Everyday Sustainability
Over the last eleven years, every time I saw a neon lit billboard at a U.S. airport with smiling faces of women refugees posing with their pretty Fair Trade−certified handicrafts, or Fair Trade publicity material celebrating the survival stories of women beneficiaries across the globe, the voices of women from Darjeeling’s out-of-the-way places have reverberated in me. Their rebuke of development, their anger, their excitement about new business plans, and the sharp humor with which they joke about all yojanas (development projects including Fair Trade) have filled me with cynicism and hope at the same time.
Cynicism comes from witnessing the hubris of social justice, as it plays out in the global stage of activism, with distinct local manifestations and material effects, oblivious to women’s situated histories, entrepreneurialisms, and everyday realities. Hope, because this decade-long feminist ethnography has convinced me that no development policy is able to sap poor women of their creative potential: their everyday innovations that keep them grounded in an everyday street feminism deeply wary of agents of the aid or the academic world.
In the middle of 2015 I learned that some of the women in SKS have formed a new self-help group called Makhmali which was completely independent of SKS or any NGO. Women pooled together money and made small items for consumption like knitwear, pickles, snacks, and also Hāthe chiā (homemade raw tea) in nearby villages. The business was running well for these twelve women and they were now planning to access local bank or panchāyat loans based on their savings. I asked Binu why the name Makhmali? She quickly grabbed my hand and took me outside her house pointing at the bushes of purple flowers called Makhmali in Darjeeling. Makhmali flowers look fragile but endure the harshness of Darjeeling winter bringing color and charm to the garden before spring arrived. The emphasis in Binu’s explanation was on beauty, endurance, and survival. “We could not find a more befitting name,” she said; “its like our ambitions and work which survive the dictates of the cooperatives’ men.” Thus, gendered projects of value took many turns in the tea farming villages in the last decade, sometimes trying to engage with Fair Trade, sometimes avoiding it by establishing Makhmali, but never losing sight of what was possible for them—their everyday sustainability.
Their understanding of what is sustainable is not without blind spots, just like our engagements in social justice that are grounded in our lifestyles and political choices. I want to refrain from all possible essentialisms in proposing something akin to “all solutions are at the grassroots” and Vandana Shiva-like deeply problematic celebrations about women’s intrinsic understanding of sustainability and so on. Yet it is at the grassroots that one witnesses the drama of gender and sustainable development unfold in its excesses. That is where one witnesses the catachrestic (Spivak 1993, see also chapter 6) dissection of the “good” in commodified global justice, aka, Fair Trade.
In this book I have upheld the catachrestic possibilities created through enacting “gendered projects of value” at the margins of conscious capitalism. These gendered projects of value weave economic and social entrepreneurialism bringing about women’s situated justice imaginaries. I reiterate that long-term ethnographic analysis of gendered projects of value can contribute to current understandings of gender and sustainability, scholarship on transnational justice regimes, and feminist debates over empowerment under neoliberal systems of development and governance as well as contemporary research on Fair Trade.
The creative way women sustain their everyday loves—albeit with its imperfections—the way they organize their lives and exercise their power at opportune moments stands in such sharp contrast to the pop-feminist notions of individualized gender justice, where an individual loan is prioritized as solution from poverty as opposed to bolstering existing collective bargaining mechanisms and making states and state agents like plantation owners more accountable. The global call for privatized gender justice now stands at an all-time high. Publicity materials for nonprofits and Corporate Social Responsibility1 campaigns frequently bombard the public with giant neon images of poor women of color from the global South accompanied by captions like “I Am Powerful.” An excerpt from Oxfam’s recent campaign for legal support of women farmers’ land rights states, “I plough. I till. I sow. I water. I harvest. I feed. I am the farmer. I want my land.”2 While well-meaning and promoting private property rights for farmer women, the campaign paints women’s rural work lives in monochrome. If the reality of women-headed households in India were factored in I think the representation of the farmer, in addition to carrying a plough, would have to include instances of her engaging in petty trade in non-agricultural products for starters (see also Lahiri Dutta 2014).
This agentive celebration of women’s individual power without attention to any structural impediments is the key ingredient of books in the moral marketing shelves at leading bookstores and upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods, adorned with Nick Kristoff’s Half the Sky. These books advocate for care and compassion to rescue otherwise resourceful women from the clutches of patriarchy in their own communities. Liberal justice czars like Kristoff and his ilk (in the global South) mirror the activities of the well-meaning gender specialists advocating for global solidarities to empower women. However, the ideas of powerful women they advance are “enframed” (Brooks 2006) in static notions of who these individual women are. Marina Lazreg (2002, 133) aptly describes these problematic global feminist interventions in discourse and practice as “containment through inclusion” where the radical critique of market-based development is drowned out with the hysteria of doing good. Hence, subaltern women may speak but only a selection of their statements will be heard and disseminated—those phrases or words are then quickly coded in the register of benevolence as another success story.
