[PEN-L:2364] Re: Vandana Shiva

[Colin Danby <danby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A few more days have given us a chance to think about some of the
other aspects of the brief Vandana Shiva discussion that bothered
us.  We must agree with Jacqueline Romanow that Shiva's ideas tended
to be dismissed with alarming haste and vehemence.

What is apparently not fully grasped by many of Shiva's readers is
that she is, among other things, trying to develop a set of cultural
meanings and stories to guide and inspire popular struggle.  Most
pen-lers would regard the work of Christian liberation theologists
with respect, and admit that it has been politically effective, even
if they do not agree with it.  If someone says "Jesus calls me ..."
we don't (or shouldn't) automatically regard her as an idiot.  But if
someone says "Nature calls me," the tendency is to dismiss her as a
vapid new-ager (or to think she's just looking for the loo).

In the context in which Shiva is working, statements about "Mother
Earth" have rich and powerful cultural/religious resonance, and have
been undeniably politically effective.  Now that doesn't mean this
work can't be criticized, or that attention should not be paid to the
problematic aspects of this use of popular culture, just as one might
point out that drawing on the Christian Gospels for inspiration may
also strengthen the patriarchal aspects of that religious tradition.
But it does not deserve contemptuous dismissal.

This debate has brought out one of the less-helpful parts of the
Marxian tradition, which is that, blinded by the Enlightenment, it
tends to consign all cultural traditions that fall outside
Enlightenment thought to the Outer Darkness of tradition, ignorance,
and superstition.  The 3rd world becomes a place of cultural and
historical stasis (remember the Asiatic mode of production?) waiting
on the platform for the train of history, which brings western
capitalism, industrialization, urban culture, and so on.  If the
locomotive is brutal imperialism, so be it -- at least people have
been rescued from stupidity and inertia.

Probably nobody on the list would put it in those terms, but this is
how the western Marxian tradition is widely perceived.   If we may
respectfully take issue with Peter Burns' thoughtful essay, the
expansion of the urban informal sector in much of the third world is
not caused by the magnetic draw of urban culture, but by events which
have denied people the opportunity to survive in rural areas.   The
lived experience, material and cultural, of people in the urban
informal sector is sharply different from the experience and
advantages that cities offer to most of us who participate on this
list.  Similarly we would resist the attribution of fixed cultural
meanings to industrialization. We take the point about the material
advantages that capitalist accumulation _can_ provide, but would point
out that for many of the world's people they have not been manifest.
And one can even fall back on the Marxian tradition, in Marx's
correspodence with Russian leftists toward the end of his life, to
argue that there are many roads not only to socialism, but indeed to
accumulation.

What distresses us is that this area of debate gets collapsed into a
simple contrast between a rich Enlightenment-inspired tradition of
Marxian thought on the one hand, and on the other hand a mishmash of
people's worst stereotypes of misanthropic Malthusians, tree-cuddling
crystal-worshippers, and romantic seekers of mythical pasts.  Very
little opportunity is provided for activists like Shiva to draw on
their own histories and cultures.  Thus while we stand by our earlier
posting opposing the simple romanticization of Hindu culture,
we do not mean to imply that this culture is a unified dismal whole,
or even a single stable, unified, and static cultural system.
Hinduism has always had internal struggles over its meanings, the
contestants including both conservative Brahminical hierarchs and a
variety of radical movements.  (The notion most westerners have of
Hinduism is the conservative caste-structured one, which the British
found it convenient to foster.)   Vandana Shiva is working in a complex,
changing, and highly-contested cultural environment, and the fact that
one can find highly, brutally oppressive practices in this environment
does not preclude the possibility of also finding emancipatory tropes,
stories, and systems of meaning.  Shiva's position, as far as we can
tell, is _not_ simply that all things rural are good.  And Indian
culture, like any other, should not be oversimplified or glibly
totalized.

A final example -- and we hope she'll forgive us if we read too much
into a perhaps offhand and hastily-written post -- is Gina Neff's
comment on "money lending in rural, traditional Indian villages" as a
sign of their backwardness.  First, there is no single pattern of the
"rural, traditional Indian village," and we'd like to get a clear
definition of what "traditional" means in this context, as there are
few areas of rural India that have not undergone a variety of
transformations in the last few centuries.  Second, moneylending is
not a simple phenomenon, being usually interlinked with a variety of
other transactions, and taking many forms.  (See Polly Hill's _Dry
Grain Farming Families_ pp. 214-221 for a lucid description of the
role of rural credit in two specific contexts; Hill also acutely mocks
the colonial obsession with rural lending as a sign of backwardness.)
Third, we would like to see Neff clarify why borrowing for weddings,
rather than "productive" purposes, is problematic.  Will Neff similarly
denounce the willingness of millions of people in the United States to
pay extortionate rates of credit card interest to finance the ritual
Christmas exchange of expensive trinkets (not to mention unproductive
journeys to see family members)?

In Solidarity,

S. Charusheela and Colin Danby