feminist cognition of experience as
constituted by history, circumstance, and <em>as</em>
circumscribed by the norm as outside it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">But, caught as I was
between the conventional registers of science and feminism, I kept falling
backwards into the question of results, and their reflection on validity.
Experience, it would seem, was faulty by virtue of its very constitutivity,
while science continued to look rigorous and unbiased. As critical courier of
scientific knowledge, I thought I was trying to weave myself into the discourse
of the <em>dais</em> with minimum damage to
their framework, and to that end I had decided to keep the question marks alive
throughout, directing them towards science as well. But as I sat down to look
at the assessment sheets on the afternoon of the first day’s session, ‘I’ was
fairly stunned. Of the ten questions put to the dais, one was worded as follows
–</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">If the child does
not cry soon after birth, we must –</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">a] say prayers
over the baby</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">b] perform
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">c] rush the baby
to the nearest health centre</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">d] warm the
placenta in a separate vessel.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">Almost all 46 of the
dais had affirmed the last answer. I remembered the asphyxiated babies that
used to be rushed to the nursery in Medical
College from the labour
room that was on another floor. I remembered the bitter debates as to why the
nursery was not stationed nearer the labour ward so that we could lose less
time in resuscitating them. I decided this could not be allowed to pass. And I
conducted the classes accordingly. When we repeated the written examination at
the end, none had ticked the last answer, and I was both relieved and
vindicated. Until I had come away, still thinking, and then I realised that I
had succeeded only because I had adopted a more positivist, authoritarian
approach – right and wrong – to get across. And why had I done that? I
realized, again, that with all my criticality, I was very much a scientific
subject, and not merely because of my disciplinary training. I had retained
reflexivity and criticality for as long as there was non-contradiction. Beyond
that, I stayed put – well within Science. I too had my experiences – I could
look at them as inseparably constituted by my production as scientific subject.
But I had been trained to look otherwise – at experience as empirical evidence
of theory. And there I was.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">In current
development policy, though, there is not so much the suppression of subaltern
voice as its making visible in extensions of scientific discourse. <strong>It has become part of development policy to include
women’s voices in their own development; the ‘third world woman’ is no longer
considered to have no voice. On the contrary, she has a <em>specific</em> voice that is apparently being heard now in development
projects in the third world. In order to articulate this voice, however, she
must have the capability to streamline it, make it universally understood as
well as reasonable, and this is the cornerstone of the ‘capabilities approach’.
Here the <em>dai, </em>once named as
dependable repository of traditional knowledge, can now be appropriated by
notions of development flowing from liberal theories, for she also represents,
in this frame, the rigid face of patriarchal traditions that have not given the
woman voice. Development here is taken to mean empowerment – a granting, or
rather restoration, of voice to the woman hitherto suffocated by tradition –
and it is to this end that the efficient model of scientific method may be
adopted. The old order will indeed change, for the <em>dais</em> … </strong><em>Aage ek rakam chhilo … ebar anya
rakam korte hobe</em><a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10"><sup><sup>[10]</sup></sup></a><em>… </em>but that
is hardly an exchange of tradition for modernity, or of experience for science;
it is an accommodation of one by the other. In the pluralism of current
development discourse, the <em>dai</em> is a figure
who exists before context, occupies an underprivileged class position, and has
a voice that may be heard or streamlined into the mainstream.<em></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">And in feminism,
despite, or after, the recognition of ‘women’s experience’ as constitutive of
hegemonic norms, there is a renewed positing of experience as resistant, as the
natural habitat, perhaps, of the woman …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is of course clearly
in evidence in what I have called the global feminist undertaking, which is
most well argued for philosophically in Nussbaum’s work, and most tellingly
represented in her examination and insertion of ‘Jayamma-the-brick-kiln-worker’
– who <em>cannot</em> <em>not</em> have a body that speaks – into the lexicon<em> </em>of development literature. As ‘third world women’s practices’ that
contribute to culture-in-the-making, it is visible in the gender work that I
have talked about.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What of my
‘conversations’ with the <em>dai</em>? As
medical-professional-feminist-addressing-gendered-subaltern, I recognized and
tried to steer clear of the various precipitations of such a binary; I ended,
however, looking for a connection <em>through
experience </em>between the ‘professional’ and the ‘unlearned’; for an essence
to the feminine, perhaps, or to woman in the Symbolic. The earlier legacy of
experience, then, inheres here; in asking questions of an epistemic status for
experience, in the anxiety of not being able to accord it equal validity, in
looking for a separation between feminist critical projects and dominant
discourse through a recourse to a feminine difference which will be different
from the place accorded to women in the patriarchal Symbolic.<a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
Most telling, perhaps, it inheres in the anxiety over the similarity or
otherwise of perspective between the (feminist) professional and the (woman) <em>dai</em> … one that presumed that the origins
of an organic connectedness was to be found in the unspoilt <em>dai</em> who talked of <strong><em>meyeder
meyeder katha.</em></strong><a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a><strong><em> </em></strong><strong>So </strong><strong>t</strong><strong>he first attempt that the <em>dais</em> made to connect with me was through <em>abhigyata</em> – experience.<em> </em>And<em> </em>the overwhelming feeling at the end of
those 6 days amongst the <em>dais</em>, and in
me, was of a solidarity that had perhaps been established. A solidarity across
boundaries of authority (though not disruptive of it in any way), across
science, across different experiences. But … where then are feminist projects
going to differ from development initiatives? What do third world women want,
if one may ask the blasphemous question, a question that gathers momentum,
nevertheless, in the context of first world vanguardism. Can the solution be
that we must give up on capability altogether as a universal? While accessing a
connectedness that would not mean the place accorded to women in the
patriarchal Symbolic would definitely be a move, where would this connectedness
be situated? If not in family or traditional community, would it be in some
other sense of being together? Will we seek to continue its residence in women?
Will we travel from an erasure of experience, the feminine, the subjective, to
an essentialising of the same? Will women be the “embodied others, who are not
allowed <em>not</em> to have a body, a finite
point of view”? If so, are we still going to stay with the biological body as
pre-discursive resource of experience?
And if science is to remain the ultimate arbiter, is experiential agency
then to be only the aporia, showing up as resistances through gaps in policy,
that must let be, or can there be a feminist policy-framing that can work on
the aporicity of experience? </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>What of collaboration? Caught between the
conventional registers of science and feminism, where science is about
knowledge and feminism about politics, not only is the <em>dai’s</em> experience waiting to be rehabilitated within science but
also within feminism. While the mainstream policy dialogues with science remain
at the level of “filling in gaps in manpower”, the philosophies of science
attempt to talk about whether “midwives’ tales” might be justified – questions
of validity. The politics of inclusion have operated to bring ‘low knowledges’
into circulation, and feminism must be the natural host to these politics in a
frame where feminism is about politics and about women. Hence the whole debate
about representation – institutional science versus the <em>dai</em>, the <em>dai</em> as gendered
subaltern versus the third world feminist, that populate the space of critique
of knowledge by politics, of science by feminism. The questions therefore
continue to be – In frames where the <em>dai</em>
as “gendered subaltern” has been appropriated into governmental apparatuses,
and <em>made to speak</em> that language, are
conscious tools of collaboration with the master’s discourse available to her?
Or is this the tool lying there for the <em>feminist</em>
to pick up, to create a discursive space of negotiation for ‘third world
feminisms’? Is this, then, yet a battle for representation, a vanguardism, a
speaking for that continues to slip into a speaking of, where third world
feminists freeze their examinations of their own enmeshedness or location in
their negotiations with global feminism and global development? Is such a
freezing inevitable? Or is the <em>dai</em> as
gendered subaltern as much outside third world-first world feminist
negotiations as outside empire-nation exchanges?</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But there is also a
question here of the continuing separation of experience and knowledge. If
these attempts to rehabilitate experience seem to be at the level of according
it equivalent status to knowledge, thus actually keeping alive the binaries
feminism has been straining to step out of, what of experience as condition of
knowledge-making? The aporicity of experience I speak of might be a beginning.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Having
identified these existing trajectories for feminist critiques of science in the
Indian context, therefore, I pick up on the gaps in the quintessentially
anthropological narrative, to bring back the question of aporicity. We have
spoken extensively of the fractured narrative. Rather than the fractured <em>narrative</em>, however, it might be the <em>fracture</em> we need to speak of now. And
rather than look at women as being essentially capable of <em>mimetisme</em>,<a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
and therefore as the essential content of fracture, it might be useful to
access the moment of fracture, using as allegory, not narrative resource, the
responses of the <em>dais</em> to the
reproductive health apparatus, or the bizarre consultation between the
recalcitrant mother and the female physician. It might not be the connectedness
between me and the <em>dai</em> as women,
then, that will serve as my resource, but our very asymmetry of dialogue, our
seeming separation. This might be the fantastic perspective that must be worked
on, in feminism, to create the discursive space required to articulate the
inversion – an overturning of the dialectic of one knowledge – that Chaudhury
(2000) speaks of. Such a concentration on momentary fractures, disallowing as
it does a final and fixed concentration on ‘woman’, or a continuing separation
of registers between politics and knowledge on account of the ‘fantastic’
perspective opening up a fresh vantage point both of knowing and critique of
possible worlds, I submit, would constitute what I have been calling a feminist
standpoint epistemology.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> There is a wealth of theorizations on the
feminine, not going for such a simplistic reading of experience or the
everyday. Feminist work in India
that looks at autobiographies, for example, has taken on the notion of the
everyday as a fraught space, but also a liberating one, following on the
re-reading of the personal as the political. Parallels with theorizing in
western feminism may be found where the spectrum has, in talking of women’s
experience, included a valorizing, as in Adrienne Rich’s description of the
experience of motherhood in the Anglo-American second wave of feminism (1986),
as also a speaking of the body, of corporeality, of embodiment, and of
subjectivity as a foil to identity (as in the French feminist school, where
notions of touch as against vision [Luce Irigaray], of ‘there being no place
for woman’ in the patriarchal Symbolic’ and women needing a different Symbolic
to ‘be’[Irigaray], have been suggested. The subjectivity-identity theorization
also recalls the <em>sati</em> debates). This
has proceeded to either pit experience against ‘abstract reason’, or to
demonstrate, more interestingly, how reasonableness is itself infected by bias,
in some cases a ‘male sexualization’ (Grosz 1994). Other powerful analyses
could be made, following on Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘constitutive
outside’, to show how Reason enacts its hegemony through a continuous
production of experience as the constitutive outside to discourse. (This need
not be construed as a structural model, as a detailed reading of Butler’s theorization of ‘politically salient exclusions’
will show (Butler
1993). Parallely, ‘experience’ has been articulated, in the work of Joan Scott,
among others, not as an ‘out there’ but a historical production (Scott 1992).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> I
have referred to the way in which I use aporia, in the introduction to the
thesis. To recapitulate, aporia is referred to as a logical impasse or
contradiction, that which is impassable, especially “a radical contradiction in
the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable” (<em>Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online</em>). </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> A
clarification here. I am not saying that experience <em>is</em> always aporetic to a narrative, but I am asking for an attention
to a particular perspective that might be so positioned as to be aporetic.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a>
The meaning that I activate here is of a perspective that appears fantastic, or
absurd, except from a particular point of view.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
“Exclusion in principle seems to function as a formidable method of forcing
dependence. And it is indeed a choice between “being on the outside or perhaps
at my heel,” conveying first an exclusion in principle, and then conditions for
secondary entry, rather than the reverse, “at my heel or on the outside,” which
would indicate first a frank authoritarianism and then punishment for
insubordination.” (Le Doueff 2003: 25)</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> Feminist Standpoint theory talks of the possibility
of a situated, perspectival form of knowing, of such a knowing as necessarily a
communal project, and of this knowing as one where the community of knowers is
necessarily shifting and overlapping with other communities. While Haraway
would speak of ‘situated knowledges’ as against the ‘God trick’, as she calls
it, of seeing from nowhere – a neutral perspective (Haraway 1992), Sandra
Harding<sup> </sup>would go on, however, to propose a version of strong
objectivity – a less false rather than a more true view; this, Harding would
suggest, can come only from the viewpoint of particular communities, sometimes
the marginalized, sometimes women. This is where Harding’s version of
standpoint epistemology is still grappling with the question of whether the
experience of oppression is a necessary route to knowledge. (Harding deals with
this with this by treating women’s lives as resource to maximise objectivity,
Haraway by treating these women as ironic subjects and seeing from below as
only a visual tool). A related question is whether the very notion of
standpoint epistemology requires a version, albeit a more robust one than in
place now, of systems of domination, and it is here that a productive dialogue
could be begun between Haraway’s more experimental version of “seeing from
below” and Harding’s notion of strong objectivity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a>
This would be stressing the empirical foundations of science, but human sciences
have always been the area where the subjective is most easily detected – hence
the name ‘soft sciences’. Things are changing, however, with the biological
sciences rooting themselves in the ‘knowable’ gene – their accession to hard
objectivity is now a reality.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> As would be evident in the models of sexual
intercourse in the medical texts with the masculine/feminine metaphors for
sperm/ovum – a model we used in the class as well, with a lively response, for
it spoke to traditional languages of patriarchy as well. This has been
discussed in some detail by Emily Martin (1991).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a>
Where experience is separate from the empirical.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a>
Things were different before … they will have to be done differently now …</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
The place of women – in patriarchy, in a language outside patriarchy, has been
a recurrent theme in the thought of Luce Irigaray. Interpreting Plato’s myth,
she draws a picture of the analogies with the patriarchal arrangement, and
proposes another topology. Plato’s Idea she designates as the realm of the Same
– “the hom(m)osexual economy of men, in which women are simply objects of
exchange. … The world is described as the ‘other of the same’, i.e. otherness,
but … more or less adequate copy … woman is the material substratum for men’s
theories, their language, and their transactions … the ‘other of the same’ …
[or] women in patriarchy … [t]he ‘other of the other’ … is an as yet
non-existent female homosexual economy, women-amongst-themselves … [I]n so far
as she exists already, woman as the ‘other of the other’ exists in the
interstices of the realm of the [Same]. Her accession to language, to the
imaginary and symbolic processes of culture and society, is the condition for
the coming-to-be of sexual difference.” See ‘The same, the semblance, and the
other’ in Whitford (1991: 104).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a>
This is between us women – a common saying in Bengali that carries connotations
both of an exclusivity – a woman’s domain – as well as insignificance – this is
just something between us women.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
To travel from ‘mimesis imposed’ (Irigaray’s term for the mimesis imposed on
woman as mirror of the phallic model) to ‘mimetisme’ – “an act of deliberate
submission to phallic-symbolic categories in order to expose them”, where “[t]o
play with mimesis is … to try to recover the place of … exploitation by
discourse, without … simply [being] reduced to it … to resubmit … so as to make
‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition [mimicry, mimetisme] what was
supposed to remain invisible …” is the Irigarayan project (Irigaray 1991,
quoted in Diamond 1997: 173).</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:42:03ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Methodologies of Critique - Responses to technology in feminist and gender work in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india
<b>In this post, part of her CIS-RAW 'Rewiring Bodies' project, Asha Achuthan records the arguments within feminism and gender work that critique the use of technology in the Indian context, and attempts to show continuities between these arguments and postcolonial formulations. Overall, the post also records notions of the 'political' that inform the contour of these critiques.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I have, in the last six posts, attempted to
trace the trajectory of the critiques of <em>technology
standing in for science</em> in the Indian context. In so doing, I have also tried
to trace the methodology of critique itself that animates the political in India. I have shown the ways in which these
critiques access anterior difference (as in connections drawn in postcolonial
work between the ‘resistant’ past as prior to colonialism and an ‘other’
modernity produced within colonialism), the ways in which they posit resistance
as providing the crisis to closure of hegemonic Western science (through the
appropriation of the language of resistance of Subaltern Studies into the
hybridity framework), and the ways in which this resistance fails to meet the
promise of crisis (the crisis being a reference to the Kuhnian understanding of
crisis that might signal the fall of a paradigm). It follows that the sometimes
implicit claim for the rise of alternate systems of knowledge also fails since
the criteria for paradigm shifts is not met.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The present discussion turns on two axes. One
is that of the political, within which I will try to place the various
arguments within feminism and gender work that try to examine and explain
science as a political institution, and the options available to negotiate with
its power. These arguments understand the political as contained in a
discussion about power; they also chart shifts from the responses to power as
coherent, singular and monolithic, to a more disaggregated notion of power
itself that also then apparently demands a disaggregated response. This shift makes
sense if we also follow a parallel shift in the 21<sup>st</sup> century from a
politics based on ideology to one that proposes an attention to
micro-negotiations, that proposes a thick description of these negotiations as
the alternative. It is such an alternative that pays attention also to context
or situation, as also to experience. Along my second axis in this discussion –
that of the epistemological – I examine the case for situated knowledges, for
experience as the situation of knowledge-making, and the possible movement from
here to the articulation of a standpoint epistemology. Indications in this direction
I will lay down in the post following this one. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In attempting to ask the question of criteria
of knowledge through the allegory of what I have called women’s lived
experience, I adopt in somewhat mutated form the strategy of the ‘outside’
consciousness, something that has received much attention, in different ways,
in orthodox Marxist and subaltern literature, as an empirical something, a
socialist consciousness that can or cannot bring to revolutionary consciousness
the ‘mass’; also in feminist literature, at times as the empirical excluded, at
others as the sign of the ‘outsider within’ who may challenge dominant
formations.<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> At all
points in the history of these formations, the translation of formulations of
the outside has been at the level of the empirical. A link possibly exists here
between this kind of translation and the apparent difficulty of attaching the
political with the epistemological in any useful way. Politics, in such a
translation, has either been about championing the entry of the empirical
outside, or about championing the knowledge attached, ex-officio, to the
situation of outsideness. I will, in the formulation I am about to offer, work
with an understanding of exclusion to which inclusion in this sense is not the
answer. In order to do so, I would also then, beginning with a formulation akin
to that of the ‘outsider within’, attempt an allegorical description of the way
in which such an outsider(’s) perspective (I bracket the apostrophe in an
attentiveness to the difference between the abstract and the empirical here)
might offer a response to the act of exclusion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I am aware as I say this that the first task is
to provide a theory of the exclusion itself; in the case of science, to ‘prove’
that it is constituted by exclusionary acts. Further, it is important to show
the operations of technology and its parallels with the operations of science. I
have given exhaustive accounts, in previous posts, of the work that has
unconvincingly done this. For more convincing accounts, I rely partly, and in
somewhat unrepentant fashion, on certain clues available in the work of
‘western’ feminist epistemological thinkers – those ‘global’ feminist accounts
that for the first time enabled a possibility of thinking gender analytics
outside Marxist frames in Bengal, while remaining hegemonic in the field of
feminism; partly on the allegory of the <em>dai,</em>
whose engagements with the reproductive health system in India I explore in some detail,<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
and partly on a different case for the ‘outside’ made in the work of a Marxian<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
thinker in Bengal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To summarise, I attempt, in this set of posts, to offer an understanding
of the political that moves from ideology toward standpoint, and an
accompanying move from ‘one knowledge’ not to alternative or many knowledges,
but towards a standpoint epistemology.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Notes from a consultation, and
from a conversation</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The consultation</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Tumi ki roj tablet khao? </em>Do you have the pill everyday?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do <strong><em>You</em></strong>
(the doctor and authority) have the pill everyday?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do
you have to have the pill <strong><em>everyday</em></strong>?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do
you <strong><em>really</em></strong>
have to …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Aamake</em></strong><em> niye
katha hocche na</em> … Its not <strong><em>me</em></strong>
we’re talking of …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>I</em></strong> am not
objectified body; <strong><em>you</em></strong> are.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I am separate from you,
elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Actually, I’m the one
who should be asking you the question.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The conversation </em><strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In April 2002, I attended, as a medical doctor, a
training programme for ‘traditional birth attendants’ – <em>dais</em> – who had come from various parts of the island to attend an
intensive 6-day training programme organized by a non-governmental
organization. This was a group of women who had varying degrees of experience
with births at which they had assisted. They had been divided into two groups,
with one doctor trained in western medicine to conduct the training schedule in
each of them. The group I had been assigned consisted of 46 women. The youngest
member was 28, the oldest around 60. The programme had the stated objective of
imparting up-to-date and accurate scientific methods (adaptable to the field)
of attending to pregnant women going into labour, that should be introduced
into the village so as to help women with limited access to hospital facilities
in rural areas. Local traditional practices could also be taken into account
and legitimately incorporated where useful. In the event, it also sought to
draw the line between right and wrong practice so that the <em>dai</em> could decide when and in which case to seek the help of the
local health centre. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>“To fill in gaps in manpower at village levels”, as
the National Population Policy draft (2000) says. The <em>dai</em>, in her own words the <em>mukkhu
sukkhu maanush</em>,</strong><a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a><strong> as yet uninitiated into ‘method’, has the key to a
vast field of experience at births, a field waiting to be tapped usefully in
development. Her know-how, which is ‘practical’ rather than ‘propositional’,
means that she has no value in existing frames as epistemological agent; hers
is the voice of experience that with a degree of training and modification can
apparently be made useful to the task in hand.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In the time and frame within which I had inserted
myself into the picture, I was able to concentrate largely on the level of the
gradients of power operating, mostly at the general/macro level, between the <em>dai</em> (the “subject[s] of enunciation that
subtend epistemology”),<em> </em>the
“development expert”, the NGO, the local male quack doctor. The NGO of course
had targets to meet – so many women over so many villages covered this year. I
was doing ‘research’, and this was one of the ways I could listen in. I was
there, however, as the ‘doctor’, the authority. The <em>dais</em> knew there was something in this for them. The kits that would
be distributed at the end of session, the legitimation of their knowledge by
the <em>sarkar</em></strong><a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a><strong> – they were now trained <em>dais</em>, not just <em>dais</em> – the
meanings this would hopefully carry in trying times when the local (male)
quack, armed with the ‘injection’</strong><a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a><strong> and assorted other drugs, in short with a sometimes
more than fair working knowledge of allopathic medicine under his belt, had all
but edged them out of their already meagre income. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Prior to introductions, the <em>dais</em> were asked to give a written test, where, with the now
standard multiple choice questionnaire, they were asked to respond to problems
generally faced during the delivery of a child. Later, through lectures,
models, role-playing, and video films, the ‘new’, scientific methods were
introduced and explained. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The schedule had been planned by the
non-governmental organisation and the <em>dais</em>
informed accordingly. We started the programme with a short discussion on the
availability and advancement of scientific knowledge in the current setting,
and the consequent responsibility incumbent on those responsible for health
issues to avail of this knowledge. Parallely, the dangers of succumbing to
uninformed traditional practices were also touched upon. A format had been prepared
by the organisation for our guidance in conducting the training; further,
members of staff were available around the clock to help us communicate with
the <em>dais</em>, many of whom spoke local
dialects completely different from urban Bengali.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Each class day started at around nine in the morning
after breakfast. We generally started the day with a new topic, discussing it
from both ends, that of Western Science as well as the perspective of the local
traditional knowledges apparently employed by the <em>dais</em>, the problems they faced therein, their interactions with
local ‘quack doctors’ at the time of a birth, the increasing presence and
authority of this group, and so on. I would generally question them as to why
they employed a particular practice, explain – in logical terms – why the
scientific method was better, and then go on to demonstrate the functioning of
the female body, as understood in (Western) medical literature, with a ritual
of endless repetitions – I even had a wooden duster to bang the table with when
the humming got too loud – for the women were hardly used to the attention
spans demanded of them. In the event, it did happen that practices or
understandings forwarded by the <em>dais</em>
afforded me glimpses of knowledges that did not conform to (or compare with,
sometimes) the Western episteme I was working with; but such difficulties I
(had to) set aside for the purposes of my work. And following me, so did the <em>dais</em>.