My book’s contention is that in this impetus to save women there is a categorical disavowal of the impending political economies of marginalization as the chapters in this book have amply documented. Good intention is not enough; one needs patience, less sympathy, more critical empathy, and extended time to unravel successive betrayals of economic development as seen from the grassroots. Self-appointed advocates also have to understand that Fair Trade is just a drop in the ocean in the face of continuing inequities related to consumption and production, where 75 percent of the world’s energy, and 80 percent of its other resources, are consumed by the mere 20 percent of the population found in the OECD members (Sexsmith 2012, 43).
Interestingly Fair Trade enthusiasts from the United States are shocked to find poor people watching WWE wrestling and sporting Bob Marley T-shirts, but they have not reconciled their own privilege of driving SUVs and drinking Fair Trade−certified lattes and English Breakfast tea every morning. In the drive to “do something” for poor women in the global south, I wonder if they think about women in the U.S. inner cities whom they could help with less carbon foot printing—would that not be more sustainable? The answers to these questions require that we engage in a healthy dose of reflexivity and know our place in the justice machine. The women in this book are also India’s daughters3 with much less privilege to tell their stories, since they do not have the networks in place like Leslie Udwin and they do not have the necessary feathers and bobbles to get them a noticeable place in the global “Oppression Olympics” for a sensational documentary (see also Tania Li 2000, 2001; Chowdhury 2011).
In this age of sound bites and app-based donation possibilities (like kiva.org micro-loans, see Moodie 2013), the sky is the limit for making the world a better place, but we must also address the mixed messages of our willful engagement to save women (Abu Lughod 2011). I recently saw a publicity image in Fair Trade USA’s Facebook site celebrating the activism of César Chávez, the noted Latino labor activist. For me it was another instance of mixed messages, since in Darjeeling Fair Trade is assisting with union busting in very sophisticated ways (see chapter 5) that César Chávez would probably not approve for celebrating plantations and certifying them Fair Trade.
Uma Narayan probably has the best assessment of the current justice-scape epitomized in Kristoff’s book. She writes:
The book offers little sustained analysis of what it would mean to recognize poor women in impoverished countries as rights-bearers, though it pervasively represents them as victims. They appear to be most victimized by local patriarchs, who subject them to rape, to pregnancies that result in maternal mortality and to sexual trafficking and who insist on spending sparse household cash on alcohol, tobacco and sugar. While I have no objections to underscoring the brutalities inflicted by local patriarchy, I do have serious objections to what is left out of the causal picture. One is given very little sense of the vast global economic and political forces that impoverish these women’s lives and cause them to attempt to survive in the middle of armed conflicts and economic chaos. The huge disparities of wealth between rich and poor nations and between the global affluent and the global poor appear to simply exist, without cause or explanation. The authors’ stress on the charitable activities of affluent well-intentioned Westerners as a central mode of securing the empowerment of poor Third World women is, arguably, at odds with their status as rights-bearers. (Narayan 2010, 5)
Fair Trade is another chapter in this “enframed” global-justice drive, where people are not just donating a tiny part of their disposable income for the needy; they get to consume their stories of survival and the wonders of Western intervention when using their disposable income to pay a tad bit extra for their morning cup of English Breakfast (albeit produced in SKS) Fair Trade Organic Certified Small Farmers’ organization that is actually illegal in the Indian tea industry. Trade-not-aid may be the mantra of Fair Trade advocates, but for women in Darjeeling Fair Trade is like “missionary impulse” (Fernandes 2013) where mostly rich brown and white people come to their communities and tell them what’s best for them and ask them to subscribe to another yojana (scheme, policy). As they often asked me “money must have overflowed in the west, right? Or why will they pay more for our tea?”
The comment about cash-overflow drives home that we need to understand how the poor create their own literacies (Massey 1991), sometimes their own fetishes to engage this vastly unequal world. Such counter-fetishes about the novelty of Western development are produced to navigate the commodified essentialisms about their pre-political lives circulating in justice-scapes (as seen in chapter 4). They have to translate what Fair Trade means for them even when the NGO officials have left. They learn through practice and through meta-conversations about their everyday realities reflected in what I have conceptualized as “gendered projects of value.” We do not need a big data set to get the smoking-gun proof that the poor may have ways to reap benefits of Fair Trade—they have learned to make hay when the sun shines since the time of the kuire sahibs (white men). One needs to understand how women are finding solutions to economic and political exigencies facing their communities in non-essentialist ways.
