Women and the Politics of Place: Ruminations and responses
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24/1/02
8:32 am
Page 18
development 45(1): Upfront The progressive common visions of an earlier period of national liberation movements have been overtaken by conservative retreats into civilizations that, as cultural abstractions, now serve as excuses for denying rights to their constituencies. Whileweneedtocriticizethepoliciesandactivities of powers such as the United States for generating, or being oblivious to, the disastrous consequences of globalization, such criticism needs to be accompanied more than ever before by critique of the leaderships in these other societies that are no less disastrous.TheTalibanstarteditsterrorathome,and against women. Pointing to the part United States anti-Communism played in the emergence of the Taliban is historically instructive, but it does not do awaywiththeresponsibilityof theTalibanleadersfor their criminal activities. I may add here that this necessity of a double-critique – both of the powers that dominate and shape the world, and of reactionary culturalist responses to it that legitimize oppressive politics – is better grasped by those in the ‘Third World’ engaged in social and ideological struggles than by intellectuals in Europe and the United States who, rebelling against a legacy of Eurocentrism, are often too anxious to pledge allegiance to the cultural claims of fictive civilizations.
Places offer a way of challenging this situation of cultural reification across all civilizational ‘boundaries’. As Arturo Escobar has put it cogently, ‘culture sits in places’. Culture, understood not in the abstract, or in terms of the ideologies of power, is inextricable from the practices through which people define and conduct their everyday lives, in the process generating ever new cultural practices as their circumstances change. It is, in other words, as alive as the lives that it defines and expresses. There are trans-place cultures, needless to say, that are generated by the interactions of places, and of places with other social and political entities (including other ‘civilizations’), but culture, to be meaningful as an aspect of life, needs to be located in everyday life in its historicity, and in all its variability across places. It is this culture that proves intolerable to the forces of homogenizing power. We are complicit in such intolerance to the extent that our language legitimizes abstract cultural claims that presuppose boundaries of nations, regions or civilizations. Place-based politics, approached through the experience of women, is ultimately about generating a new language of cultures and development so that we may begin to think and act in the world in new ways.
Women and the Politics of Place: Ruminations and responses JULIE GRAHAM1
ABSTRACT Julie Graham connects the categories used by the introductory paper to the project – ‘place’, ‘women’ and ‘politics’ – to the economic politics that she and Katherine Gibson are engaged in with several communities in the US, Australia and the Asia Pacific region. This political work builds upon the specificity
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