</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>While planning on ways to communicate with the
women, both of us (health professionals working with the two groups) had come
to the conclusion that visual models, role-playing etc. would be good methods,
since a large number of the participants were not only non-literate in the
conventional sense, but unused to conventional methods of classroom learning.
The “students” indeed took to these with enthusiasm; having overcome initial
inhibitions, they enthusiastically took on the roles of woman in labour, <em>dai</em>, mother-in-law, husband, doctor at
the local health centre, to enact the scenes as they should from now on be
played out, as I watched in satisfaction – the <em>dai</em> had come of age. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The
first question that the <em>dais</em> asked me
when I arrived in their midst was whether I was married. If so, how many
children I had. As I realised that I was alone in a room full of mothers, I
felt the beginnings of an unbridgeable gap; I might pick up the local tongue, I
might sit down with them and attempt to erase authority, but I did not share
what they shared with most other women, the kind of experience they valued (or
considered necessary for authority). As the classes wore on, this became a
little joke amongst us – every now and then, one of the older women would stop
proceedings to ask – <em>Accha, tomaar to
nei, tumi eto jano ki kore</em>?</strong><a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a><strong> And I would
counter sagely – <em>Aaro jaani</em>.</strong><a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a><strong> Finally they
settled for – <em>Aare</em><em> eto rugi dekheche, ekta abhigyata hoy ni</em>?</strong><a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a><strong> An
experiential referent had been found, however clinical, and that was
something! </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>The turn to
experience – from consultations to conversations </em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I have no names (of protected
confidentiality or otherwise) to offer for the women in both the episodes I
report above; neither was part of an ethnographic study, and both are offered
more as plausible accounts of a situation, and contexts within which feminist approaches
to experience have materialized.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The consultation was with
a recalcitrant mother who had been put on the contraceptive pill following the
abortion of an unplanned pregnancy and had returned for follow-up with a
continuing carelessness regarding its intake. The entire consultation, as is
evident from the report, lasted two sentences, leaving the female physician
irritated, and the patient engaged in a certain conversational response – the
kind of response that comes the way of the physician every day, but is
nevertheless the kind of response that is illegitimate, aporetic. Enough has
been said about power-knowledge nexuses that promote one knowledge – in this
case the Western medical – as high, as singular. This is the kind of response
that, through its own aporicity – neither appropriate, nor oppositional, nor
even alternate – makes visible, and bizarre, the positioning of medical
knowledge as objective, unanchored to experience, and on <em>that count authoritative</em>. It is also the kind of response that does
not sit well with liberal feminist approaches that would wish to mediate
authority through information, choice, or consent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Feminist politics in India, in response to this authoritative stance,
initially took a ‘more women-in-science’ position; it asked for <em>increased</em> <em>presence</em> <em>of</em> <em>women</em> <em>as professionals</em> in the scientific enterprise, for <em>increased access</em> <em>for women</em> to the fruits of science and technology, as also to
information. It was hoped that changes in gender composition at the
professional level would both bring in women’s perspectives, and in so doing
transform the disciplines through such inclusion.<a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
The entire gamut of women’s right to health campaigns articulated this
position. Technology in this frame comprised the manifest diagnostic and therapeutic
tools of medical practice, particularly reproductive health practice. This is a
route that has been taken in later state development agendas as well, where,
after the World Bank clauses requiring clear commitments to gender appeared in
1987, States put in place protocols to include women’s perspectives in
development.<a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a> This
was a position that stayed with one-knowledge theories, wanting, along with one
knowledge, adequate <em>dissemination</em> of
the products of such knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 90s saw a clearer
shift to a politics of ‘third world women’s experience’, from authoritarianism
to alternatives. This shift talked about bringing back ‘low’ knowledge, of
re-reading marginality as a place for knowledge-making, and of making the
‘third world’ – geographically understood – an empirical site for the same.
Eco-feminist moves like those of Vandana Shiva are a case in point, where the
experiential is the pre-technological, and also the anti-technological, the
proper sphere of resistance to the instrumentality of technology. There are a
couple of things I would like to point to here. On the one hand, this shift was
not so much a chronological as perhaps an ideological shift, and populated more
of the rhetorical than the clear-cut theoretical articulations of the turn to
experience. It was a turn that allowed a <em>re-making
of the third world</em>, for post-developmentalists, from the WID
(women-in-development) initiatives that exercised only inclusion rhetoric. It
was also a shift that informed a politics of the time – a politics of location,
a politics that allowed a community to speak for and in itself on account of
being in a marginal relation to what was perceived as hegemonic, that is, the
West. This was a politics of oppositional difference, a politics of resistance,
a politics that was born out of and needed, for its continuation, hierarchical
difference, a politics that said, “I know mine, you know yours, there can be no
dialogue”. But it was also a move that populated rhetoric more than theory or
practice, at least in Indian contexts, not always enjoying full status
alongside ‘one knowledge’ theories, so that “empowerment alongside perspective”
became the more acceptable motto. Such an attempt has perhaps been best
articulated philosophically in the work of Martha C. Nussbaum, who talks at the
same time of a uniqueness to women’s perspectives <em>and</em> of the need to raise them to the common level “human”.
Difference – either cultural or sexual – was not the motive force in this
attempt; rather, it was something that needed to be marked in order to be
transcended. Finding a commonality to women’s experiences and raising them
therefore to the universal level was the task. Knowledge was still one and
singular, but a <em>democratization in modes
of arrival </em>at such knowledge was the important goal. “We all know,
together” – such would seem to be the motto.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Such a democratization
did not obviously require ideological buttressing, and anthropological work
that began in the 90s, calling itself gender work but spurning feminist
stances, drawing upon women’s practices, critiquing trends in globalization but
not naming capitalism, marked a new shift in the turn to experience. I will go
into these in greater detail in a later section.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is in the context of these shifts that I
see the turn to experience in feminist and gender work. In using the allegory
of the two reports I provide, I also wish to mark my own shift – a shift that I
call a re-turn to experience. The particular relationship between the <em>dai</em> and the doctor could be and has been
read as a case of “I know, you do”, where the <em>dai</em>, in her own words the “<em>mukkhu
sukkhu manush</em>” – the unlearned person – is brought in as experienced but
non-knowledgeable, as probable representative of “indigenous health systems”
that fit, makeshift, into the overcrowded field of reproductive health care,
with the distinction alive at all times between Western medicine and such
systems that are neither standardized nor adequately tested for efficacy and
safety (NPP 2000). This is the orthodox ‘high knowledge’ position that works
well with simple policies of inclusion. In response, both feminism and gender
work have attempted to chart a politics of third world women’s experience, to
present an alternative picture, as I have briefly delineated. I will, in some
detail, categorize two of these moves.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>The global feminist making of the Third World Woman: building
capability, fostering agency </em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText">(The
‘typical’ breast-feeding mother as depicted in Community Health posters)<a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a> <strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong>Feminist political philosophy has frequently been sceptical of
universal normative approaches. I shall argue that it is possible to describe a
framework for such a feminist practice of philosophy that is strongly
universalist, committed to cross-cultural norms of justice, equality, and
rights, and at the same time sensitive to local particularity, and to the ways
in which circumstances shape not only options but also beliefs and preferences.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> (Nussbaum
2000: 7)</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The first day of the typical
SEWA education program for future union and bank leaders is occupied by getting
each woman to look straight at the group leader and say her name. The process
is videotaped, and women grow accustomed to looking at themselves. Eventually,
though with considerable difficulty, they are all able to overcome norms of
modesty and deference and to state their names publicly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (17, fn. 20)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText">By
women as a category of analysis, I am referring to the crucial assumption that
all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially
constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis.
This is an assumption which characterizes much feminist discourse. The
homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological
essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and
anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any given piece of feminist
analysis, women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of a shared
oppression. What binds women together is a sociological notion of the
“sameness” of their oppression. It is at this point that an elision takes place
between “women” as a discursively constructed group and “women” as material
subjects of their own history.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (Mohanty 1991: 56)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Vasanti and Jayamma</strong><a name="_ftnref14" href="#_ftn14"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[14]</span></span></a><strong> entered the
development literature when the imperative to attend to the local gained
legitimacy, as quintessential representatives of poor, “illiterate” women
caught up “in particular caste and regional circumstances in India” (Nussbaum
2000: 21); women situated, especially, on the lower rung of sexual hierarchies,
and yet “trying to flourish” (15).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="Preformatted"><strong>Despite
all these reversals (and others), Jayamma is tough, defiant, and healthy. She
doesn’t seem interested in talking, but she shows her visitors around, and
makes sure that they are offered lime juice and water. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> (19)</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Persistent take-off points, they, or their names at
any rate, have gained iconic currency as the ‘real’ local women who can now
speak of the sufferings they endured till they moved from the ‘informal sector’
or a place “marginal to economic activity” (15, fn. 14) to the avowedly
different and more agential category of ‘self-employed’. Of Vasanti it is said,
“She now earns 500 rupees a month, a decent living” (17, contrasted in the text
with the Rs. 180 per month allotted to destitute women under the Indian
Criminal Procedure Code in 1986). In a world where “letting the women speak for
themselves” (17) is the task at hand, and one that is entirely possible, they
speak. They break sanctions, form political alliances, <em>learn</em> <em>to</em> <em>name</em> themselves. </strong><strong>And it is as a first step toward making possible
this movement <em>from the local
particularity to the universal value </em>that Nussbaum works hard to prepare
the ground for herself as justified observer of Vasanti’s and Jayamma’s
struggles. Such a universal will render possible for these women choice, the
capability to make that choice, the right to demand political rights according
to needs. For Nussbaum, detachment coupled with concern and familiarity is the
ideal (and achievable) point from which this is possible. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>Speaking
to the local</em></strong><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Nussbaum, therefore,
begins her discussion on development, women and social justice by stating and
grounding her primary focus on “the case of India,
a nation in which women suffer great inequalities despite a promising
constitutional tradition” (9). It is also a country she is familiar with, and
this, she says, helps her “write on the basis of personal observation and
familiarity, as well as study” (9): </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="Preformatted"><strong>… I
went to India to look at women’s development projects, because I wanted to
write a book that would be real and concrete rather than abstract, and because
I knew too little to talk about the problems of poor working women in a country
other than my own. <em>I had to hear about
the problems from them</em>.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (ix, italics mine)<strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Drawing on Jawaharlal
Nehru’s concept of “One World that can no longer be split into isolated
fragments” to host her project, she also, however, describes being “both a
foreigner and a middle-class person”, and thus “doubly an outsider vis-à-vis
the places about which” she writes. Nonetheless, a certain mixture of
“curiosity and determination” helps “surmount these hurdles – especially if one
listens to what people say”. As a foreigner, Nussbaum believes she possesses a
“helpful type of neutrality amid the cultural, religious, and political
debates” that a local scholar would not be free from. “In a situation of
entrenched inequality”, she feels, “being a neighbor can be an epistemological
problem” (10).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Speaking of tradition,
Nussbaum finds it “impossible to deny that traditions, both Western and
non-Western, perpetrate injustice against women”. But though traditions –
“local” or otherwise – cannot be denounced as “morally retrograde” through
“hasty judgement”, it is important not “[t]o avoid the whole issue” and “stand
around in the vestibule” refusing to “take a definite stand on any moral or
political question” (1999: 30), because “there are universal obligations to
protect human functioning and its dignity, and … the dignity of women is equal
to that of men.” Referring to what she calls Western tradition, an example of
sexual harassment at the workplace shows that “[c]learly our own society <em>still</em> appeals to tradition in its own
way to justify women’s unequal treatment”(1999: 30, italics mine). But although
“there is no country that treats its women as well as its men … [d]eveloping
countries … present <em>especially urgent
problems</em>” (2-3, italics mine). In such a situation, the need for a
cross-cultural universal becomes imperative. As a possibility, it is already in
place. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The urgency mounts with
paragraph upon paragraph listing the “uneven achievements” of developing
nations with respect to areas considered necessary to women’s quality of life –
female employment statistics, rape statistics, workplace harassment statistics,
literacy, health, nutrition. One must of course be careful, says Nussbaum, even
where favourable statistics are concerned, for “local governments tend to be
boastful.” </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>And through the increased
magnitude of the problems, only vestiges of which apparently “still”
contaminate the West, does one glimpse the spectre of the white woman who takes
on the onerous responsibility of saving the brown woman from her traditions? Of
course, armed with curiosity and the determination to satisfy it, the “neutral”
foreigner, the disinterested observer who is not embroiled critic, can serve,
apparently, as trusted confidante for the ‘innocent’ subaltern – a sensitive
alliance, as it were, between the concerned intellectual and the
yet-to-be-capable-agent – the moment not yet <em>realized</em> in representation.</strong><a name="_ftnref15" href="#_ftn15"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[15]</span></span></a><strong> The brown woman
“scholar”, despite her however tenuous commonalities with Jayamma or Vasanti,
might here be, by very virtue of her “enmeshed”ness, more suspect than the
“unimplicated” foreigner.</strong><a name="_ftnref16" href="#_ftn16"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[16]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><strong>It
is at this secure subject who is sought to be arrived at or revived on the
premise that she exists somewhere before context, and must be reinstated, or
given voice, that Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is directed.</strong></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Working
on the local</strong></h2>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>The “capabilities
approach” has been proposed by Nussbaum in basic agreement with Amartya Sen.</strong><a name="_ftnref17" href="#_ftn17"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[17]</span></span></a><strong> Nussbaum talks of the capabilities
approach as a “foundation for basic political principles that should underwrite
constitutional guarantees” (70-1), and draws on “Aristotle’s ideas of human
functioning and Marx’s use of them” (70). It is proposed as a universal and
ethical approach that must nevertheless “focus appropriately on women’s lives”
(71) in order to be relevant, that is, it must “examine real lives in their
material and social settings” (71). Premised on the “intuitively powerful”,
“core idea … of the human being as a dignified free being who shapes his or her
own life in co-operation and reciprocity with others” (72), an “awe-inspiring
something” that is “above the mechanical workings of nature” (73), the
capabilities approach moves primarily in the direction of looking at each
individual as an <em>end</em> in her own
right, and endeavours towards promoting “central human functional
capabilities”, that is, capabilities that deliver readiness to make (certain)
choices regarding functioning in ‘multiply realizable’ ways that are “truly
human” (72), and living “a life that is shaped throughout by these human powers
of practical reason and sociability” (72). These capabilities are to be
promoted, and social and political institutions so structured, so that at least
a threshold level, a “social minimum”, of these capabilities may be attained.
It is the idea of this threshold that Nussbaum concentrates on, stating that
“we may reasonably defer questions about what we shall do when all citizens are
above the threshold, given that this already imposes a taxing and nowhere-<em>realized</em> standard” (12, italics mine).</strong><a name="_ftnref18" href="#_ftn18"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[18]</span></span></a><strong> “On the other hand,” says Nussbaum, “…
[one is] not pushing individuals into the function; once the stage is set, the
choice is up to them.”</strong><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There is a distinction drawn, and
stressed, between capability and functioning. The concept of capability is
generally discussed in conjunction with rights, and the State is seen here as
guarantor of these rights, not an enforcer of discipline. The presence of
capability, then, is taken as reflection of a developed State, and the presence
of functioning flowing from this capability as reflection of a good State that
encourages citizens to express the choices they have been initiated into.
Nussbaum says, “Thus, we want soldiers who will not <em>simply</em> obey, when an order is given....”</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">But in cases where functioning is
considered important, like casting one’s vote once the capability has been
given, citizens might be forced into exercising their given capabilities – that
is, into functioning. This argument is extended to innumerable situations,
including children who need to function in a particular manner to make for
capable adults, the spheres of health, maintenance of environments, literacy,
nutrition, citizens’ responsibilities like the paying of taxes, and others. “In
general, the more crucial a function is to attaining and maintaining other
capabilities, the more entitled we may be to promote actual functioning in some
cases, within limits set by an appropriate respect for citizens’ choices” (92).