The solutions women come up with are not because they are closer to nature in some kind of essentialist ecofeminist way. They are not telling us to abandon all plans for development; how can they, since their self-images are very much tied to what we all desire—prosperity, security, and the availability of disposable income. Something that policy feminists, as soon as they read my book, will interpret as an indication of full-fledged endorsement of market-based development.
Figure. C.1. Little Girl Going to Office. Photo by the author.
In this image a little girl in a tea-farming household is seen engaged in the “play” of going to office. Note the sharp contrast of this little girl’s outfit from her nini (grandmom). Her nini explained to me that dressing up, taking that bag, and wearing her shoes was her favorite thing to do when she is not at elementary school. In a way this little girl’s play reflects women’s engagement with Fair Trade since many women farmers wanted their daughters to have “service kaam (work)” in a school or bank and they hoped that their entrepreneurial ventures would support such dreams. Everyday cultural productions in household and community life reflect a desire for mobility and economic stability not associated with agricultural life.
These depictions of village life will also upset armchair leftists (with their upper-caste and class privilege intact). They would read the celebration of “cash overflow” or these cultural productions (like in image C.1) as the deafening of the indigenous alternatives and hegemonic conquest of indigenous ways by NGO-ization. Leftist feminists in India are not far behind on such quick conclusions about what the poor need; everyone has a sound-bite solution ready, but not the time to engage in the everyday. The reality in rural Darjeeling is of course much more complex; it takes time to understand where the rubber meets the road, costly time which cannot be made up in fly-by-night activism including instagramming about odd service-learning projects in a village (Kascak and Dasgupta 2014), while simultaneously shopping your hearts out at your local co-op. It requires that we address everyday gendered realities of social reproduction and cultural production in the West and the rest, which has reached the point of ecological crisis due to over-consumption (although some would even deny that we are indeed on that path).
Amidst promises and proclamations of gender justice via populist marketing and commercial feminist projects, I always ponder the questions women tea plantation workers and smallholder tea farmers, two distinct producer groups in Darjeeling’s certified Fair Trade–Organic tea industry, repeatedly asked me during my ethnographic research over the last nine years: “Why now, sister; where were these people when we needed them most? What can Fair Trade do to change our plight? Our smiling faces are famous all over the world, but does anyone care about us in Darjeeling? No.” This book, I hope, has driven home the point that sustainable development is only possible when the everyday is in focus in a grounded way by reckoning with “gendered projects of value.” It is precisely because of this lack of respect for the everyday that women in Darjeeling feel the need to disassemble and reassemble the tenets of the Fair Trade movement to write, converse, and make visible their own justice imaginaries and practices. Northern propaganda around Fair Trade and its impact is replete with smiling faces and upbeat stories—survival narratives—from women in producer communities—hyper-representations that conceal situated gendered activisms around Fair Trade.
I find hope in the writings of fellow feminist scholars who are thinking about sustainability in the context of gendered processes of social reproduction. Kathleen Sexsmith (2012, 42−43) in analyzing the failed negotiations of the “Ten Year Framework of Programs (10YFP) for Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP)” of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development’s (UNCSD)’s 19th session writes that
… by taking Western consumption trends for granted and refocusing energies on the environmental impacts of production processes the debate has obscured the need to address inequalities ascribed in social relations. Gender-based inequities have been marginalized in the SCP debate, in particular. By proposing technical fixes and tweaking around the environmental margins of the global chains of labor and products that structure the world economy, this discourse has rendered invisible the feminized spheres of reproductive work that support activities at every node of the production chains. The new solutions therefore falsely presume the gender neutrality of consumption and production relations, and, in doing so, preclude development alternatives that would situate environmental improvements in relation to the gendered contexts of productive, consumptive, and reproductive work.
My insistence on the importance of a gendered power-inflected discussion of social sustainability is very much in line with what Sexsmith has outlined above.
Proponents of decentralized sustainability practice need to move beyond the discussion of economic and ecological (of the triple bottom-line approach) efficiency if they really want to understand how women interpret emerging sustainability regimes.
The concept of social and cultural sustainability also enables a more nuanced understanding of two important concepts relevant to gender and sustainable development: vulnerability and livelihood diversification. I believe that women’s situated conceptualizations of vulnerability vis-à-vis their resource environment are mediated by their self-perceptions of their social vulnerability, which in turn drive the individual and collective search to diversify their livelihoods. Women plantation workers often emphasized to me the bondage of thikā. Thikā in practical terms meant much more than wage-work; it was a metaphorical representation of the intense patriarchal disciplining of women at the workplace and at home. The gender ideologies pertaining to women plantation workers helped in controlling their actions; specifically, managers strictly monitored the women’s non-plantation economic activities and awarded bonus payments accordingly. Even though the women workers took concrete actions in their own informal collectives—ghumāuri groups—they recognized their structural vulnerability by describing themselves as “tadpoles in water.” Women are well positioned to understand the possibilities and limitations of sustainability policies in their particular political and cultural situations.