“Even compulsory voting would not be ruled out, if we were convinced that
requiring functioning is the only way to ensure the presence of a particular
capability” (93).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
attempting </strong>to arrive at a normative theory of
social justice,<strong> Nussbaum considers
state policies and principles of development in the third world as faulty not
inasmuch as they do not take into account the perspectives of <em>women in an essential sense</em>, but
inasmuch as they neglect women “as people who suffer pervasively from acute
capability failure” (6). A focus on “women’s problems … will help compensate
for the earlier neglect of sex equality in development economics and in the
international human rights movement” (6-7). Her approach to development,
therefore, is from the point of view of asking for recognition and inclusion in
the category of the “truly human”, and towards producing the ability to deserve
it. Capability building and agency are, to this end, essential components, as
is also the taking into account of the lived everyday experiences of women in
the third world, that reflects on the absence of this capability.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Before addressing the several
questions begging to be asked on universalist values endorsed by Nussbaum, I
will briefly go into what implications such a position might have for a
response to science. Nussbaum sees in her listing of “central human functional
capabilities” the potential to suggest a normative ideal of bodily health, as
well as a principle that has been applied in definitions of reproductive
health:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The 1994
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) adopted a
definition of reproductive health that fits well with the intuitive idea of
truly human functioning that guides this list: “Reproductive health is a state
of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely an absence of
disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and its
processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a
satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and
the freedom to decide if, when, and how often to do so.” The definition goes on
to say that it also implies information and access to family planning methods
of their choice. A brief summary of the ICPD’s recommendations … “1. Every sex
act should be free of coercion and infection. 2. Every pregnancy should be
intended. 3. Every birth should be healthy.”</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (Nussbaum
2000: 78 n. 83)</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Following from the
general notion of capability, this approach has a critique of modern medicine
and development with regard to inclusion, taking as neutral and commonsensical
the definitions of health or illness; the key question then is one of building
the capability to make informed choices on contraception, for example. For
women vis-à-vis development programmes, the question would not be about the
resources available at their command, or their satisfaction with those resources
(the Rawlsian account), but of what part of those resources – medical
facilities – they are capable of using – “what her opportunities and liberties
are” (71). The argument then is one for access and inclusion into an apparently
universal(ly understood) framework.</strong><a name="_ftnref19" href="#_ftn19"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[19]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Nussbaum's position runs
immediately, as she is well aware, into charges of colonialist, imperialist and
universalist attitudes, and this is where it might be useful, as a first step,
to recall a critique like Chandra Mohanty’s, on “third world women and the
politics of feminism”. In her innumerable pointers to the “Western eye”,
Mohanty</strong><a name="_ftnref20" href="#_ftn20"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[20]</span></span></a><strong> has pointed to
the construction of the archetypal and “average” third world woman in Western
feminist work, as also in other kinds of feminist discourse sited in the
universalist frame. Such an archetype, in her argument, is the constitutive
difference that makes possible the image of the Western feminist herself. This
archetype is constructed through a slippage between the analytic and
descriptive categories “Woman” and “women” respectively. “The relationship
between “Woman” – a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed
through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical,
linguistic, cinematic, etc.) – and “women” – real, material subjects of their
collective histories”, states Mohanty, “is one of the central connections the
practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address … [and is] not a relation of
… correspondence or simple implication” (53). The feminist writings of the Zed
Press that she analyses, Mohanty suggests, “discursively colonize the material
and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world,
thereby producing/ re-presenting a composite, singular “third world woman” – an
image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it
the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.” (53) As part of this
effect, Mohanty traces “the similar effects of various textual strategies used
by writers which codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as
(implicitly) Western. It is in this sense”, she says, “that I use the term <em>Western</em> <em>feminist</em>” (Mohanty 1991: 52), thus clarifying both her separation
from the geographical sense, and the ways in which certain articulations,
positioned alongside others, acquire a particular sedimentation of meanings
that constitute Eurocentrism. Mohanty traces some of these discourses –
colonial anthropological,</strong><a name="_ftnref21" href="#_ftn21"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[21]</span></span></a><strong> western
feminist, developmental, multinational capital – as addressed in the Zed Press
publications to make her point, and following her argument, it is possible to
also trace the continuities between these discourses.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Such an archetype, Mohanty
points out, rests on the presumption of sexual difference as primary to the
oppression that women in the third world might suffer – “that stable,
ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in
these countries” (53-4). For one, it takes as stable and before the event
‘third world women’ as a sociological category, an “automatic unitary group”,
(7) building on this then to show up their ‘victimization’ under
“underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high illiteracy, rural and urban
poverty, religious fanaticism, and “overpopulation” of particular Asian,
African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries” (Mohanty 1991: 5-6). In
doing so, it irons out the absolute heterogeneity of the lived experiences of
women in the third world. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>So
there is a “third world difference” too that is naturalised in and through this
archetype, and thereafter, an easy connection made between “third world women”
and feminism.</strong><a name="_ftnref22" href="#_ftn22"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[22]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty herself, following Dorothy Smith
(1987), points to a more productive way of looking at colonialism as <em>processes of ruling</em> instead of as a
fixed entity, and suggests ways in which multiple contexts for the emergence of
contemporary third world feminist struggles may be traced. These include the
configurations of colonialism, class and gender, the state, citizenship and
racial formation, multinational production and social agency, anthropology and
the third world woman as “native”, and consciousness, identity, writing.</strong><a name="_ftnref23" href="#_ftn23"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[23]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty would therefore ask for the
delineation of a more complex <em>relation
between struggles</em> rather than sexual difference as a primary origin for the
category of third world women, if at all it can be deployed – and that
deployment she is not entirely against. “What seems to constitute “women of
color” or “third world women” as a viable oppositional alliance”, she says, “is
a <em>common context of struggle </em>rather
than color or racial identifications … it is third world women’s oppositional <em>political </em>relation to sexist, racist,
and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality” (7). The
Woman-women connection, then, as she sees it, needs to be adequately
historicized, set in context. And the category of Third World Woman has to be
seen, in order to be useful, as a process of subject formation through these
multiple conjunctures rather than as a pre-existing victim category.</strong><a name="_ftnref24" href="#_ftn24"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[24]</span></span></a><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
pointing to the absolute heterogeneity of the experiences of third world women,</strong><a name="_ftnref25" href="#_ftn25"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[25]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty does not, however, give up on
the idea of domination or hegemony. What she suggests, instead, is that in
understanding the “complex <em>relationality</em>
that shapes our social and political lives … it is possible to retain the idea
of multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women
differently at particular historical conjunctures, while at the same time
insisting on the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and collectives and
their engagement in “daily life”” (13). The parallels with Homi Bhabha’s notion
of hybridity are here apparent, and indeed Mohanty herself points to the
parallel (75, n. 3), both in promoting a more complex notion of hegemony than
that offered by easy binaries of colonizer and colonized, and in identifying
the ways in which multiple negotiations in “daily life” can constitute
resistances that are intimately imbricated with the hegemonic.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Mohanty’s
critique of such a difference as suggested by the naming of a ‘third world
woman’ is then, in sum, a reference to the hierarchization on which it stands;
in a more useful sense, it is part of an attempt to define “context” in a
conceptual manner, and it is this attempt that I will take up in greater detail
in the last section.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Let
us, however, also examine Nussbaum’s own account of such charges and her
subsequent defence of the universal. Nussbaum considers three arguments
generally offered against universalist values – “the argument from culture”,
the “argument from the good of diversity”, and the “argument from paternalism”.
The argument from culture apparently presents a different set of norms as
constitutive of Indian culture – norms of “female modesty, deference,
obedience, and self-sacrifice that have defined women’s lives for centuries”
(41); norms that need not definitionally be bad, norms that work, presumably,
for Indian women, and norms that may actually be preferable to Western norms
that promote individualism for women. Nussbaum responds to her reading of the
culture argument in several ways. For one, she talks of the cultural diversity
of India,
both temporal and spatial, that hardly allows for reference to such a
homogeneity of norms – there are women who resist tradition, for instance.
Therefore, “[c]ultures are dynamic … and [c]riticism too is profoundly
indigenous … to the culture of India,
that extremely argumentative nation” (48). Further, such norms would be
acceptable if women had choices about adhering to or rejecting them, which
women like Vasanti or Jayamma do not, in her opinion. They do not even endorse
the norms they adhere to, and this strengthens her argument against simply
accepting a relativist thesis on norms. After all, “[w]hy should we follow the
local ideas, rather than the best ideas we can find?” (49) And a position of
moral relativism also fails when one realises that a relativist position,
conceptually, is not one that is tolerant of diversity or of other cultures. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Regarding
the argument from the good of diversity, Nussbaum feels that cultural values
that are different from the ones we know still demand a judgement of and
decision-making on which ones to endorse and which to reject. “And this
requires a set of values that gives us a critical purchase on cultural
particulars … it does not undermine and even supports our search for a general
universal framework of critical assessment” (51).</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>As
for the argument from paternalism, which would object to any effort at “telling
people what is good for them” (51), Nussbaum responds by saying that “a
commitment to respecting people’s choices hardly seems incompatible with the
endorsement of universal values … [specially] the value of having the
opportunity to think and choose for oneself” (51). Further, she says that every
law or bill does this, “telling people that they cannot behave in some way that
they have traditionally behaved and want to behave” (53), which is “hardly a
good argument against the rule of law” (51), particularly when it is required
to protect some from the behaviour of others. Also, in order to build the
“material preconditions” of choice, “in whose absence there is merely a
simulacrum of choice” (51), law notwithstanding, it might indeed be necessary
to “tell people what to do”, something that obviously requires a universal
normative account – what Nussbaum will call ‘political’ rather than
‘comprehensive liberalism’. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Does
the build-up of Nussbaum's argument for intervention in “the particularly
urgent problems of developing nations” then indeed, after reading her defence,
seem to constitute West-centrism? Is she, as postcolonial critics of
universalism and third world feminist engagements would have it, and as I have
also been tempted to flag in her text, marking an archetypal third world woman
who needs rescuing? Are her ‘universal values’ constituted by such an
archetype?</strong><a name="_ftnref26" href="#_ftn26"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[26]</span></span></a><strong> Although her conversations are with
women who are typically poor, tradition-bound, victimized, yet defiant and
speech-worthy, for a philosopher like Nussbaum, the archetype is marked <em>so as to be transcended</em>, shed, saving
the brown woman from those of her traditions that are constricting,
transforming her, through an accurate application of universal principles, into
ideal human and citizen. To this end, Nussbaum also needs to demonstrate that
victimhood is not the essence of ‘woman’, just as difference in any form is
not. Indeed, essence or difference will find no place in her philosophy, and
her painstaking description of cultural particularity is merely a preamble to
then argue for commonality – these are features of “women’s lives everywhere”,
where the seeming oddities are only differences in manifestation of stereotypes
of women and men, rather than being signs of an “alien consciousness” (23). She
also quotes ‘local’ scholars to endorse their views on the undeliverability of
“a representative, authentic Third-world woman … [e]ven in India, there is no such thing as <em>the</em> Indian woman – there are only Indian
women. And the individuals are far more interesting than any assumed stories of
authenticity” (Indira Karamcheti, quoted in Nussbaum 2000: 47). However, “the
body that gets beaten is in a sense the same all over the world, concrete
though the circumstances of domestic violence are in each society” (23). In
that sense, India, with its
extent of poverty and difference, merely offers the model ‘case study’.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Nussbaum
sees herself, then, in a peculiar relationship with these women. Her primary
interlocutor is not so much the feminist sited in the third world, who has
attempted to offer an interpretative edge to the naming itself. The purported
conversation is, instead, directly with the poor, tradition-bound, victimized,
yet defiant and speech-worthy third world women, each different from the other,
at the most mediated by a Leela Gulati, the anthropologist in the field. There
is no absence of commonality between women here and women elsewhere; there is,
however, a value to the ‘local’ that the feminist political philosopher needs
to acknowledge, a specificity to the problems that, though identifiable in
“women’s lives everywhere”, asks for the exercise of a <em>non-imperialist</em> <em>universal</em>
recognition of the particular <em>before it
can be represented</em>. It is this impulse that produces the insistent
declaration that her proposals are based on and grew out of her experience of
working with poor women in India.
The ghost of colonialism, once it is shaken off, can produce for Nussbaum the
reality of the ‘third world’. It is this “defence of universal values” that can
be adequately represented by her (34), and that is enacted here.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
rests on this exercise of delineating Nussbaum’s position and challenges to it?
I would suggest that the problem, at least in so far as current global feminist
analyses identify it, lies elsewhere than economo-centrism and the
non-attention to difference. For Nussbaum, the chief interlocutor is in fact
the field of development economics that does take into account various
non-economic indicators. Victimhood is no longer the critical discourse, if it
ever was. Nor is homogeneity of experience asserted, although commonality
indeed is. In fact, both Nussbaum and Mohanty are aware of and attempting to
nuance binaries here – Nussbaum to challenge the ‘West as evil’ image and
development as a totalizing discourse by pointing to the problem as one of bad
practitioners, and Mohanty working on the other arm of the binary, to point to
the impossibility of “third-worlding” in any simple sense. Mohanty’s critique
of universalism is accurate inasmuch as she points to the binariness of certain
existing critiques. It fails, however, in her insistence on historical and
socio-political heterogeneity as the necessary context of category formation;
any category, no matter how minutely contextualized, is by definition
nominalist, unintended to capture the entirety of experiences, and to that
extent, presence of heterogeneity <em>per se</em>
can hardly constitute a critique of category formation. Nussbaum’s categories
are, by her own admission, provisional, nominalist, <em>stable</em>, and hence not philosophically subject to this particular
charge of rigidity.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>But … the charges of the
“Western eye” are not merely charges about faulty practitioners, as Nussbaum
would have it, nor, surely, can proof of resistance to norms be proof of their
absence? Further, the “third world” that Nussbaum names in the plural and as a
non-essentialist category, yet needs delineation in a manner that pointing to <em>practices of bias</em> cannot begin to get
close to. It is in the assumptions of the unimplicated foreigner, then, that
Nussbaum’s universalism lies, as in her complete indifference to the anchoring
“sample populations” on which the ideal citizen, or the neutral definitions of
reproductive health, for example, have been built. Herein lies the validity of
Mohanty’s charge of “ethnocentric universality” (53). While Nussbaum’s
arguments actually clarify for us that universalism in its ideal description is
hardly the problem, there is a double move in the delineations of the universal
<em>and</em> the particular in her writing,
and in other work in this frame. Vasanti and Jayamma are clearly not, in
Nussbaum’s lexicon, victims of the mute kind. They have been, despite the
unavailability of infrastructure and mechanisms that could reverse hardship,
negotiators and survivors. They are ‘lacking’ apparently only in the
capabilities that would allow them to access legal and economic structures. And
yet, embedded as they are in their “particular caste and regional
circumstances”, their negotiations with those circumstances are tied to their
bodies in ways that seem to embody their very specificity. A putting together
of body-situation-circumstance that makes up ‘third-worldness’ as a category of
description for Nussbaum and her fellow-universalists, be it the embodied
images of ‘mothers of colour’ breastfeeding their newborn, or the detailed
physical descriptions of Vasanti and Jayamma and their surroundings, then, is
not incidental to the narrative of their flourishing; <em>it is, singularly,</em> <em>the
narrative of the particular</em>. In a frame of lack of capability, Vasanti or
Jayamma can hardly be expected <em>not to
have a body</em>; and they can hardly be expected to produce analytic
statements. As a “political explanation”, therefore, when Jayamma says that
“[a]s a [domestic] servant, your alliance is with a class that is your enemy”,
her “use of the Marxist language of class struggle” must be taken with a pinch
of bemusement – “whether one endorses it or not” [19]. It is after this
particularity has been described in its entire nuance that Nussbaum can set out
to draw her comparisons with “efforts common to women in many parts of the
world”.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>A useful critique
of universalism would mean, as Mohanty begins to suggest, an attention to
context, a beginning of knowledge <em>and of
categories</em> from enmeshment rather than outsideness, although it would
require a movement from that enmeshment to a form of objectivity – the movement
from perspective to story that Lorraine Code speaks of, in her work on feminist
epistemology.</strong><a name="_ftnref27" href="#_ftn27"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[27]</span></span></a><strong> It would also
require, and here Mohanty’s and other critiques of first world feminism fall
short, a recognition that <em>relationality</em>
between struggles in what I continue to provisionally call the third world will
also mean a space between them that is hardly ever <em>common</em> in the sense of a happy relation. It will, then, involve the
recognition that such struggles are sited in different <em>worlds</em>, and will, in their cohesion, also mean a movement away from
each other. It is only in the attempt to interpret this movement that a
discursive space of negotiation with the ‘first world’ can perhaps be forged. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To such a
universalist position, ecofeminists have replied with the following:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>A soliloquy of the local – ‘I know mine, you know
yours, there can be no dialogue’</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The ‘third world woman’ as perspective <em>to speak from</em> has perhaps not been articulated as clearly anywhere
else as in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s writing on ecofeminism, and this work
is also evidence of the ways in which development becomes a powerful organizing
metaphor for ‘third world feminism’. Building on the notions of organicity,
wholeness, and connectedness as the primary postulates of ecofeminism, Mies and
Shiva thereafter take up certain cultural characteristics associated with the
Third World to offer a picture of third world women as already in convergence
with nature, as upholders of the subsistence economy as against the “capitalist
patriarchal” system, and as offering perspectives for resistance to such an
economy of the Same. Critiquing both Western science and development, they
endeavour to demonstrate the reductionist and universalist paradigms that the
former occupies. For these critics, the mechanicity that Western science relies
on, the ways in which it dominates nature-women-third world, treating and
re-producing each of these as a dead object, are symptomatic of a
subject-object dualism that is carried over into development philosophies too.
Western science, says Shiva, is philosophically embedded in dualisms<a name="_ftnref28" href="#_ftn28"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[28]</span></span></a>
of subject-object, which allow for such a possibility only vis-à-vis nature or
any researched object. The neutrality that this apparently guarantees the
researcher is however a false one, since the universal position from which it
emanates is itself anchored in Western paradigms. Mies traces continuities here
from Francis Bacon onwards – “scientists since Bacon, Descartes and Max Weber
have constantly concealed the impure relationship between knowledge and
violence or force (in the form of state and military power, for example) by
defining science as the sphere of a pure search for truth … [thus lifting] it
out of the sphere of politics … [a separation] which we feminists attack [as]
based on a lie” (46). This scientific principle, constructed through “violently
disrupting the organic whole called Mother Nature” (46), became then the route to
knowledge, creating the “modern scientist [as] the man who presumably creates
nature as well as himself out of his brain power … [after] a disruption of the
symbiosis between the human being, Mother Nature, and the human mother … [and
this is] the link between the new scientific method, the new capitalist
economy, and the new democratic politics” (47). Similar to this, asserts Mies,
is Immanuel Kant’s evolution of a concept of knowledge and rationality through
an extrusion of emotion.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The masculine character of Western
science, constituted through such an extrusion of emotion, such a “subjection
of nature and women”, was also associated with a violence that is evident in
all technologically advanced societies. Mies and Shiva cite the examples of
military, new reproductive and biotechnologies that accompany new globalized
economies, pointing out that such technology is never neutral but functions
through the “principle of selection and elimination” that provides the “main
method of conquest and control” over what will survive and what will not be
allowed to (195).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Development, Shiva asserts, has in its
overall philosophy followed the principles of Western science. It would follow
that development has then always been about ‘catching up’ with a universal model
that has apparently worked in Western countries to provide a good quality of
life, freedom from poverty, hunger, illness, and so on. The socialist states
were the first to set up the model, and despite strong evidence contradicting
its effectiveness even in those states, it has remained the model in dominance
today.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">But Shiva has more than the
ineffectivity of the model to offer as critique. The accumulation model, she
asserts, is built on the premises of colonialism and capitalist patriarchy,
that “interpret[s] difference as hierarchical and uniformity as a prerequisite
for equality” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 2). “This system emerged, is built upon and
maintains itself through the colonization of women, of ‘foreign’ peoples and
their lands; and of nature, which it is gradually destroying” (2). Technology
is one of the tools of such colonization. Technological advancement is
accompanied by externalization of costs, so that workers in colonized
peripheries are treated differently and paid less than workers in the
metropole. The “colonization of women” involves the unpaid labour of women –
the “free economy” of mainstream economics – that shores up the market economy.<a name="_ftnref29" href="#_ftn29"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[29]</span></span></a>
The “hidden costs generated by destructive development … [include] the new
burdens created by ecological devastation, costs that are invariably heavier
for women, in both the North and South” (75).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Although this ecofeminist approach, like the other kinds of gender
work I have highlighted that negotiate science or development, speaks of the
need for “a creative transcendence of … differences” between women the world
over in order to offer resistances little or large, it is also in dissonance
with them in proposing a far more fixed position – a philosophy already
embedded in ‘the people’, here the women by virtue of <em>being</em> <em>woman</em>. The
intensification of the local provided in Mies and Shiva’s ecofeminist approach,<a name="_ftnref30" href="#_ftn30"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[30]</span></span></a>
then, separates itself somewhat from other approaches to the local as a
critique of development. Such an intensification is not in the frame of stark
cultural difference that would, in Mies and Shiva’s opinion, produce a cultural
relativism, nor is it interested in distilled essences of the local or the
“romanticization of the savage” (150) that appear in globalized market
discourse, but rather in a connection between the spiritual and the material –
a relation of soil-nature-subsistence that is somehow to be found in the
practices, intuitions, and indeed protest movements of third world women. In so
doing, ecofeminism of course exposes itself to the standard critique of
essentialism.<a name="_ftnref31" href="#_ftn31"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[31]</span></span></a> What is
important for our purposes here is the need to recognize that ecofeminism is
far closer to old ideological positions in the spectrum between these and the
new dynamic local or hybrid, and as expected, discredited for the same reasons
in the current climate. The understandings of colonialism and capitalism that
animate Mies and Shiva’s version of the ecofeminist project are, insofar as
they are spelt out, inadequate as provisional arguments. Further, the manner in
which the category of ‘third world women’ is activated through a reference to
the organicity and wholeness of their practices, fails to give an adequate
account of how this may happen; as such, it continues to fall into the trap of
romanticization that it seeks to avoid. A philosophy that is intuitive and
already in place, along with the interpretative ability to put it into practice
through various movements of resistance, fails to provide any evidence of its
assertions.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>A
disaggregated (third) world: women negotiating meanings</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But there is another kind of scholarship now
in currency that negotiates meanings of gender differently. Global gender work
disdaining the universalist approach takes on the hybridization argument and
works toward identifying contingent moments of resistance. This scholarship is
in alignment with postcolonial approaches. Anthropological investigations into
midwifery and childbirth practices exemplify this position. This is what I call
the space of not-feminist gender analysis. I take up, in this section, a
particular text that is fairly representative of such analysis, and that, to
begin with, marks its separations from post-development positions like
Escobar’s,<a name="_ftnref32" href="#_ftn32"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[32]</span></span></a>
concentrating instead on the heterogeneity of experiences as well as the
disaggregated nature of institutional apparatuses that apparently make a
description of hegemony difficult,<a name="_ftnref33" href="#_ftn33"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[33]</span></span></a>
and further, on the impossibility of even identifying such a hegemonic role for
Western science in the Indian context.<a name="_ftnref34" href="#_ftn34"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[34]</span></span></a>
Of course, having made this argument against the hegemonic nature of Western
science, in this case Western medical frameworks, this kind of global gender
analysis also carries with it the imperative to separate itself from
universalist positions, both in justifying the impulse of choosing subjects of
research<a name="_ftnref35" href="#_ftn35"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[35]</span></span></a> as well
as in declaring a detached commitment to such research.<a name="_ftnref36" href="#_ftn36"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[36]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>On culture and the local</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Cecilia
Van Hollen – who is fairly representative of a body of work in anthropology
(see Rozario 1998,</strong><a name="_ftnref37" href="#_ftn37"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[37]</span></span></a><strong> Ram 1998, 1994, 2001, and a large number
of other anthropologists working especially on reproductive health issues in
India) – begins her argument at the site of a shift she identifies as useful in
anthropological work, from a reading of practices as reflection of a culture,
to a reading of culture as “in-the-making” through everyday practices.</strong> Using this “processural view of culture-in-the-making”, she
clarifies that her anthropological approach does not seek to imply “one
monolithic thing that we can call “modern birth” in the contemporary world
order” (5). For her, it is important “to stay within the specific ethnographic
field of [her] own research and to underscore [her] point that biomedicine
always takes on a unique form at the local level” (8). At the very moment of
her refusal to call it monolithic or by a common name, however, she is speaking
of the re-interpretations of the global project of biomedical knowledge at the
“microphysical level by individual actors, collectivities, and institutions”,
and it is in this re-interpretation and the possibilities of hybridisation and
reconfiguring along caste, class and gender axes through it that she is
interested.<strong> In her case, she finds it
important to “view[ing] reproduction itself as a key site for understanding the
ways in which people <em>re</em>-conceptualize
and <em>re</em>-organize the world in which
they live” (5). She has a similar approach to gender ideologies, hierarchies,
or practices, and is at pains to demonstrate the impossibility of
cross-cultural assertions that do not take into account these practices and
their different sedimentation of meanings. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Such
a disciplinary move is accompanied, perforce, by the need to challenge the
clear separation of biomedical technological systems and indigenous practices
of healing that has characterized earlier analyses of Western medicine and by
extension, science. It is accompanied by a challenge to the notion of
development as totalizing discourse philosophically anchored in the
geographical West (and hence the separation from Escobar). It is accompanied by
a challenge to the need to identify resistance in a straightforward rejection
of Western medicine or technology. In doing this, then, it is also avowedly a
move away from those feminist readings of the agency of third world women as
sited in the ‘natural’, the ‘cultural’, or the ‘indigenous’, and </strong>of Western biomedical practices as controlling of women (15). <strong>This means a re-cognition of the ‘local’ as itself
multiply constituted and constantly in flux. And it is accompanied by the
mandatory recognition, akin to Nussbaum’s, of the problem of being the Western
feminist and intellectual who must constantly strain towards transparency.
Here, of course, the anthropologist’s new requirement of self-reflexivity has
manifested as an expression of near-guilt – a moral problem. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The agency question gets taken up
differently from Nussbaum in such an analysis that invokes the ‘local’ but at a
more avowedly involved level. There is a pattern to this kind of scholarship
that affirms the burden of a feminist re-invocation of experience while needing
to disavow existing feminist modes. Van Hollen has, for example, attempted to
speak of the marginalization of women’s labour within modern medical systems.
So “ethnographic stud[ies] of how modernity was impacting the experiences of
poor women during childbirth in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu at the end
of the twentieth century” become a part of the attempt to understand “how the
relationship between maternity and modernity is experienced, understood, and
represented” (4).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">While feminist activism and
scholarship has done much to point to “medicalization” in Western medicine –
“the process by which medical expertise “becomes the relevant basis of decision
making in more and more settings” … the process whereby the medical
establishment … incorporates birth in the category of disease and requires that
a medical professional oversee the birth process and determine treatment” (11),
anthropology has avowedly contributed to a disaggregation of biomedicine itself
as it is practised in the ‘Western world’, through descriptions of how it is
actively redefined in the ‘third world’. Van Hollen states that such
disaggregations challenge “those feminist studies that view all the controlling
aspects of biomedicalized births as derived from a Western historical legacy of
the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and that present a romanticized
vision of holistic “indigenous” birth, or “ethno-obstetrics”, as egalitarian,
“woman-centered”, and non-interventionist” (15). As she proceeds to unravel the
“historical and cultural specificity of the transformations in the experience
of childbirth” (15), it is clear that she sees resistance as embodied in these
specificities; moreover, she sites resistance in the bricoleur-like response to
various biomedical allopathic procedures rather than in a soliloquous ‘natural
therapy’ movement. And this difference between, say, the African home birth
movement and the individuated responses in Tamil Nadu, signals what she calls
cultural specificity.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">What happens to the agency question in
this exercise? Clearly, empowerment here is through frames other than the
modified inclusions suggested by Nussbaum. Any use of the modern, states Van
Hollen, is bound to refigure it in ways that bear back on the definition of the
modern. Anthropological exercises such as Van Hollen’s see themselves as
different from ‘postcolonial’ studies that focus on rural areas and that, like
feminist work, tend “to depict childbirth practices as relatively untouched by
allopathic institutions” (8). By locating her own investigation in metropolitan
Madras (now Chennai), for instance, Van Hollen prefers to home in on more
central locations for allopathy, aiming to look at “the central role which
allopathy plays in women’s decisions regarding childbirth and … how women
choose from among different allopathic options as well as non-allopathic
practices.” In other words, the hybrid, mixed bag of tradition-and-modernity,
also a bag that is being negotiated in a way that avoids “falling into the trap
of representing others simply as victims” (10).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">With such a frame in place, Van Hollen
proceeds to look at the various negotiations made by women in Tamil Nadu
vis-à-vis allopathy.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>After ideology</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
the shift from a notion of strong hegemony to a description of disaggregated
discourses – which is actually a different exercise from suggesting hybridity
as a <em>model</em> – Van Hollen acts, then,
as representative of a position that determinedly embeds itself in the local,
in the category “women”, in experience, to propose weak and diversely
articulated structures of power rather than a singular monolith. Rather than
express these as ‘binaries’, Van Hollen finds it a more fruitful exercise to
concentrate on the processes of modernization that, for the purposes of her
study, “impact childbirth in Tamil Nadu: 1) the professionalization and
institutionalisation of obstetrics, 2) transformations in the relationship
between consumption patterns and reproductive rituals, 3) the emergence of new
technologies for managing the pain of birth, 4) the international mandate to
reduce population in India, and 5) development agencies’ agenda to spread
biomedical conceptions of reproductive health for mothers and children. These
processes,” she contends, “taken together, have transformed cultural
constructions of reproduction and social relations of reproduction in myriad
ways” (6). She is also interested in “assess[ing] how the five processes of
modernity mentioned above, in relation to other factors, influence the
“choices” poor women and their families make about the kind of care to seek for
childbirth-related needs.” In referring to choice, she clarifies that “the
decision-making process is never a matter of the free will of rational,
value-maximizing individuals, but, rather, it is always enacted in
political-economic contexts and shaped by socio-cultural factors such as
gender, class, caste, and age” (7).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2"><strong>How exactly does
Van Hollen undertake this project? Her conversations with the women she meets
in her two primary field-sites in Tamil Nadu produce for her a vast collection
of words that are in common conversational usage in terms of negotiations
(between modernity and <em>shakti</em>, for
instance), are also part of the canon of Hinduism, and the subject of much
critique. For Van Hollen, the feature to be noted is the ways in which these
words travel and acquire a rich concatenation of meanings – <em>which</em> concatenation, she will contend,
is what actually constitutes culture – an act of bricolage.</strong><a name="_ftnref38" href="#_ftn38"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[38]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What,
then, does such an anthropological exercise achieve? Is it, in also shifting
from the earlier ethnographic impulse, talking about the bricolage that
constitutes culture? Van Hollen is definitely building up a glossary of words –
<em>vali, maruttavaci</em>, <em>shakti</em>, and so on, but these are words
that she refers to as the <em>originals</em>
in the analyses she makes. It may be that the particular word referred to in
translation may travel to the reader of her text against the grain as well, as
alternative interpretations of the words she has heard and put down. In the act
of simply putting down vis-à-vis western concepts of pain etc., however, there
is no suggestion towards such a move, and the glossary seems to act more as
evidence of fidelity to the ‘object of knowledge’, namely the “poor women of
Tamil Nadu”; like Nussbaum, a way of “listening to what they are saying”.
Reflexive anthropology, in this case, makes the claim to transparency as much
as the earlier ethnographic exercise, with the difference that it wants to do
this through the insertion of the researcher into the frame, as against earlier
forms which unapologetically museumized the cultures being studied as exotic,
other, and as object of knowledge separate from the anthropologist. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
does such a position offer in terms of furthering the understanding of
hegemony, or, as Van Hollen herself puts it, of “how modernity was impacting
the experiences of poor women during childbirth in the South Indian state of
Tamil Nadu at the end of the twentieth century” (4)? What does the shift from a
notion of strong hegemony to a description of disaggregated discourses mean for
conceptual strategies to read the same? The disaggregated picture that Van
Hollen describes, the hidden corners it uncovers, all mark ways in which
childbirth is viewed differently, as also ways in which seeming centres of
power – institutions and policies – are negotiated. In her invocation of the
different relationship to labour pain or <em>vali</em>
– for instance the idea that “poor women in Tamil Nadu” seem to have a
relationship of attachment to, practically a summoning of, suffering as a
necessary constituent of childbirth, as against standard mainstream moves and
feminist calls for painless labour – she also wishes to point to different ways
in which both culture and gender may be constituted as dynamic practices,
rather than as an identity or reserve that is drawn upon, or as <em>structures</em> of domination and resistance.
In any useful extension of her project, then, it would be necessary to say that
the categories of domination and resistance are themselves difficult to define.
Why? Is it because of their contradictory nature? Their ambivalence? Van
Hollen, as indeed more and more anthropologists, performs the task of
description with fidelity and often with ingenuity. This task of description is
expected to offer a critique of macro-analyses, as also of rigid, monolithic
descriptions. In what often turns out to be a misunderstanding of
macro-analyses with generalization, of structural understandings with rigidity,
however, the task of description does not, as Van Hollen would have us believe,
offer a model of hybridity as a framework of hegemony. The engagement I set up
between Mohanty and Nussbaum shows us the same slippage.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>There
is something else happening here. While Van Hollen strains to clarify that she
does not wish to refer to an authentic and fixed notion of a culture, or a
cultural past, her use and interpretation of her glossary terms falls back on
relating conversational usage to the canon in some form. Such a method might
well, as postcolonial theorists have attempted, recall a notion of repetition
rather than origin. Van Hollen’s stress is on difference, however, and in
articulating this difference, it is a stable notion of culture that she falls
back on, still associating with cultural essentialisms while always disavowing
them. As such, the easy transposition of dichotomies like public-private that
make sense in Western intellectual contexts, to conversations Van Hollen has
with these women is in itself a simulation of the local that hardly works.</strong><a name="_ftnref39" href="#_ftn39"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[39]</span></span></a><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
the notion of a ‘gap’ or a ‘failure’ to understand or hegemonize the local,
this kind of anthropological analysis aligns with the framework of hybridity
put forward by the postcolonial school. It does not, however, do the same work
in even attempting a conceptual strategy, merely ranging itself alongside
instead.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>Bringing the economic back home</em></strong><strong><em></em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the influential and important 1991
World Bank report on <em>Gender and Poverty
in India</em>, principal author Lynn Bennett announces:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">… now,
researchers, women’s activists, and government departments are reaching a new
consensus. … [W]omen must be seen as economic actors – actors with a
particularly important role to play in efforts to reduce poverty.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (John 1999: 105)</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>There
is another difference from other anthropological work that Van Hollen asserts,
and offers as a more strident critique of globalisation than isolated cultural
analyses. This she does by bringing in questions of consumer practices and
globalisation, and the various changes in birth practices in the light of
changes in the economic; in so doing, she re-configures third world women as
important economic actors.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>‘Third
world poverty’ is here a significant allegory. For Nussbaum it is a condition
to be resisted along with sexual hierarchies; for Van Hollen, economic
disparities and changing forms of the economy create different conditions of
possibility for changing cultural practices. In both, there is a sense that
economy is being brought back into the discussion, after a period of much-vaunted
culture as the last instance of difference. In both, then, the ‘economic’
becomes a metaphor for connection (Nussbaum will say that the lives of poor
women are the same everywhere; Van Hollen will refer to the ‘politics of
globalization’) as well as difference, in some sense actually regaining
importance, as it were, in causal frameworks. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The World Bank report itself drew entirely on
the findings of the 1988 <em>Shramshakti</em>
report on the condition of women in the informal sector, compiled after extensive
field surveys in different parts of the country. The <em>Shramshakti</em> report, states Mary E. John, “was intended to show
women’s extremely vulnerable working conditions across diverse occupations
under high levels of discrimination, as well as the range of health hazards
women were exposed to on an everyday basis. The recommendations of the report
addressed to various ministries … included enlarging the definition of work to
encompass all women engaged in production and reproduction, recognizing women’s
position as major rather than supplementary wage earners, and finding
strategies to enhance women’s control over and ownership of resources” (John
1999: 112). This is a finding that is set up, in the World Bank report, to
actually say that these are women who are more efficient resource managers, and
therefore better negotiators of poverty, <em>than
their men</em>. In that turn, in the shift from <em>exploitation to efficiency</em> (as John points out), in the shift in
focus from the <em>formal to the informal
sector</em>, and in the <em>examination</em> of
poor third world women in this space as a given rather than as a problem (94%
of the informal sector is constituted by women, but this is not considered the
problem, as is not the conditions of employment that prevail in this sector), a
fresh image of the “third world woman” is constituted – enmeshed but not mired
in her cultural practices, poor but a survivor, and an important economic
actor, as a glance at the literature on social capital or New Communitarianism
will also show.<a name="_ftnref40" href="#_ftn40"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[40]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
does a moment when such a report was appearing alongside a vast literature on
the micro-politics of negotiation by women of third world countries, ask to be
read as? Clearly, negotiation as a strategy of power and economic resources,
encouraging a re-inscription of the ‘third world’ as agential, sits in a not
uncomfortable alignment with a concentration on the problem of development as a
‘third world problem’ – something mainstream development language has always
done. Further, the move from ideological critique to description, finds another
parallel, in an apparent move from politics to self-help.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><em>And
after feminism</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We have seen, in Van Hollen’s text, the
impulse to move away from feminist articulations. Feminism here is, of course,
seen as the ideological stance that is both epistemically unreliable in its
monolithic description of social conditions, and vanguardist in not taking into
account women’s spontaneous consciousness/ negotiations. Given such an
understanding of feminism, the only alternative would be to move away from
feminism to women, sometimes positioning women as ex-officio knowers, sometimes
as learning through living, never as a coherent community, and never as
subjects of feminism. Apart from being the new and acceptable micro-politics in
the new globalised economy, this could also be read as a response to rigid
ideological stances in feminism that read <em>both
women and science</em> in homogenous frames. It is also, in other words, a
movement from ‘difference’ – both the hierarchical difference that was promoted
in Marxist perspectives on gender and the feminist call to a different
perspective to break free of Marxist methodologies – to differences.<a name="_ftnref41" href="#_ftn41"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[41]</span></span></a>
We would do well, I believe, not to simply label this the backlash against
feminism, for it has not merely resulted in an antagonistic positioning of
feminist and other kinds of gender work vis-à-vis development; there are
significant overlaps, too, in the two movements. The turn to autobiographical/
ethnographic narrative as experience, for example, has driven much feminist
analysis that struggled to shed rigid ideologies, as we have seen at least in
part above. The most significant overlap here with non-feminist gender work
would be the need to build a <em>narrative of
experience</em> against that of Reason, or Culture, or the concomitantly named
hegemonic entity. In this sense, the task in both later feminism and gender
analysis has been to turn to experience, as it were, and describe it
faithfully, in its diversity and heterogeneity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">How does this exploration of feminist and
gender work offer an understanding of technology or its critiques? In previous
posts we have seen the framework of negotiations with the hegemonic set up in
postcolonial scholarship; we have also seen the ways in which Marxist metaphors
of revolution get recuperated into this work. Both feminist and gender work,
embedded as they are in these contexts, also present a critical response to
science, often science as technology, and the ways in which these critical
responses move from the ideological to the everyday, from the structural to the
microcosm, from the neutral to the situated and experiential, while continuing to
look at Western science as a powerful institutional apparatus, an apparatus of
which technology is a visible manifestation. I will say that the contexts of
‘women’s lives’ provide perhaps the most powerful site for the playing out of
these critiques. The point is to show how these responses continue to retain
the same notions of technology, as discrete, as separate, as instrument, and I
suggest that such a notion of ‘powerful technology’ is what shores up the possibility
of politics – in the shape of ‘isms’ or as individual negotiations – as a
critique of hegemonic knowledge systems, the Western scientific among them.
Such an understanding of the political serves not to unpack the philosophy of
these systems, concentrating only on the hierarchies and exclusions evident in
their institutional manifestations. To unpack the conventional understanding of
the hegemonic, in this case the technological, requires a form of critique that
might well begin from experience, as feminist and gender work has done, but inserts
that experience into the hegemonic to change that picture, rather than
valorizing experience per se as always already resistant to technology. Such an
inversion of the dialectic might well constitute revolution – a revolution in
understandings of technology, and to make a primary suggestion in this
direction has been the task of this project.</p>
<p> The
next post will examine a set of possibilities for feminist responses to science
that contain such a suggestion.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
The idea of the ‘outsider within’ was first mooted by Dorothy Smith (1987).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
The <em>dai,</em> or village midwife, or
traditional birth attendant as she is referred to in the development literature,
is usually considered the repository of experience and practice in terms of
“traditional systems” who might be called upon to fill certain gaps in manpower
(not in knowledge) in the reproductive health apparatus. I refer to her, her
responses, and her experience, in this post, not as repository of knowledge of
the traditional canon, but as the aporia, the impasse to the narrative of
science. My attention thereafter is not to the discovery or description of such
an impasse, but rather to what lessons we may derive from here in a
re-cognition of the narrative.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> I
attempt here to make a distinction between Marxist and Marxian in the sense of
the former referring to organizational frameworks, practices, attitudes, and
theorizations that claim allegiance to texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Marxism
is in that sense a closed system of theory. By Marxian I refer to theoretical
formulations originating in Marx, but engaging with other texts and
methodologies as well, and not always in agreement with official or
conventional Marxist thinking. I draw from Marx’s own statement “I am not a
Marxist”, made in despairing criticism of the many entrenched positions that
were being put out in his name. In a letter to C. Schmidt on 5 August 1890,
Marx's fellow-author Friedrich Engels wrote, “As Karl Marx used to say about
the French “Marxists” in the 1870s, ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist’”
(Marxist CD Archive 2003).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> I
will come back to this vignette from the family planning clinic of a state
referral hospital, for now only wishing to draw attention, through the emphases
I have placed in the conversation , to the putting to work not only of
institutional and knowledge hierarchies, but also constitutive elements of the
propositional models of knowledge that are hosted here. For each part of the
conversation, therefore, I have set down these constitutive elements in the
indented paragraphs – those unspoken, seemingly bizarre, yet constitutive
elements. I will also say, in continuation of this point, that the somewhat
bizarre turn this conversation takes, and that I wish to point to, is not
entirely attributable to the apathy or non-personalized nature of care-giving
that is the feature of most large state hospitals.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
The unlearned people.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
Government. <strong>It is a case in point that
for the <em>dai</em>, the analytic separation
between government and non-governmental organization does not exist. The space
of civil society that the NGO conceptually occupies as separate from the state
is unavailable to her; both represent the call of legitimate authority that
have brought her here. And yet, does her turn to authority have an element of
the conscious? Puti di (Puti Jana, one of the economically more disadvantaged
of the group, also one of the most attentive and eager to imbibe the new)
approached me the day after the video film showing a trained <em>dai</em> at work in Rajasthan. She had
watched the <em>dai</em> in the film fill up
her register with the details of each birth she attended, and report to the
municipal office, and had come with a request for us to arrange something
similar for this group. So that, as she understood, they could make an honest
(and just) living, for in such a case payment to the <em>dai</em> would presumably be fixed and commensurate to her efforts. </strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a>
Oxytocin, used (under strict monitoring in hospital settings) to induce uterine
contractions, and used freely by these practitioners when called in to assist
at delayed labour, with effects ranging from the magical to the disastrous.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a>
How do you know, having none of your own?</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a> I
know that much and more.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a>
She’s seen so many patients, surely she must know something.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
As suggested in the manifesto of The School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, 1988.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a> <strong>World Bank
operations evaluation study reports on ‘gender issues in World Bank lending’
have divided the period from 1967 to the 1990s into the reactive years – 1967
to 1985, and the pro-active years – 1985 to the 1990s. The reactive years, says
the document, displayed a consistent failure to draft clear directives (for
borrower nations), to have separate chapters on gender, and generally include
gender perspectives in policy formulation. No separate department had been
allotted for ‘Women in Development’ (hereafter WID) till 1987, the existing WID
advisor had few powers and fewer funds, and it was as late as 1980 that
higher-ranking officials in the Bank first used the phrase ‘women in
development’. But voices, within the Bank and outside, had begun to speak,
since the early 1970s, of the absence of the perspective of women in development
projects around the world. While the single most landmarked work in development
literature in this direction has been that of Ester Boserup (</strong><em>Woman’s<strong> Role in Economic Development</strong></em><strong>), documents titled “Recognizing the ‘Invisible’
Woman in Development: The World Bank’s experience” (1975) or statements
extolling the “immensely beneficial impact … from educating girls” (McNamara,
World Bank president, 1980) have been making their appearance since 1975. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
As is evident from the poster, breastfeeding is part of the exercise of
third-worlding that is promoted by development agendas and globalist feminist
rhetoric alike. Shorn of any talk of natural birthing or mothering that such a
move would be accompanied by in the West, it is nevertheless promoted – ideologically
in theory, and pragmatically in practice, as the battle against the bottle and
artificial feeds, as the alternative to global Capital making the third world
mother self-sufficient provider of nutrition, and as the metaphor for
responsible motherhood.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn14" href="#_ftnref14"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[14]</span></span></a> Stories of “two women trying to
flourish” as perceived and told by Martha Nussbaum. “Unlike Vasanti, Jayamma
has been examined previously in the development economics literature … I am
very grateful to Leela Gulati for introducing me to Jayamma and her family and
for translating.” (Nussbaum 2000: 17, fn. 21). Leela Gulati, known for having
brought anthropological perspectives to bear for the first time on seemingly
economic issues, was the first to discuss widow and brick-kiln worker Jayamma
in her work on widows in India (appearing in 1998, in Martha A. Chen, edited, <em>Widows in India: social neglect and public
action)</em>,<em> </em>and also in other work
on women’s studies perspectives.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn15" href="#_ftnref15"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[15]</span></span></a> It would be
important to note here that the ‘subaltern’ is another space of contestation.
Is the subaltern a person with a pre-given identity? Does there exist a
subaltern consciousness? Can the subaltern be known? Can the subaltern be
‘developed’? The answers to all these questions within development discourse,
and especially in Nussbaum’s version of critique, would be yes.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn16" href="#_ftnref16"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[16]</span></span></a> Is one allowed to
turn that virtue on its head and talk of enmeshedness, for instance, as one
reason among many for the local scholar to begin to understand or build
“ethical singularities” (to use Spivak’s phrase) with the subaltern? Spivak
clarifies that “I have no doubt that we must learn to learn from the original
practical ecological philosophies of the world. Again, I am not romanticizing …
[this] can only be attempted through the supplementation of collective effort
by love. What deserves the name of love is an effort … which is slow, attentive
on both sides … mind-changing on both sides, at the possibility of an
unascertainable ethical singularity that is not ever a sustainable condition”
(1999: 383). Enmeshedness may not be enough for critical intimacy; is it
necessary? What would I mean by enmeshedness? An involvement, both historically
and existentially, with the issues at hand. This is not to say enmeshedness is
enough, or can be looked at in isolation. It would be in an intersection with
location. And location would be understood not only as historical or
geographical context but as relational, between worlds, where the question of
consistently perpetuated structural inequalities between ‘first’ and ‘third’
worlds would come up, where the implication of white feminism in defining
issues on the global feminist agenda would have to be faced. It is a different
story, however, when I, “local brown woman scholar” (and the scare quotes might
remind me of the politics of identity implicit in that self-naming),
essentialise both my <em>geographical</em>
location and my “scholarship” to ground representative status for myself. Then
again, local scholars always stand the chance of over-compliant alliances with
the coloniser. It would also be useful to remember that this is not to initiate
a battle over representation, as it too often turns into.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn17" href="#_ftnref17"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[17]</span></span></a>
An Indian economist, Amartya Sen <strong>is
known for his contributions to welfare economics including his work on famine,
human development theory, understanding the underlying mechanisms of poverty,
gender inequality, and political liberalism. In order for economic growth to be
achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and
public health, must precede economic reform. Sen was called the
"conscience of his profession". He has addressed problems related to
individual rights (including the formulation of the liberal paradox), justice
and equity, majority rule, and the availability of information about individual
conditions, and has inspired researchers to turn their attention to issues of
basic welfare. </strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn18" href="#_ftnref18"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[18]</span></span></a>
Based on an approximation of “what seems to be part of any life we will count
as a human life” (Nussbaum 1995: 75), Nussbaum lists, provisionally, what are
“basic functional human capabilities … 1. Being able to live to the end of a
human life of normal length … 2. Being able to have good health; to be
adequately nourished … 3. Being able to avoid unnecessary and non-beneficial
pain … 4. Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to
reason … 5. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside
ourselves … 6. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in
critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life. … 7. Being able to
live for and to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings …
8. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and
the world of nature … 9. Being able to laugh, to play … 10. Being able to live one’s
own life and nobody else’s … 10a. Being able to live one’s own life in one’s
own surroundings and context.” (Nussbaum 95: 83-85). Each of these are, stresses Nussbaum, “<em>separate</em> <em>components</em> [such that] [w]e cannot satisfy the need for one of them
by giving a larger amount of another one” (81).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn19" href="#_ftnref19"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[19]</span></span></a>
There is also, of course, an elision between sex and reproduction in the third
world here; how it follows from the ICPD recommendations that a satisfying sex
life is being talked about is a mystery.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn20" href="#_ftnref20"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[20]</span></span></a> Although the arguments quoted here
are from Mohanty’s text (1991) published well before Nussbaum’s, and although
Mohanty's critique is specifically based on the Zed Press ‘Women in the Third
World’ series of publications (as being “the only contemporary series … which
assumes that “women in the third world” are a legitimate and separate subject
of study and research” [75, endnote 5]), Nussbaum has already been expressing
her position vis-à-vis the capabilities question from the 1990s itself, drawing
on Aristotle as a resource for an account of human functioning. Further,
Mohanty’s work seems to read directly, critically, and powerfully into some of
the concerns in Nussbaum’s self-avowed feminist political philosophy,
particularly her writing on women in the third world that largely follows the
women-in-development approach. Mohanty has been one of the more vociferous and
visible critiques of first world feminism, and as such, it is necessary to
engage her critique at this point. There are also significant ways in which Nussbaum’s
text shows up shifts in thinking in first world feminisms themselves, and it is
with these in mind that I juxtapose the two.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn21" href="#_ftnref21"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[21]</span></span></a> With its nativization of the “third
world woman” (32).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn22" href="#_ftnref22"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[22]</span></span></a> “First, there are the questions of
definition … Do third world women make up any kind of constituency? … Can we
assume that third world women’s political struggles are necessarily “feminist”?
How do we/ they define feminism? … Which/ whose history do we draw on to chart
this map of third world women’s engagement with feminism? How do questions of
gender, race, and nation intersect in determining feminisms in the third
world?” (2-3). Needless to say, these questions are by now commonplace in any
discussion of feminism, and the question of ‘how’ may perhaps be a more useful
one to attempt to answer.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn23" href="#_ftnref23"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[23]</span></span></a> Where, for Mohanty, the writing of
testimonials as public record, rather than autobiographies, becomes the space
not merely for recording and recovery, but formation of subjectivities of
resistance (34).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn24" href="#_ftnref24"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[24]</span></span></a> I
have mentioned the Marxist trajectories that are one of the contexts underlying
development critique, and this would include the experience of becoming
feminist in Marxist spaces. This experience included, after the first enabling
encounter with Western feminist texts, the recognition of that qualifier –
Western – and my contention would be that it was the peculiar co-presence of
postcolonial Marxist discourses rather than direct experiences of oppression or
marginalization that made possible the primary recognition of this qualifier,
as against others. I am, then, somewhat in disagreement with Mohanty’s argument
on colonialism as a straightforward condition of possibility for third world
feminisms.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn25" href="#_ftnref25"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[25]</span></span></a> I would like to clarify that
throughout this discussion I am referring to third world women as referenced by
Mohanty.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn26" href="#_ftnref26"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[26]</span></span></a> Let me clarify that rather than
being a digression in the debate on possible feminist critiques of development,
these questions are relevant to where the positioning of such a possible
critique could be.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn27" href="#_ftnref27"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[27]</span></span></a> I
have discussed this argument in detail elsewhere. I will elaborate on the
possibilities inherent in this formulation, in my suggestion towards a feminist
methodological critique of development, and science, in the next post.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn28" href="#_ftnref28"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[28]</span></span></a> There are strong ecofeminist
positions on duality, however, that this approach fails to take up. See
Plumwood, 1993. <em></em></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn29" href="#_ftnref29"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[29]</span></span></a> For more work on
this, see Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff, 1994.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn30" href="#_ftnref30"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[30]</span></span></a> There are ways in which the third
world as local is re-produced in this discourse, even in the “transcending of
differences” among women the world over that it proposes.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn31" href="#_ftnref31"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[31]</span></span></a> This is a critique that
ecofeminists counter with the view that it stems from a dualistic thinking on
the historical-materialist Left that considers that nature is also socially
constructed, and that any attempt to say “body” is automatically reverting to
biology and some form of naturalism. On the other hand, “[f]emaleness is and
was always a human relation to our organic body [and] [o]nly under capitalist
patriarchy did the division between spirit and matter, the natural and the
social lead to the total devaluation of the so-called natural … a necessary
integration of both [ecofeminist and social ecologist] views … would not be
possible [they say, following Mary Mellor] ‘without reconstructing the whole
socialist project’” (160).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32">
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><a name="_ftn32" href="#_ftnref32"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[32]</span></span></a> “<strong>Arturo
Escobar has proposed that development is first and foremost a discourse, a
coherent system of representation that creates the “reality” of its objects and
exerts control over them. … This Foucauldian approach accomplishes a radical
relativization of development discourse by showing it to be a distinctively
modern and Western formulation. It suggests, as well, that the logic of
development discourse is fundamentally cohesive. Ethnographic research, however,
highlights the gaps in what appears to be a totalizing development discourse.
The perspectives and experiences of both the people who are constituted as the
“objects” of development as well as the people in the institutions that
implement development locally point to a much messier and often contradictory
experience of development. Akhil Gupta describes this experience as the
“complex border zone of hybridity and impurity.” In short, we cannot assume
that the logic of development discourse as produced by official reports,
studies, and programmatic statements necessarily structures the way that
development is used and experienced at the local level” (Van Hollen 2003: 168).</strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn33" href="#_ftnref33"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[33]</span></span></a>
“… anthropologists have begun to examine the diverse and uneven ways … [in
which] childbirth is being biomedicalized throughout the world” (ibid: 15).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn34" href="#_ftnref34"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[34]</span></span></a>
“Unlike the situation in the United States and many parts of Europe, the
biomedical establishment’s control over childbirth in India can by no means be
viewed as hegemonic” (ibid: 55).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn35" href="#_ftnref35"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[35]</span></span></a>
The impulse being an avowedly a personal one – “My initial decision to carry out this research
in Tamil Nadu … had more to do with my own personal history in the state than
with a purely scholarly interest in filling a lacuna in academic research” (ibid:
18).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn36" href="#_ftnref36"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[36]</span></span></a> “My intent is not to criticize from
afar the work of so many hardworking and dedicated health care providers and
policymakers. In fact, I am keenly aware of the historical legacy of the
damning depiction of maternal and child health care in India by colonial discourse to legitimise
colonial rule. So I present these criticisms with a certain amount of
discomfort about my role in perpetuating this discourse in the postcolonial
era, despite the fact that I strive to show how international and globalizing
forces are intricately implicated in women’s critiques” (ibid: 9).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn37" href="#_ftnref37"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[37]</span></span></a> Who, during case studies of <em>dais</em> in Bangladesh, finds unpardonable the
luxury of “mythologizing and romanticizing the process of ‘natural childbirth’
and of projecting this image on to a Third World context where it is not always
appropriate” (Rozario 1998: 144).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn38" href="#_ftnref38"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[38]</span></span></a> Levi-Strauss has used the word
‘bricolage’ to suggest the origin of myths from tales put together, to abandon
“all reference to a <em>center</em>, to a <em>subject</em>, to a privileged <em>reference</em>” (Derrida 1978: 286), and to
separate method from truth. In French, a bricoleur is a jack-of-all-trades.
Derrida, critical of the value of the distinction between the bricoleur and the
engineer, sees in the ethnographic impulse the pressure to interpret, arrive at
“a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign” (292).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn39" href="#_ftnref39"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[39]</span></span></a> The analysis of <em>vācal </em>(translated as doorway), for
instance, as metaphorically separating the private and the public. Why is it
not simply a description? At the very least, what are the disciplinary
methodologies by means of which anthropology, for instance, seeks to apply this
semantic construction?</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn40" href="#_ftnref40"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[40]</span></span></a>
Also referred to as progressive conservatism, this proposes a political economy
embedded within local communities, as a buffer to the continuing collateral
damage of capitalist economies. Needless to say, this relies on community
networks already in place, including patriarchal ones.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn41" href="#_ftnref41"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[41]</span></span></a> I
have examined, elsewhere, how legacies of Left critique worked for those
‘growing up feminist in Marxist spaces’ in Bengal in the ‘80s. My hypothesis is
that this legacy actually shaped the methodologies of feminist work on science
and development, including the shift from ‘access’ to ‘terms of access’, as a
parallel reading of the shift in Left approaches to science and technology from
the nationalist to the postcolonial moments would suggest. This is not to
suggest a relationship of bonhomie or emulation between feminist and Marxist
practice in Bengal, but rather a fraught and largely unacknowledged
relationship of antagonism. In Left spaces in Bengal, the positioning of the
‘feminine’ as inchoate and perspectival, as <em>experienced
but non-knowledgeable</em>, shores up Marxist discourse, rather, is necessary to
the articulation of a Marxist standpoint, and it is from here that I propose
that, in our contexts, feminist methodologies too have at least partly been
fraught with the need to retain the element of ‘perspective’ as a particular,
sometimes limited ‘way of looking’, an experience addressed to and <em>contained within</em> the hegemonic – here
masculinist Marxist practice – rather than an interpretative tool that could
provide both a knowledge of dominant systems, as well as a better account of
the world.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:44:04ZBlog EntryPostcolonial Hybridity and the ‘Terrors of Technology’ Argument
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument
<b>In the last couple of posts, Asha Achuthan has been building towards an understanding of how the anti-technology arguments in India have been posed, in the nationalist and Marxist positions. She goes on, in this sixth post documenting her project, to look at the arguments put out by the postcolonial school, their appropriation of Marxist terminology, their stances against Marxism in responding to science and technology in general, and the implications of these arguments for other fields of inquiry.</b>
<p>Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.
(Heidegger, 1927)[1]</p>
<p>By the very nature of its instrumental-managerial orientation to Indian society, modern science has established a secure relationship with the philosophy and practice of development in India. Indian developmentalists are now faced with the obvious fact that the developmental vision cannot be universalised, for the earth just does not have the resources for the entire world to attain the consumption levels of the developed west. It does not have such resources now, nor will it have them in the distant future. The developmentalists, therefore, have a vested interest in linking up with the drive for theatrical science to create the illusion of spectacular development which, in essence, consists of occasional dramatic demonstrations of technological capacity based on a standard technology-transfer model. Under this model, highly visible short-term technological performance in small areas yields nation-wide political dividends. This model includes a clearly delimited space for ‘dissent’, too. While some questions are grudgingly allowed about the social consequences of technology – about modern agronomy, large dams, hydel projects, new dairy technology, modern health care systems, space flights, Antarctica expeditions, et cetera – no question can be raised about the nature of technology itself.
(Nandy 1988: 9)</p>
<p>Science and technology have sustained various forms of systemic violence … [p]lanned obsolescence, with its de-skilling of communities, … [s]ocial triage, a rational framework for treating vulnerable communities as dispensable, … extinction, …[m]useumisation of tribals and other defeated and marginal groups who are unable to cope with modernity and development’, … the violence of development, including internal displacement, … the violence of the genocidal mentality, … [n]uclearism … [m]onoculture … [e]xclusion or enclosure … as central to the globalisation process … [i]atrogeny … in which the experts’ solution increases the endemic violence or suffering of a community … [and] the violence of pseudo-science, or antitechnological movements …
(Visvanathan 2003: 170-2)</p>
<p>Grassroots movements in India have suggested the ideas of ‘cognitive justice’ and ‘cognitive representation.’ Cognitive justice … holds that knowledge, especially people’s knowledge or traditional knowledge, is a repertoire of skills and a cosmology that must be treated fairly in the new projects of technological development. Cognitive representation, which is a corollary, presupposes that in the act of science policy-making, the practitioners from various systems would be present to articulate their concepts, theories, and worldviews. Both concepts seek to pre-empt the liquidation of certain forms of local or marginal knowledge.
(Visvanathan 2003: 165-6)</p>
<p>Modern science began as a powerful dissenting imagination, and it must return today to becoming an agent of plurality, of heretical dissent.
(Visvanathan 2002: 50)</p>
<p>The philosophies of anti-development have largely turned on the metaphor of violence. The violence of technology, the violence of science, the violence of reason, the violence of the market. The starting premise of most of anti-development has been the correlation between the ideologies of these phenomena – science, reason, the market,[2] and their collective exclusion of experience. The question of science itself has been charted through the question of technology.[3] These connections have permeated western as well as nationalist and postcolonial critiques of mainstream development, with violence being seen as constitutive of scientific knowledge rather than simply an effect of scientific practice or policy. This position is, of course, built by challenging the premises of scientific knowledge as objective, value-neutral, verifiable, and unified. Visvanathan, Shiva, and others challenging these premises of scientific knowledge, suggest that an exclusionary violence is constitutive of such knowledge that activates a subject-object dichotomy[4] although its claims to objectivity are shown up to be false in its imperialising tendencies; further, that it works with a systematisation ‘wherein science becomes an organiser of other mentalities, [affecting] … the domains of work, education, sex, and even memory.’</p>
<p>Like Shiva, Visvanathan marks western science as dualistic, as imbued with a knowledge-power nexus, and as vivisectionist. Shiva makes a strong proposal for choosing pre-existing alternative knowledges as against reductionist modern science, which she defines through her identification of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of reductionism, traced to Descartes; Visvanathan, however, claims a reluctance to a simple return, looking, rather, for an ‘escape from the dualism of Luddism versus progress’ (2003: 172). He refers to the ‘chaos’, ‘play’, or uncertainty that science traditionally allows but that gets disallowed once it enters the text. For Visvanathan, the scientific self is one without shadows, cut off from the moral one, as well as from the playful, spiritual, anarchic self of its initial imagination. The scientific community is merely an ‘epistemologically efficacious’ one that has no internal filters to exercise ‘ethical restraint’, to confront the ‘perpetual obsolescence that science and markets impose on a community’ (2002: 43).</p>
<p>He asks, therefore, at a conceptual level, for a return to a more ambivalent, anarchic self, to play, to a place for grief,[5] to memories of change in a community; at the policy level, for a plurality and democratisation among skills and knowledge systems. Such a return to what Visvanathan names a sacred root, is a rescue from the present homelessness of modern science in its secular, proletarianised form – a condition where science is treated as apart from and above a culture instead of being embedded in it. On the other hand, ‘[m]odern science began as a powerful dissenting imagination, and it must return today to becoming an agent of plurality, of heretical dissent’ (2002: 50). Such ‘play’, such an anarchy of perspectives, such a form of democracy, embodied for him in ‘grassroots movements’ like the popular science movements of the 70s, where the citizen is seen as a ‘person of knowledge’, and where those ‘currently designated scientists’ become ‘prisoners of conscience’, is what could effect a response to what he calls the secularisation and proletarianisation of science. He charts a series of exercises that might make this possible – renunciation of science, cognitive indifference to it, a different cognitive justice being among them. ‘One wishes one had a Gandhi or a Loyola to construct … a book for science, with exercises which, while spiritual, are also deeply cognitive and political. I think in this lies the real answer to the Cartesian meditations or to Bacon’s Novum Organum’ (2002: 47).</p>
<p>While Shiva makes fairly straightforward substitutions between science and technology in her critique, citing the violence of one to indict the other, Visvanathan suggests, at various points, that technicity (2002: 41) - by which he refers to an attitude that treats the human as immortal, nature as resource, and technology as both instrument and nearly universal antidote - is the problem with a science that might otherwise have been better. ‘Everyday technologies’, on the other hand, being embedded in cultural requirements and practices, release science from expertise.</p>
<p>My purpose, in charting these positions, is partly about this peculiar connection, or substitution, between science and technology that most of the critiques stand on in pointing to the violence of mainstream development. The ‘will to power’ of technology in these positions seems, more often than not, an obverse of the ‘will to mastery’ over technology in its most instrumental sense, which is why the debates seem to hover endlessly over technology being beneficial, devastating, or a judicious mixture of the two. The pre-technological appears free of the instrumentality of technology; ‘everyday technologies’ seem to offer respite in the shape of an embeddedness in community; at the very least, they appear to possess the mythicity, the poiesis, that Visvanathan so wistfully regrets the absence of in modern science. And these two –everyday technologies and the pre-technological, in their common possession of such poiesis, such anarchy, seem organically tied and a natural vantage point for critique of the modern technological.</p>
<p>All these critiques, then, try to offer a release from the ‘instrumentality’ of technology, but by attaching themselves to a certain instrumental view of technology itself. An instrumental view might be, as Heidegger puts it, the correct view, the fundamental characteristic of technology; is it the true (essential) one? The correct view of technology – in other words, what technology is – for Heidegger, is the instrumental and anthropological view, namely, technology as a tool and means to an end, and technology as human activity.[6] To move from the correct to the true requires an understanding of instrumentality itself, and Heidegger takes up the task of this movement in trying to understand ‘man’’s relationship to technology. To understand instrumentality is to understand the early Greek sense of responsibility, a bringing forth. ‘The principal characteristic of being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival’, i.e. an occasioning or an inducing to go forward. This is the essence of causality in Greek thought, and not a moral or agential sense, as populates these and other critiques.[7] This bringing forth is basically a revealing, demonstrates Heidegger, an entry into the realm of truth – aletheia. ‘Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning-causality and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belongs instrumentality.’</p>
<p>What of the difference between the older sense of craft and modern technology? Can it be said that this sense of revealing, bringing into unconcealment, is true only of Greek thought, and can be applied at the most only to the ‘handicraftsman’? Heidegger holds that modern technology too is to be understood in its essence as a revealing, with the difference that in modern technology, the revealing becomes a challenging that perhaps converts nature into resource, a ‘setting-upon’ rather than a ‘bringing-forth’. ‘But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate … [r]egulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.’ [17]</p>
<p>A turn to Heidegger, then, at least seems to imply that a simple description of technology as instrumental and therefore somehow morally evil cannot be the basis of critique. Whatever the difference between the pre-technological or the everyday on the one hand, and modern technology on the other, both the fundamental characteristics and the essence of technology remain the same; further, techné as a form of knowing is hardly, in its originary sense, reducible to the ‘machine’, defined in opposition to a romantic vision of ‘man’. Although both ecofeminist and postcolonial critiques have declared themselves apart from such a Luddite view, they fail, in their persistent definitions of technology, to sufficiently separate themselves from it.</p>
<p>This ‘man’-machine opposition also follows on the debate around a clear separation between the two. In the various engagements with technology, or rather with the machine, we see attempts to bring it around to terms of friendliness with ‘man’, or to humanise it, or to get it to mimic ‘humanness’. Artificial intelligence projects look for the anthropomorphic answer – look in the mirror – to understand intelligence, science fiction longs for the monster machine that can be made human. The critical debates on the AI project too, then, insist on some ‘extra’, some remainder, in human consciousness, that must escape computation – an ‘essence’ in Searle, the search for a likeness in Nagel, a methodological mystery for Chomsky and others. For more external critiques, questions of machine learning, representing ‘man’ adequately, or emotive capacity, take centre stage.</p>
<p>It is not too difficult to trace continuities between these positions and the postcolonial ones I have just delineated above, with the development that the frail ‘human’ rendered even frailer in subalternity now takes centre-stage; and it seems that in both, the sacred boundary between ‘man’ and ‘machine’ is at stake. Haraway, speaking from within the late-twentieth century scientific culture of the United States, refers to this now ‘leaky distinction … between animal-human (organism) and machine’ to suggest that ‘[p]re-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid.</p>
<p>Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway 1991: 152). The technological determinism that drives socialist feminist critiques of science and technology, then, and offers natural collectivities of women, or class, in their empirical connotations, as vantage points, is re-opened, so that destruction of ‘man’ by ‘machine’ no longer suffices as critique. Putting together Heidegger and Haraway, it is clear that it never did, and that boundaries are indeed the sites on which control strategies function, rather than the integrity of natural objects. With such a view, it is obvious that neither questions of vivisection nor of representation stand, with their reliance on wholeness and organicity.</p>
<p>Finally, following Sanil V., the history of technology is the history of culture. A critique of technology arising from culture, therefore, as the postcolonials seem to articulate, particularly, in their accessing of anterior difference, is hardly a useful, or sound, critique. It is, moreover, an instrumental critique, as caught in the thrall of technology as the mainstream itself, indeed more so. The necessity might be to recognise the impurity in the separation itself, rather than in, as again the hybridity framework seems to suggest, the negotiations with technology by culture.</p>
<p>To sum up this and the 2 preceding posts, therefore, I put down telegraphically the following steps. Predominant critiques of science in India that continue to have valence today have been voiced as critiques of technology. These have drawn partly on Gandhi’s critique of technology as instrument, and have articulated the empirical subaltern as seat of resistance to technology, retaining, in this move, the commitment to the ‘human’ of liberalism that they also purport to critique. Such a subaltern is also seen as having cultural continuities, in whatever inchoate fashion, with an anterior difference – an immutable past. When such a ‘subaltern-as-resistant’ is purported to offer crisis to western science, as the hybridity framework suggests, resistance is asked to carry the referent of revolution, without fulfilling the promise of inversion of the dialectic that revolution, to merit the name, must carry. I would suggest that, in such a case, resistance remains the Kuhnian anomaly, without succeeding in a convertion to crisis.</p>
<p>In the next set of posts, I will try to look at feminist arguments drawing from these and other positions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[1] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, from Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from 'Being and Time' (1927) to 'The Task of Thinking' (1964)'‘, Revised and expanded edition, edited, with general introduction and introductions to each selection by David Farrell Krell. Harper:San Francisco.</p>
<p>[2] ‘… both science and market are amnesiac communities, … hegemonic groups that force products, processes and communities into obsolescence. Both are seen as progress. But what is progress but a genocidal word for erasure, for forgetfulness’ (2002: 43).</p>
<p>
[3] There are many sides to this debate between whether the scientific and technical traditions were two streams that, for most of recorded history, run apart from each other. For most of postcolonial practice, which wants to work against a simple version of the technological as applied science, a connection is sought to be made between the two that is, however, not explored or explained carefully, except when referring to the everyday technologies, where, paradoxically, the separation of the scientific and the technological is what is drawn on, to suggest the value of one over another.</p>
<p>
[4] Vandana Shiva would make this case particularly with respect to nature, which, she says, is treated as passive in the western scientific knowledge binary of subject-object.</p>
<p>
[5] ‘The tear may transform the scientific ‘eye/I’’ (2002: 46).</p>
<p>[6] ‘We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together.’</p>
[7] ‘Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting. In either case we bar to ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is latter called causality. So long as this way is not opened up to us we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based on causality, actually is.’ [9]
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:45:43ZBlog EntryThe (Postcolonial) Marxist Shift in Response to Technology
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology
<b>In her previous post, Asha Achuthan discussed, through the Gandhi-Tagore debates, the responses to science and technology that did not follow the dominant Marxist-nationalist positions. Later Marxist-postcolonial approaches to science and responses to technology were conflated in anti-technology arguments, particularly in development. In this post, the fifth in a series on her project, she will briefly trace the 1980s shift in Marxist thinking in India as a way of approaching the shift in the science and technology question. This exercise will reveal the ambivalence in Marxist practice toward continuing associations between the ‘rational-scientific’ on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ on the other.</b>
<p></p>
<h3>The importance of the subaltern <br /></h3>
<p>Ranajit Guha, writing
in 1982, was the first to consider, within Indian Marxism, the
structure of subaltern consciousness. Questioning the incidental place given to
the peasant in what I have called Marxist-nationalist frames, Guha proposed a
re-cognition of the subaltern – here the local peasant – as political and
politicised, and not merely a cog in the wheel or an included member of a
revolution conceived of by the vanguard. In re-conceptualising or
re-discovering (it is not clear which) the political, the Subaltern School, up
until the time of Subaltern Studies IV, brought up an analysis of colonialism
that challenged early and neo-colonialist historiographies, as dominance <em>without</em>
<em>hegemony</em> in at least the first fifty years of its existence. This
suggested that colonial power had not only <em>not</em>
worked with the active consent of ‘the people’; it had placed everything before
colonial time in the zone of non-history, and by extension, in the zone of the
pre-political. Nationalist historiographies had followed the same patterns in
addressing the peasant, thus leaving out the 'politics of the people' (Guha 1982). The Subaltern
Studies School up until Subaltern IV, then –</p>
<p>1.
Raised the question of subaltern consciousness.</p>
<p>2.
Uncovered the 'role of the peasant in nationalist
movements' as the subaltern domain of politics – a domain separate from the 'elite' nationalist domain – rather than an un-political 'sticks and stones'
activity.</p>
<p>3.
Re-read colonialism as a discourse of dominance without
hegemony, that resulted in separate elite and subaltern domains of politics.</p>
<p>4.
Challenged existing ‘elite historiography’ - both
colonialist and nationalist.</p>
<p>5.
Made these moves through a different mode of
history-writing that took into account unconventional sources, and used
different methodologies, producing, on that account, a different history.</p>
<p>I will not go into
the two significant challenges to the Subaltern School<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> that came up with Subaltern
IV. For my purposes, the early Subaltern phase, in its shifts from the
Marxist-nationalist moment, is important for the ways in which it aligns with (or rather, facilitates) various critiques of technology that permeate discussions around development today, and sometimes seek alliances with Gandhian philosophies in doing
so. Needless to say, all of these relied for their critique on the vantage
point of the subaltern. That subaltern was an empirical category or condition
as set out in Subaltern Studies.<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> I examine here two of
three spaces where this shift from earlier Marxist to subaltern perspectives is
visible – the popular science movements, the post-trade-union movements, and
the critiques of technology available in the postcolonial school.</p>
<p><strong>People’s Science Movements</strong></p>
<div class="pullquote">The <strong>Science and Rationalists’
Association of India</strong> (name of the organization in Bengali is <em>Bharatiya
Bigyan O</em> <em>Yuktibadi Samiti</em>) established on 1<sup>st</sup> March
1985, our organization is made up of like minded people coming from different
professions. We are not affiliated to any political party. </div>
<div class="pullquote"><strong> <u>Our aim</u></strong> is to
eradicate superstition and blind faith, which include religious fanaticism, astrology, caste-system, spiritualism and numerous other obscurantist
beliefs.</div>
<p> </p>
<div class="pullquote"> <strong><u>Our view</u></strong> is that
rational way of thinking shall be spread among the people as against spiritual
or religious teachings, and that alone can bring about social change. </div>
<div class="pullquote"><a href="http://www.srai.org/sra.htm">http://www.srai.org/sra.htm</a></div>
<p>The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mfcindia.org/intro.htm">Medico Friends Circle</a> was set up in 1974 at
a national level, to critically analyse the existing health care system in
India and 'to evolve an appropriate approach
towards health care which is humane and which can meet the needs of the vast
majority of the people in our country'. With an emphasis on
the necessary role of the state in providing such health care, it demanded 'that medical and health care be available to everyone irrespective of her/his ability to pay … that medical intervention and health care be strictly guided
by the needs of our people and not by commercial interests'; and asked for 'popularisation and demystification of medical science and … the establishment
of an appropriate health care system in which different categories of health
professional are regarded as equal members of a democratically functioning
team'. Alongside, it also decided to push for 'active participation by the
community in the planning and carrying out preventive and promotive measures',
for 'a pattern of medical and health care adequately geared to the
predominantly rural health concerns of our country … a medical curriculum and
training tailored to the needs of the vast majority of the people in our
country', and asked, further, that 'research on non-allopathic therapies be
encouraged by allotting more funds and other resources and … that such
therapies get their proper place in our health–care'. It also asked that we be attentive to the
role of 'curative technology in saving a person’s life, alleviating suffering
or preventing disability'.</p>
<p>Community Development Medicinal Unit, an independent
non-profit voluntary organisation, was set up in 1984, to 'achieve the
basic societal need of facilitating access to essential medicines', to 'provide
unbiased drug information to health professionals and consumers, to weed out
spurious and “irrational” drug combinations from the market through consumer
information and pressure on government, to “negotiate with the Government to
formulate people-oriented drug policies and weed out irrational and hazardous
drugs from the Indian market, [and to] … conduct community-oriented research on
drugs' (<a href="http://www.cdmubengal.org/aboutus.html">http://www.cdmubengal.org/aboutus.html</a>).</p>
<p>These were a few of the many organisations that grew in the
70s and 80s to nurture the ‘social’, ‘civil’, ‘cultural’ space. Alongside other
organisations like the Janakiya Samskarika Vedi in Kerala, these determinedly
claimed an autonomous, non-profit <em>guardianship
of </em>'<em>the people</em>', reacting as much
to the violence in the political life of the entrenched Left as to its
vanguardism.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
Their primary aim, therefore, was to increase access and availability not only
to the fruits of scientific knowledge, namely drugs and curative technologies,
but to that knowledge itself, so that programmes of ‘popularisation and
demystification’, rural needs, ‘alternative system use’, were incorporated and
taken up as the activities of local science clubs.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the
stress was on 'active participation', which did not need an unpacking of
knowledge systems or knowledge-making, but rather an involvement at the level
of knowledge-dispensation, as also an extension of the WHO slogan '(think
globally) acting locally'. But the stress itself possibly had other histories.
Autonomous or otherwise, these organisations came out of what Raka Ray has
called the 'hegemonic field' of the Left, in Bengal
and Kerala, among other spaces. In attempting to move away from the notion of
vanguard party and the ‘mass’, ‘the people’ of a democratic state became the
organising metaphor for these ‘movements’ that not only 'took science to the
villages', but also admonished technology for its inattentions to the people. Appropriate technology and best practices, then, were the logical next step, as
also the accompanying challenge to big dams – all manifestations of technology
that suppressed subaltern voice.</p>
<p>While the <em>Bigyan O</em> <em>Yuktibadi
Samiti</em> may be the most caricatural
version available today, most of the people’s science movements did rely on
associations between 'rationalist' and scientific ideas, using the one to
bolster the other, or, in the later turn to the PSM, accuse the one on account
of the other. In this later turn, the PSM share the philosophy of the
anti-development positions, in their attention to the vantage point of the
subaltern as an empirical identity from which to critique the existing
knowledge frames. Part of the expectation from such movements, that
they would eliminate 'nativism' and challenge 'fundamentalism', then, was
obviously not met in the later turn.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3">Why have PSMs not
taken the fight to the priests and the temples?</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3"><em>I believe that the nativist
turn by an important segment of Gandhian social activists and intellectuals
made it unfashionable to question tradition and religion. It became almost
obligatory to defend the 'wisdom' of the masses, as opposed to the 'violence' of modern scientific ideas themselves. This kind of
thinking moved the focus to 'safer' targets, like big development
projects, MNCs and such in which 'modern' technology and modern institutions
were the main culprits and people's traditions the source of resistance (I am
not suggesting that the left should not oppose MNCs and big development
projects, as and when they need to be opposed. But they have to be opposed
while defending a progressive, secular worldview; not in order to defend the 'people's wisdom' which contains many inherited prejudices and
superstitions). Science movements imbibed the populism and cultural
traditionalism of leading Gandhian/postcolonial intellectuals who took a highly
anti-modernist position for nearly three decades, starting around late 1970s
(coinciding with Indira Gandhi's emergency).</em></p>
<p> (Nanda 2005:
http://www.sacw.net/index.html)</p>
<p>Nanda’s statement is at the cusp of
the postcolonial appropriation of Marxian terminology in its anti-technology
arguments. We will go into these in more detail in the next post.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> Spivak
on subaltern agency (<em>Can the Subaltern
Speak?</em>), and Ajit K. Chaudhury on Subaltern Studies’ dismissal of Lenin’s
consciousness as ‘elite’ (<em>In Search of a
Subaltern Lenin</em>). In effect, both moves challenged the <em>empirical subalternity </em>on which Subaltern Studies perspectives
seemed to stand.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> 'The
word "subaltern" … as a name for the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender and office or in any other way'. And the work of Subaltern Studies
therefore relates to 'the history, politics, economics and sociology of
subalternity as well as to the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems – in
short, the culture informing that condition' (Guha 1988: 35).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> Another element of the organizational perspectives is a certain divide
between the political and ‘other’ activities that this period saw. Paralleled by the base-superstructure divide,
or the massline versus military line was this socio-cultural activity versus
political activity, a debate well demonstrated in the history of the Janakiya
Samskarika Vedi (Sreejith K., EPW December 10, 2005).</p>
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:22ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [2]
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2
<b>This is the third in a series of posts on Asha Achuthan's Rewiring Bodies project. In this post, Asha looks at the Tagore-Gandhi debates on technology to throw some light on the question of whether there was a nationalist alternative to the technology offered by the West. </b>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">'Pandit Nehru wants
industrialization because he thinks that, if it is socialized, it would be free
from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that evils are inherent in
industrialism, and no amount of socialization can eradicate them.'</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">'Instead of welcoming machinery as a boon, we should look upon it as an
evil.'</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">"Division of labour there will necessarily be, but it will be a
division into various species of body labour and not a division into
intellectual labour to be confined to one class and body labour to be confined
to another class."</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote"> </div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">But where am I among the crowd, pushed from behind, pressed from all
sides? And what is this noise about me? If it is a song, then my own <em>sitar</em> can catch the tune and I join in
the chorus, for I am a singer. But if it is a shout, then my voice is wrecked
and I am lost in bewilderment. I have been trying all these days to find in it
a melody, straining my ear, but the idea of non-cooperation with its mighty
volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of negations
shouts. And I say to myself, “If you cannot keep step with your countrymen at
this great crisis of their history, never say that you are right and the rest
of them wrong; only give up your role as a soldier, go back to your corner as a
poet, be ready to accept popular derision and disgrace.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">(Tagore 1921:
Chatterjee 56)</div>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The Tagore-Gandhi debates – as a window on the
contestations between the ambivalent 'modern' somewhat removed from the
mainstream of nationalist politics, and the recalcitrant 'pastoral' within the
same stream – perhaps give a better idea of the responses to modernity and
science than the Nehru-Gandhi dialogues or the former's reading of the latter's
philosophy. In a series of letters exchanged between 1929 and 1933, and earlier,
in debates conducted in the pages of <em>Young
India </em>and <em>Modern Review</em>, Gandhi
and Tagore spoke to each other of rural reconstruction, of the possibilities
and limits of handicraft industries and the <em>charkha</em>
programme, of the discourse of science as opposed to that of religiosity.
Although a lot of the dialogue between them is neither direct nor addressing
the other’s concerns fully, both had blueprints for rural programmes of
self-sufficiency; both were opposed to heavy technology, both were opposed to
state views on education. For both thinkers, the anti-colonial struggle was
symbolised in the protest against foreign cloth, heavy technology, or
government-sponsored education. This protest, in the form of the call for
swaraj, differed in nuance in Tagore and Gandhi, but essentially it signified a
moral freedom from the West, a dignity of human labour, a protection of the
intellect from colonization. Swaraj would involve, for both, a reconstruction
of life – the moral as well as the material.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">For both, the moral and the
material were inextricably linked; the difference seems to be in the stress on
attaining material freedom through the moral in Tagore, and on attaining moral
freedom through material activity in Gandhi’s thought. Nowhere was this more
evident than in the different systems of schooling, both outside the
state-sponsored system, that Gandhi and Tagore set up, in Wardha and
Santiniketan respectively. Both had different and powerful analyses of the
hegemony of western science, and consequently different views on the nature of
oppositional practice. A point Akeel Bilgrami has noted about Gandhi’s thought
may be true of both thinkers here, namely, the integrity of their thought, the
difficulty of picking strands of it regarding particular issues, or of separating
their political impulses from their epistemological ones. Let us, for our
purposes, however, force such an initial strand, and take up the programme/metaphor of the charkha as 'cottage machine'<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
to look at the debate around development and technology that ensued around it
between the two thinkers.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">For Gandhi, the <em>charkha</em> programme was a
symbol for rural cooperation – a 'non-co-operation … neither with the English,
nor with the West [but] with the system the English have established' (1921,
‘The Great Sentinel’, addressed to Tagore). That system indicated the broad
sweep of Western materialism, expressed in hugely consumptive desires, and for
Gandhi, the charkha stood for a rejection of this exchange value for use value
– self-sufficiency. Gandhi’s early proposals around spinning the <em>charkha</em> offered an alternative programme
of rural construction, particularly the exercise of self-sufficiency. These
were followed up in 1921 in the laying down of 'indispensable conditions for
swaraj' (188-9). Later, he stood firm through Tagore’s qualified scepticism and
other critiques, moving from the larger programme to <em>charkha</em> as spiritual metaphor; 'To the perplexed', he said that 'I
do regard the spinning-wheel as a gateway to <em>my</em> spiritual salvation, but I recommend it to others only as a
powerful weapon for the attainment of swaraj and the amelioration of the
economic condition of the country' (Gandhi <em>Collected
Works </em>vol. 30, 450-1, 1958, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 108). In response to
the poet’s chagrin at the requirement of all to spin, 'I do indeed ask the poet
and the sage to spin the wheel as a sacrament. ... The call of the spinning
wheel is the ... call of love. And love is <em>swaraj</em>. The spinning wheel
will 'curb the mind' when the time is spent on necessary physical labour can be
said to do so. ... I do want growth ... but I want all these for the soul. ...
A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognising the dignity of labour.'
88-9. That growth of the soul, that spiritual salvation, the actual realisation
of swaraj, meant for Gandhi the rejection of the ‘system’ – the moral force
that made it irrelevant. That system included the railways and hospitals,
which, however, Gandhi was not 'aiming at destroying … though [he] would
certainly welcome their natural destruction … Still less … [was he] trying to
destroy all machinery and mills' (Gandhi <em>Young
India </em>26 January 1921, 33, Chatterjee).<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
For he made the conventional acknowledgement that '[m]achinery has its place;
it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human
labour ... I would welcome every improvement in the cottage machine but I know
that it is criminal to displace the hand labour by the introduction of
power-driven spindles unless one is at the same time ready to give millions of
farmers some other occupation in their homes'
(Gandhi 1925, 'The Poet and the <em>charkha</em>', Young India, 5 November, Chatterjee 125).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Was Tagore too as clearly opposed to heavy
technology? The <em>yantra</em> <em>danava</em> is a recurring theme in his
poetry, and even at the time of his critique of Gandhi’s <em>charkha</em> programme, he was writing, in plays like <em>Mukta Dhara </em>and <em>Rakta</em> <em>Karabi</em>, searing
critiques of the effects of technology on people’s lives.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
As far as the rejection of the West went, also, he was with Gandhi, holding him
up as the 'Mahatma [who], frail in body and devoid of material resources,
should call up the immense power of the meek …' ('Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 55), and reminding his readers that 'I have
seen the West; I covet not the unholy feast, in which she revels every moment,
growing more and more bloated and red and dangerously delirious …' (ibid,
55-9). His was not the mode of Non-Cooperation, however, for this movement,
with its 'noise', its particular strategems that instrumentalised, made 'barren
and untrue' the spirit of the Mahatma’s words, failed to provide for him the
‘melody’ he needed.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> On the
yantra itself, Tagore clearly had ambivalent views, for on other occasions in his
poetry he offers what might be <em>homage</em>
– yantra namah.<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">While the withering critique of railways, doctors
and lawyers in <em>Hind Swaraj</em>
exemplifies at least the early Gandhi’s views on these symbols of modernity and
the need for their unconditional rejection,<a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
Tagore reacted again and again to such a view, particularly to the moral
element shoring it up, complaining, for instance, about the principles of the <em>charkha</em> programme - 'economics is
bundled out and a fictitious moral dictum dragged in its place' (Tagore, ‘The
Call of Truth’). While being opposed to heavy technology, Tagore refused to
accede to the “magical formula that foreign cloth is impure” (Tagore, ‘The Call
of Truth’). 'Swaraj,' he says, 'is not concerned with our apparel only - it
cannot be established on cheap clothing; its foundation is in the mind ... in
no country in the world is the building up of swaraj completed ... the root of
such bondage is always within the mind. ... A mere statement, in lieu of
argument, will never do. ... We have enough of magic in the country ... That is
exactly why I am so anxious to re-instate reason on its throne.' [Chatterjee
82].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">What, then, of his critique of Western materialism? 'You know that I do not believe in the material civilisation of the West just
as I do not believe in the physical body to be the highest truth in man. But I
still less believe in the destruction of the physical body, and the ignoring of
the material necessities of life. What is needed is establishment of harmony
between the physical and spiritual nature of man, maintaining of balance
between the foundation and superstructure. I believe in the true meeting of the
East and the West. Love is the ultimate truth of soul. We should do all we can,
not to outrage that truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea
of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our heart fire but
the fire that burns out our hearth and home.' ('Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation', <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 59)</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In this sense, there was an affinity between Tagore
and Nehru – with respect to desirable national attitudes to faith, unreason, or
imperialist policy. For Tagore, swaraj was, as he wrote to Gandhi, '<em>maya</em>, … like a mist, that will vanish
leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal. However we may delude
ourselves with the phrases learnt from the West, <em>Swaraj</em> is not our objective.' (Tagore 1921:)<a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">On the ability of the charkha to bring about rural
reconstruction, Tagore avers – 'The discussion, so far, has proceeded on the
assumption that the large-scale production of homespun thread and cloth will
result in the alleviation of the country's poverty. ... My complaint is, that
by the promulgation of this confusion between <em>swaraj</em> and <em>charkha</em>,
the mind of the country is being distracted from <em>swaraj</em>.' [Chatterjee
118]. 'One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has
overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the
neglect of science. … If a great union is to be achieved, its field must be
great likewise ... the religion of economics is where we should above all try
to bring about this union of ours.' [Chatterjee 104-6-7]. What Tagore perceived
as happening in the charkha programme, on the other hand, was the 'raising of
the charkha to a higher place than is its due, thereby distracting attention
from other more important factors in our task of all-round reconstruction.'
[Chatterjee 112].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Tagore had
other problems with charkha and its being tied to swaraj. For one, the ‘cult’
of the charkha would not work for swaraj because it is an “external
achievement”, apart from being a call to obedience that only recalled slavery
in its worst form.<a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> For
another, the isolationism enshrined in the act of rejecting foreign cloth only
seemed to bring back the “sin of untouchability” in the guise of the charkha
versus ‘impure’ foreign cloth. Further, and here Tagore raises his most
eloquent objection, his failure to see a difference between the charkha and the
high machine that introduces repetitive activity, boredom, and alienation in
human labour. “Humanity”, he says, “has ever been beset with the grave problem,
how to rescue the large majority of the people from being reduced to the stage
of machines. ...” [Chatterjee 104-5]. The discovery of the wheel signified, for
Tagore, “[t]he facility of motion … given to inert matter [which] enabled it to
bear much of man’s burden … [and t]his was but right, for Matter is the true <em>shudra</em>;
while with his dual existence in body and mind, Man is a <em>dwija</em>. … Thus,
whether in the shape of the spinning wheel, or the potter’s wheel or the wheel
of a vehicle, the wheel has rescued innumerable men from the <em>shudra’s</em>
estate …” (“The Cult of the Charkha”, <em>Modern Review</em>, September 1925,
Chatterjee 104). In such a scenario, it may be argued that “spinning is … a
creative act. But that is not so; for, by turning its wheel man merely becomes
an appendage of the charkha; that is to say, he but does himself what a machine
might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement.
... The machine is solitary ... likewise alone is the man ... for the thread
produced by his charkha is not for him a thread of necessary relationship with
others ... He becomes a machine, isolated, companionless” (ibid). And why is
this? Tagore refers back, here, to the discus of Vishnu which signifies the
“process of movement, the ever active power seeking fulfilment. … Man has
[therefore] not yet come to the end of the power of the revolving wheel. So if
we are taught that in the pristine <em>charkha</em> we have exhausted all the
means of spinning thread, we shall not gain the favour of Vishnu … If we are
wilfully blind to the grand vision of whirling forces, which science has
revealed, the <em>charkha</em> will cease to have any message for us.”
(Chatterjee 104) Therefore we must realise that “<em>swaraj</em> will advance,
not propelled by the mechanical revolution of the charkha, but taken by the
organic processes of its own living growth” [Chatterjee 121].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Tagore
refers, again and again in his polemic, to the dynamicity inherent both in the
truth of Vishnu, and in the progress of science, as against the dead burden of
“rites and ceremonials” that have produced in “India’s people” the habit of
relying on external agencies rather than on the self. The charkha embodies for
Tagore such an external object, static. Is he then subsuming the wheel and its
dynamicity in the discourse of science? A careful reading of Tagore’s polemic
seems to suggest that his point is rather in examining the nature of material
activity and making the connection, through dynamicity, without which neither
science nor the charkha might have any value.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There were other differences. Tagore recognized that
for Gandhi, productive manual work, such as that embodied in the charkha, was
the "prime means of intellectual training" (<em>Harijan</em>, 18 sep 1937). The sort of
oneness that such collective occupational activity may create for Gandhi,
however, fails to move Tagore, for whom the act is a performance of sameness
and stagnation. Charkha, he says, in one of his many tirades against the
programme, is “a befogged reliance on … narrow paths as the sole means of
gaining a vast realisation.” [Chatterjee
114]. As such, the philosophy of swaraj as it was being enacted, along with the
programme of Non-cooperation and rejection of the West, only produced an
isolation, a soliloquous discourse, a “struggle to alienate our heart and mind
from those of the West … [that could only be] an attempt at spiritual suicide …
India has ever declared”, he said, “that Unity is Truth, and separateness is <em>maya</em>.
This unity … is that which comprehends all and therefore can never be reached
through the path of negation … Therefore my one prayer is: let India stand for
the cooperation of all peoples of the world. The spirit of rejection finds its
support in the consciousness of separateness, the spirit of acceptance in the
consciousness of unity” (Tagore’s
reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 62). More disturbing for
him was the violence enshrined in the principle of Non-cooperation. “The idea
of non-cooperation is political asceticism. ... It has at its back a fierce joy
of annihilation which at best is asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of
frightfulness in which the human nature, losing faith in the basic reality of
normal life, finds a disinterested delight in an unmeaning devastation ...
[non-cooperation] in its passive moral form is asceticism and in its active
moral form is violence. ... The desert is as much a form of <em>himsa</em>
(malignance) as is the raging sea in storms, they both are against life” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and
cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921,
Chatterjee 57-8). Tagore was, perhaps, making a stronger critique, here, of the
violence embedded in political collectivities, and the moral questions
contained in non-violence as a practice.<a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Gandhi
responded to the polemic in several ways. At pains to explain to the poet the
relevance of the charkha, he reminded the latter, in some exhaustion, that “I
do not draw a sharp distinction ... between ethics and economics.” [Chatterjee 90]. Elsewhere he clarifies
in no uncertain terms – “I am always reminded of one thing which the well-known
British economist Adam Smith has said … he has described some economic laws as
universal and absolute. Then he has described certain situations which may be
an obstacle to the operation of these laws. These disturbing factors are the
human nature, the human temperament or altruism inherent in it. Now, the economics
of khadi is just opposite of it. Benevolence which is inherent in human nature
is the very foundation of the economics of khadi. What Adam Smith has described
as pure economic activity based merely on the calculations of profit and loss
is a selfish attitude and it is an obstacle to the development of khadi; and it
is the function of a champion of khadi to counteract this tendency.”
(Chatterjee 81) Further, “… I have asked no one to abandon his calling, but on
the contrary to adorn it by giving every day only thirty minutes to spinning as
sacrifice for the whole nation. … The Poet thinks that the <em>charkha</em> is
calculated to bring about a deathlike sameness in the nation and thus imagining
he would shun it if he could. The truth is that the <em>charkha</em> is intended
to realise the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads
… All I say is that there is a sameness, identity or oneness behind the
multiplicity and variety. And so do I hold that behind a variety of occupations
there is an indispensable sameness also of occupation” (Gandhi 1925, “The Poet
and the <em>charkha</em>”, 124).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Does
that involve a separation from the world, an isolationist discourse? Perhaps
not … for “the message of
Non-cooperation, Non-violence and swadeshi, is a message to the world
...[through] Non-cooperation [which] is a retirement within ourselves … [for
i]n my humble opinion, rejection is as much an ideal as the acceptance of a
thing. It is as necessary to reject untruth as it is to accept truth. ... I
make bold to say that <em>mukti</em> (emancipation) is as much a negative state
as <em>nirvana</em>. ... I therefore think that the Poet has been unnecessarily
alarmed at the negative aspect of Non-cooperation. We had lost the power of
saying 'no'.” [Chatterjee 66-7]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. <em>Young India</em>, 1
June 1921). As to the rest of the world, “I want the cultures of all the lands
to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off
my feet by any ... Mine is not the religion of the prison house. It has room
for the least among God’s creation. But it is proof against insolence, pride of
race, religion or colour”[ Chatterjee 64]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. <em>Young India</em>, 1
June 1921).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Elsewhere, in response to alternative positions like
that of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, who believed the absence of cultural
attributes had resulted in India’s subjugation by the British, Gandhi spoke,
rather, of the disjuncture between the prevailing politics and the morality of
the community that had resulted in the same. Chatterjee presents the moment of
Gandhi in nationalist politics as the moment of manoeuvre, proposing that
Gandhi’s critique of civil society and representative democracy emerges through
his reworking of the relationship between the moral and the political. Without
going in to the merits of Chatterjee’s formulation here, we could try to
understand this separation that Gandhi makes, in order to better understand his
accompanying take not only on the value of science, but on a necessary
relationship between its use and the morality of the community.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Again and again, in response to industrialisation,
in response to the work of doctors of medicine, in response to “much that goes
under the name of modern civilisation” (quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 80), Gandhi
reacts. “I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to the doctor, he gives me
medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken
the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved
by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me
to indulge myself” (Chatterjee 84). And so with history, and so with the law,
all of which are the record of visible illness rather than of the truth. In
Gandhi’s world, it would seem that “[t]rue knowledge [which] gives a moral
standing and moral strength” (Chatterjee 119), can be the only basis for any
politics. To that extent, Non-cooperation or satyagraha, as “intense political
activity” rather than passive resistance, but in the form of a negation of the
existing political frameworks, was born. The “disobedience” here was not only
of the British administration, but of existing modalities of resistance. The
positive content of the programme was that of rural construction through khadi
and the charkha programme, which for Gandhi would be the true method of
non-violent swaraj. This too, however, needed the abdication of the state from
responsibility. The collectivity that Tagore found so suspect in this regard
was for Gandhi an experiment in the modalities of non-violent mass resistance.
And to Tagore’s eloquent argument against the charkha on account of its
staticity, what more eloquent answer than this – “It is a charge against India that her
people are so uncivilized, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to
induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What
we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change”
(Chatterjee 96).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">How does this otherwise rich polemic help us to
understand positions on science and technology? Is Gandhi a pastoral
philosopher or a peasant intellectual proposing a separate epistemic realm from
that of the West? Can he be labelled a Luddite? Is he caught, like the European
Romantics were, in the dilemma between Reason and Morality? Or is he making a
fundamental distinction between truth and the knowledge encompassed in
disciplines like science and history, suggesting that truth cannot but strike
elsewhere from knowledge? While the answers to each of these may be difficult,
while individual examples for each of these arguments may be found in Gandhi if
not seen as part of the integral picture, and while any attempt to
intellectualise his thought may be doomed from the start, I might perhaps
attempt to say that there is, here, a critique of existing knowledge systems,
of which scientific knowledge is one, that calls for a fundamentally new theory
of knowledge, a theory of knowledge inextricably linked with morality, rather
than a choice of alternate system from the ‘West’ or any other.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the next post, coming in a few days from now, we
will see how a peculiar conflation of these positions alongwith shifts in
Marxist thinking in India
helped to produce the classical responses to technology that then pervaded
feminist thinking and other paradigmatic frameworks on thinking gender and
technology.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> (Gandhi
1925, “The Poet and the <em>charkha</em>”, 125).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> Gandhi’s
critique of these articles of faith of the scientific world, then, couched as
it was in moral language, was clearly outside the thematic of nationalist
politics, and more an attitude of selfness. While Nehru, for different reasons,
had ambivalent responses to nationalism as an ideology, his responses were
within the ambit of Enlightenment critiques of nationalism – a position Gandhi
was clearly out of.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> <em>Mukta Dhara</em> – Free Current – on the
question of construction of a large dam as symbolizing ‘man’s’ desire to
control nature, or <em>Rakta Karabi</em> – Red
Oleander – the story of a cruel king who lives behind an iron curtain while his
subjects, working under terrible conditions in underground mines, suffer untold
cruelties meted out by him, speak of displacement, the facelessness of
technology, of power, of dehumanizing impulses in technology.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> Probably
the sentiment Tagore experienced when he expressed his abhorrence of an
instrumentalist view of satyagraha which he felt was being used as a “political
gamble [while] their minds [continued to be] corroded by untruth …” Tagore’s
‘Call of Truth’, <em>Modern Review</em>.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> I am
grateful to Prasanta Chakravarty for this useful insight.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> So that
Romain Rolland calls <em>Hind</em> <em>Swaraj</em> 'the negation of Progress and
also of European science.' [Chatterjee
1986: 85]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a> This, from a Tagore who consistently held an
anti-statist position, on the grounds that unlike in Europe, the State was
never a central entity in the life of the Indian nation, and that further, in
the present time, i.e. in British India, the state is external to society,
rather than a part of it. “Our fight” as he puts it, “is a spiritual fight … to
emancipate Man from the meshes … [of] these organisations of National Egoism …
We have no word for Nation in our language. When we borrow this word from other
people, it never fits us. For we are to make our league with <em>Narayan</em> …” (Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> Those for whom authority is needed instead of
reason, will invariably accept despotism in place of freedom. ... [Chatterjee
82].</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a> Tagore
draws parallels with his reading of the negativity of Buddhism to make his
point – “<em>Brahma-vidya </em>(the cult of Brahma, the Infinite Being) in India has for
its object <em>mukti</em>, emancipation, while Buddhism has <em>nirvana</em>,
extinction. It may be argued that both have the same idea in different names.
But names represent attitudes of mind, emphasize particular aspects of truth. <em>Mukti</em>
draws our attention to the positive, and <em>nirvana</em> to the negative side of
truth.</p>
<p>Buddha kept silence all through his teachings about
the truth of the <em>Om</em>, the everlasting yes, his implication being
that by the negative path of destroying the self we naturally reach that truth.
Therefore he emphasized the fact of <em>dukkha</em> (misery) which had to be
avoided and the <em>Brahma-vidya</em> emphasized the fact of <em>ananda</em>, joy,
which had to be attained. … Therefore, the idea of life’s training was
different in the Vedic period from that of the Buddhistic. … The abnormal type
of asceticism to which Buddhism gave rise in India reveled in celibacy and
mutilation of life in all different forms …” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 57).
A significant difference in Tagore’s and Gandhi’s approach to the ‘moral’ seems
to be in evidence here – while for the former it is a need for creativity that
will be stifled by subjection to any constraint like collective action without
the conviction of the reasoning intellect – be it ritual or any other
“unreasoned creed” (The Call of Truth), for Gandhi, it was about self-denial –
“Our civilization, our culture, our <em>swaraj</em> depend not upon multiplying
our wants – self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants – self-denial”
(“The Conditions of <em>swaraj</em>”, <em>Young India</em>, 23 February 1921,
Chatterjee 189). More than a simple separation of reason-unreason between the
two thinkers as some commentators have made out, this may be read as a comment
on the political that was reiterated by Tagore again in his repeated references
to the separation between truth and the “barren stratagems of the political”,
and moreover, the violence constitutive of the latter. In that respect,
Gandhi’s later frustrations, and stepping away, from the movement, may suggest
a greater overlap between their positions.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:17ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [1]
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment
<b>This is the second post in a series by Asha Achuthan on her project, Rewiring Bodies. In this blog entry, Asha looks at the trajectory of responses to technology in India to understand the genesis of the assumption that the subjects of technology are separate from the tool, machine, or instrument. </b>
<p>The question
of technology perhaps arose in greatest relief in India in development and the
responses to development. In order to understand this, we need to understand
the pre-history of this activity in the nationalist moments.</p>
<p>A version of
Marxism pervaded Nehru’s nationalism – one that espoused the 'scientific,
economic sense' of progress. Some of the emphasis placed in the Indian National
Congress on economic issues, particularly during the 1937 elections, was the
direct result of Nehru’s urgings. This changed after 1937, but Nehruvian
socialism, inasmuch as it valued a materialist conception of history, or
considered the economic as important in the last instance, continued to pervade
nationalist agendas. Analyses of India’s
problems too were in this mode – 'Parties [in an independent India] will be
formed with economic ideals. There will be socialists, anti-socialists,
zamindars, kisans and other similar groups. It will be ridiculous to think of
parties founded on a religious or communal basis' (Nehru 1931: 284, quoted in
Seth 1995: 212).</p>
<p>Nehru’s stand on nationalism, by distinguishing between
oppressor and oppressed nations, also legitimised certain nationalisms, while
remaining critical of nationalism in general.<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
Needless to say, this vision of nationalism had as its underlying philosophy
rationalist Enlightenment thought, and was also tied to internationalism<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
and progress – a progress that would bring socialism as a 'saner ordering of
human affairs' rather than as a 'moral issue' (Nehru, Selected Works, 'Whither India': 8, quoted in Seth 215). To
that end, the scientific temper, as Nehru reiterates again and again, is the
requirement.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
And to realise that requirement, Nehru did, apart from his policy efforts, take
up the philosophical debate, pointing to 'the essential basis of Indian thought
for ages past … [which] fits in with the scientific temper and approach' (Nehru
1946: 526, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139). This temper informed, for this
version of nationalism, analyses of colonialism, cultural difference, religion,
and industrialisation; each of the first three were attributable to economic
backwardness and disparity, and the removal of these disparities, accompanied
by the development of ‘big’ science and technology, was the answer.</p>
<p>As far as
Nehru was concerned, the colonial state was the enemy of such
industrialisation, partly owing to its own selfish commercial interests, but
more importantly because such interests went against the universal models of
economic growth wherein developing nations also needed to grow in order to keep
the rich nations healthy. For his version of scientific socialism, then, a
critique of colonialism could not simultaneously be a critique of reason or
modernity – colonialism was ‘wrong’ primarily because it did not fulfil the
requirements of modern growth. Clearly, this also involved for Nehru certain
expectations of the national bourgeoisie who would provide political
leadership.</p>
<p>What confounded him, therefore, were the ‘spontaneous’ peasant
uprisings, as also the Gandhian philosophy of development that was singularly
in conflict with his own notions of progress. Both of these meant for Nehru a
shift not only from reason to unreason, but, in parallel, from the political to
the utopian. Chatterjee (1986) suggests that Nehru solved the problem by granting
to Gandhi a stage in the ‘passive revolution’ – an intervention – where, once
the stage had been set for the real political battle, the ‘masses’ could be won
over to the larger nationalist cause through faith, emotion, or other such
means both incomprehensible and vague of objective (to Nehru). The larger
nationalist cause was the promotion of large-scale industry over small-scale or
cottage industries, since 'the world and the dominating facts of the situation
that confront it have decided in favour of' the former' (Nehru Discovery of India,
1946: 414, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 144). The ‘masses’, by whom Nehru usually
meant the peasantry, needed to recognize, like the rest of India, that
small-scale industry in these 'dominating facts of the situation' could only
function as a 'colonial appendage' (413). Industrialisation and expert
knowledge were what were needed for progress and a modern nation.</p>
<p>After
independence, this project of the modern nation was taken up by planning – what
Chatterjee calls the new systems-theorists’ utopia. In this scheme of things,
once political independence had been achieved and independent state control set
up, economic disparities would gradually disappear, for the only real problem
would be one of access, a technical rather than political issue. Planning, as
far as Nehru was concerned, would take care of this. Planning involved experts,
and an approach to individual concrete problems at a practical level, not a
political philosophy. 'Planning essentially consists in balancing ...'
(Nehru 1957: 51, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159) and 'co-operation in planning
was particularly soothing ... in pleasant contrast to the squabbles and
conflicts of politics' (Nehru 1946: 405, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 160).
Further, '[s]cientific planning enables us to increase our production, and
socialism comes in when we plan to distribute production evenly' (Nehru 1962:
151, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159).</p>
<p>Socialism too, then, becomes, rather than
a system of thought or a violent class struggle, the pragmatic planning of a
national economy – one that, if adequately planned, would automatically produce
the 'classless society with equal economic justice and opportunity for all, a
society organised on a planned basis for the raising of mankind to higher
material and cultured levels, to a cultivation of spiritual values … ultimately
a world order' (Nehru 1936: 552, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 161). For
Chatterjee, this selective appropriation of scientific Marxism was how the
reason-unreason binary was precipitated, giving rise to a different politics
for the elite and the subaltern in mature nationalist thought. In the next post
I will try to demonstrate how this formulation of Chatterjee’s was one of the
foundations from which the critiques of development too took off.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a></p>
<p>My point here is to cull, from among
these debates, both the routes taken in development thinking and the contexts
for postcolonial approaches to the science and technology question. Marxism, in
its early nationalist avatar, presented an approach to science that involved
its accurate interpretation, application and access, rather than any critique.
As is evident from the debates between Nehru and the CPI,<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
and Nehru’s own writing on the subject,<a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
colonialism was equal to capitalism, the anti-imperialist struggle of the
Indian masses was the route to independence, and the change in forces of
production would needs must bring about a change in the means of production.
For Nehru then, the nationalist agenda consisted at least in part of bringing
to the third world access to technology and a transformation in the forces of
production that would address poverty and unemployment. In the
Marxist-nationalist space, the debate was about what would be the agent of
change – the nationalist bourgeoisie or the working class; also whether it
would be forces of production by themselves or the subjective sense of the
proletariat.</p>
<p>But both
third-worldism and Indian nationalism had other, powerful and different
approaches to the same questions – the analysis of colonialism and the required
response, the question of technology, the concept of the state/cultural
difference. Was there then a nationalist alternative to the technology offered
by the West? We will, in the next post, look at the Tagore-Gandhi debates
on technology to throw some light on this question.</p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> To
identify within oppressed nations overarching standpoints was also therefore,
in this frame, problematic, for, '[d]o we place the masses, the peasantry and
the workers first, or some other small class at the head of our list? Let us
give the benefits of freedom to as many groups and classes as possible, but
essentially whom do we stand for, and when a conflict arises whose side must we
take?' [4-5] Nehru, <em>Whither India
</em>1933]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> 'Differences
[in national realities] there are but they are chiefly due to different stages
of economic growth.' [ibid, 5]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> 'It is
better to understand a part of the truth, and apply it to our lives, than to
understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce
the mystery of existence … It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and
yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the
refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change
previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact
and not on preconceived theory … not merely for the application of science but
for life itself …' (Nehru 1946: 523, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> Seth has
concluded, differently from Chatterjee, that this was not a simple
appropriation of scientific Marxism, leaving its political core alone.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> See
Palme Dutt and his efforts to bring together the communist movement, the
democratic camp and the nationalist movement. Nehru’s truck with the communists
more or less dissolved around the response to the August 1942 revolution and
the dissent over relations with the Muslim League.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> At his
second Presidential address to the Indian National Congress in Lucknow on April 12, 1936, Nehru repeated some of his
earlier commitment on this, 'I am convinced that the only key to the solution
of the world’s problem and of India’s problem lies in socialism, and when I use
the word I do so not in a vague, humanitarian way but in the scientific,
economic sense.' From Jawaharlal Nehru, <em>Selected
Works</em>, vol. 7, p. 180, quoted in Seth 1995: 222.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:03ZBlog EntryJustice and Difference - the first talk in 'the monster album of feminist stories'
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/justice-and-difference-the-first-talk-in-the-monster-album-of-feminist-stories
<b>CIS and 'the monster album of feminist stories', in relation to the Rewiring Bodies project by Asha Achuthan, hosted the first of a series of talks on cognizing feminism at the CIS premises on Cunningham Road on 14th November, 2008. </b>
<p></p>
<p>To give a brief introduction and explain why we call this the <strong><em>monster
album</em></strong>, we could repeat the tired old truism that feminism is being
crowded out, today, by ‘gender talk’, and, ironically, by the visibility now
available to women. While truisms cannot be challenged, the sense of denial of
space that this statement carries has today, perhaps, more to do with notions
of irrelevance or the anachronistic nature of the word ‘feminism’ rather than
the “backlash against women” so popularly and persuasively argued by Susan
Faludi at another point in time. In response to this sense of denial, those of
us who remain the irremediably converted have moved between defiance, defensiveness,
apologia, and, now a decisive, if quiet, digging in of heels, based on a
re-cognition of feminism itself--that is the work of the <strong><em>monster
album</em></strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Feminism as that liberatory, shade-giving mother, that warm
place of refuge, is not a workable thesis, and the question then is – was it
ever so? Or is feminism that monster, that unhappy moment of possession (not of an
identity but by a vision), that grows larger and larger, demands more and more,
not simply of the dominant but of the interrogator of the dominant? Does this
not render unstable each time what had seemed the ultimately radical, interrupt
each time a consolidation of identity under its own name, so that in response
to the rhetorical question “Who’s afraid of feminism?” the <em>feminist’s</em> answer would be – “I am”? At such
a re-cognition of feminism is where we are, with this talk as the first step in that exercise; it is perhaps a place that will
host instability and unpalatable porosities between categories of “dominant”
and “critical”. The <strong><em>monster album</em></strong> is related in indirect but hopefully productive ways to the work of the "Rewiring Bodies" project that is, in a nutshell, attempting to rework critical boundaries between women and the technological. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Prof Shefali Moitra's talk on
“Justice and Difference” offered a reading of the mainstream monologic
model of justice that follows the principle of impartiality, and that seeks to
incorporate context through representation. This was followed by a discussion
of the “ad-hoc” model that responds heavily to context, to the extent of
rejecting the monologic model altogether. Finally Prof Moitra spoke of what
she called a “hybrid model” – one that takes into account the principles of
impartiality and objectivity, and yet also takes into account context. A
version of the paper that formed the basis for the talk is put up <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/floss/software-patents/blog/uploads/Justice%20and%20Differenceversion.doc" class="internal-link" title="Justice and Difference">here</a> for those wish to read it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The talk threw up a lot of speculation,
particularly regarding the ‘hybrid’ model. Considering that the prevailing
climate of critique – of justice, as also in other areas – seems more comfortable
with versions of the ‘ad hoc’ model as alternative, and any notion of impartiality
seems infected by sameness, violence, or exclusion, a model such as the hybrid
was bound to throw up such speculation and some confusion as well. But it is
the <em>possibility</em> of such a model, that
continues to talk of impartiality and objectivity, but that fails the normative
claims of the homogenous system, that was most interesting. We hope
to hear more from philosophers-practitioners on this. As for the <strong><em>monster
album</em></strong>, this could perhaps be one of the ways in which liaisons between
knowledge and critique might be explored.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/justice-and-difference-the-first-talk-in-the-monster-album-of-feminist-stories'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/justice-and-difference-the-first-talk-in-the-monster-album-of-feminist-stories</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiawomen and internetrewiring bodies2011-08-03T09:43:24ZBlog Entryof doctors and maps - Snippet two
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two
<b>This may seem like a careless swipe at the volumes of critique of technology. And yet ... I need to know ... </b>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>Where am I with respect to technology?
Represented in it? Protected from it? Accessing it? And is my doctor the knower who will use the instrument of technology to heal me?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Why then does he feel like an apologetic
outsider, unnecessary to this process, merely the public relations man as I lie
here, surrounded by the linear accelerator? Why do the women in the planning
room, wired through their scans with the accelerator, smiling benevolently at
him, seem more at home, more with me, within me?</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:45:22ZBlog Entryof doctors and maps - Snippet one
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps
<b>The clinic is not what it was. It is highly technologized, flooded with information systems. But what of the relationships it traditionally supported, between patient and doctor?</b>
<p>She was in the eye of technology. Cocooned in
the simulator. Surrounded by the linear accelerator.</p>
<p>While each act of swallowing became more conscious, more painful, each act of devising mathemes became more precise, more focal.</p>
<p>Yes, this is mathematicized medicine. This is where she was, while re-writing technology, mathematicization, mapping. Not ‘under’ the ‘gaze’ as she understood it.</p>
<p>She was one with the simulator.</p>
<p>The doctor did not even figure; the 'godhead', the 'male knower', the butt of criticism, had become irrelevant, an anachronism.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Now what in the world does that mean?</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:44:43ZBlog EntryUnpacking technology - beginnings
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings
<b>This is a work-in-progress that seeks to inaugurate a field of critical technology studies with the women-technology relationship as a unique entry point of investigation.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>This is a work-in-progress that
seeks to inaugurate a field of <em>critical
technology studies</em> with the women-technology relationship as a unique entry
point of investigation. To this end, it will</p>
<ul><li>lay down the historical and geo-political
contexts for the use of technology in India</li><li>engage with existing concepts like context,
postcoloniality, organicity, and exclusion that have come into use with the
critical responses to technology in India</li><li>
offer a conceptual vocabulary that explains the
tools being used to engage with the question, and</li><li>suggest strategies for testing of the hypotheses
being set forward in the paper, as well as parallel modes of generating
‘critical debate’ on them. <br /></li></ul>
<p>This is in order to contribute,
eventually, to a specific unpacking of the concept of technology that will in
turn help evolve a more robust response to it than has been our understanding
so far.</p>
<h3>A few questions to
begin with</h3>
<p>What are the conditions that drive
such an approach? Since the time of Nehruvian socialism, the language of the
relationship between human and technological elements in India has changed
considerably. While this has partly to do with more and more constituencies
asking for attention in the industrial polity and development frameworks, it
also has to do with changing perceptions of technology itself. Thus it is that strongly positive and dynamic images of technology
(to be found in the Indian scientific and medical establishments) as well as
strongly critical positions (anti-development stances, eco-feminist movements,
postcolonial theorizing) reside side-by-side in the discourse around technology
in India, in a manner that appears to be the particular characteristic of
postcolonial societies today.</p>
<p>The
effects or parallels of such criticality, however, are not limited to ‘civil
society’ positions, meaning that it is not a simple state-versus-the-people
problem. A cursory examination of development scenarios in the area of
reproductive health, for instance, yields evidence of a situation where state
population policy dictates, as part of infrastructural requirements, an
increasing use of technology, while at the same time insisting on an attention
to women as repositories of “indigenous systems” in order to “fill in gaps in
manpower [that can access or use technology] at village levels” (National
Population Policy 2000). The state also encourages discussions of increased
entry of women as professionals into academic technological institutions. In
cohort with the critiques, then, there are approximately four responses to
technology that are in evidence today across state and civil society positions
- presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The presence of women as agents of
technological change, improved access for women to the fruits of technology,
the inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by
technological amendments, and a recognition of technology’s ills particularly
for women.</p>
<p>My
central suggestion is of a connection between all of these seemingly disparate
responses. For one, they espouse a vision of technology as discrete, bounded,
and separate from the human, woman being a ‘case’ thereof. Following such a
vision of technology as instrument or tool separate from human agency, and the
necessary corollary of pristine humanness, in postcolonial theorization
aggravated into empirical subalternity, the debates seem to hover endlessly over
technology being beneficial, devastating, or a judicious mixture of the two.
Complementarily, the pre-technological appears free of, or lacking in, the
instrumentality of technology; “everyday technologies” seem to offer respite in
the shape of an embeddedness in community; at the very least, they appear to
possess the mythicity, the poiesis, that critics so wistfully regret the
absence of in modern science. And these two – everyday technologies and the
pre-technological, in their common possession of such poiesis, such anarchy,
seem organically tied and a natural vantage point for a critique of the modern
technological.</p>
<p> What <em>obviously</em> happens to this understanding of technology, and to this
version of critique, with the arrival of digital, particularly internet
technologies? It may be stated fairly accurately that internet technologies are
<em>employed</em> by state agendas on the same
principle as the above, namely, as instruments of access, information, or
development. In the case of internet medical technologies, however, once we
shift our attention from the internet as medical data bases to systems like
Immersion medical simulators, robotic surgical systems, or robot surgeons, we
find a curious (some would say deadly) shift. Representation is no longer what
is at stake, so that these technologies are no longer aiming at providing
extensions or voice to the human. What is happening, rather, is <em>simulation</em>,
in a movement, as Donna Haraway puts it, from old hierarchical dominations to a
new informatics of domination. While the critiques have mostly hitherto
concentrated on the question of access on the one hand or of organicity on the
other, that is, asking for more (inclusion) or asking for less (withdrawal),
therefore, an unpacking of the word or concept ‘technology’ itself has also
somewhat forced itself to attention in this scenario. Old wirings of women-technology where one is independent of
the other have become circumspect with evidence, at least on the surface, of
overdetermined relationships of wo‘m’an-machine-nature.</p>
<p> I see the surface complications
brought in by these technologies as a <em>symptom
of the malaise of the old understanding</em> rather than as a new development.
And it is in this context that I propose a further, and more adequate, <em>unpacking of the concept of technology </em>through a specific understanding of internet
technologies. More specifically, I would suggest an <em>unpacking of the relationship of technology to its constituencies</em>,
of which I concentrate on one, namely women. What I am proposing, therefore, is
the development of a field that I will tentatively call critical technology
studies – a field that does not merely name each new technology as example, but
brings back a study of each to enrich the originary understanding of
technology. I begin from one node - women-technology. I start this
investigation with a series of questions -
once we give up on the wiring
between women-technology that populates mainstream positions as well as the
critiques, which also means a giving up on the representational relationship
between women and technology, how does one speak at all of gender and
technology? Of gender and science? Gender and development? Further, the
relationship, of wo‘m’an-machine-nature, an overdetermined relationship, <em>need not necessarily be a symbiotic one</em>.
Once this is taken into account, how does one talk of the difficulties of
technology? The devastating effects? If we shift our expectations of technology
from the beneficial or the symbiotic to the <em>arbitrary</em>,
and moreover, once we have refused to talk of nature or pre-capitalism as
pristine or prior entity, what of the critique?</p>
<p>Let us say, then, that I seek to
investigate afresh the nature of the relationship women-technology that may
help articulate a response to the ‘problem of technology’, without turning it
into either a monster or a benevolent entity. This would involve understanding
control strategies which, as Haraway puts it again, may have more visibility on
border regions rather than as disturbing the integrity of ‘natural objects’ –
women and their bodies among them. This would involve a shift from articulating
better politics, and policies, of representation, to understanding simulatory
strategies of new internet technologies. And this would involve, putting these
two together, recovering not a pristine narrative of women’s experience –
homogenous or varied, but an attention, instead to its possible aporeticity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodies2008-10-31T09:47:08ZBlog Entry