Smallholder women tea farmers were also under patriarchal scrutiny, some of it self-imposed, because they perceived themselves as housewife-entrepreneurs who had higher social status than plantation women. In the absence of a regular wage, they were always planning new ventures to sell various produce and diversify their livelihoods. In such a scenario, single-commodity Fair Trade certification imposed “unfair” structures that limited their attempts at diversification. They chose to negotiate with local patriarchs in the cooperative as part of a larger strategy to gain recognition for their invisible labor. Further, their somewhat successful encounter with development programs and access to land had greatly heightened their self-esteem despite their struggle against patriarchal constraints. These concrete, gendered self-perceptions led them to bargain very differently with their families, cooperative members, and Fair Trade bureaucrats, as evident from many ethnographic instances in this book. They often referred to themselves as the “police of their fields.” Consequently, women plantation workers limited their engagement with Fair Trade, whereas women tea farmers actively engaged with Fair Trade ideas and practices. The institutional structures of which these women were a part—namely, the plantation and the cooperative—were both patriarchal and exploitative of women’s vulnerability, but they did alter women’s self-perceptions. Such self-perceptions of vulnerability or strength within distinct political fields need to be factored into any assessment of the success of sustainable development.
Thus, women tea farmers and plantation workers engage in different kinds meaning-making around sustainability projects based on self-perceptions of their social location and associated gendered projects of value. Their self-making projects tempered by gender ideologies of respectability at the two sites (plantation and cooperative), result in different kinds of “gendered projects of value.” In Darjeeling sustainable development, in the garb of Fair Trade policies and practices, is frequently subjected to these social expectations (Ferguson 1990) driven by women’s situated assessments of how Fair Trade can (or cannot) enable them to advance their gendered projects of value.
This book focuses on “gendered projects of value” and will enable scholars and practitioners to recognize how development ventures acquire gendered meaning at the “Bottom of the Pyramid.” Such meaning-making, evident in their narratives, help us understand women’s chronicling of their own empowerment pathways while exploring new collective possibilities for community-level change. Gendered projects of value direct our attention to processes (political, cultural, economic) that have shaped the threshold of their contemporary maneuvers at the individual and collective level. It also facilitates our understanding of where contemporary sustainability initiatives figure in these efforts.
I propose that a bottom-up method of dealing with notions of sustainability since a return to indigenous or communal practices might not get us very far when thinking about the alternative collective desires nurtured by poor women. This is why on a theoretical, methodological, and political level we need to engage hybridity (see also chapter 1) We also need to think about what kind of “location” we communicate in thinking about these alternatives and representing the everyday lives of poor women as feminists. Do women who are critical of Fair Trade not use it in any way? If they do use Fair Trade policies, does that mean they are in some way subordinated? What kind of “Global Literacies” (Chatterjee 2009) do we produce about women’s engagement with market-based sustainable development? Here I heed Amanda Swarr and Richa Nagar’s (2011) caution to scholars engaged in representing the local and the global in feminist collaborative transnational praxis where the local becomes the unquestioned place for engendered pure resistance or counter-hegemony.
Swarr and Nagar raise an important issue when thinking about “oppositional consciousness” to neoliberal hegemony. In this book I have dealt with this question further by exploring whether women in Darjeeling’s tea sector display what could be called a global understanding of their specific location as they chronicle their own pathways to empowerment. During my fieldwork I often heard statements such as “everything in the United States must be Fair Trade, or else why were people prosperous there” or “there must have been an overflow of cash since we are getting money in Darjeeling” or “why would they care about Fair Trade in Darjeeling.” Women imagine their well-being, capabilities, and everyday economic and cultural entrepreneurialism in comparative monetary terms. Whether working inside or outside of the plantations, they constantly devise ways to better their financial situations. Therefore, they often contemplate affluence in the West, of which Fair Trade is clearly a product, and why it does not attend to their financial inadequacies. They are also deeply aware of the appropriation of their images and stories to increase the value of Fair Trade. Ghumāuri is a shield against that. This desire for monetary stability is not necessarily evidence of adopting neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Women’s ambition for respect and success are much more complicated, as many chapters in this book have upheld.
The women smallholder tea farmers I write about have had many years of exposure to microcredit policies. It was through their encounters with microcredit that women reimagined their labor of social reproduction (sakaunu) as a form of business (see also Sen and Majumder 2015). Women cultivated an entrepreneurial subject position in which they avoided loans and turned to mutual lending. Their entrepreneurialism was geared toward eliminating intermediaries and reducing dependency in their small businesses. Everyday entrepreneurialism was celebrated but not the burden of loans. Such decisions and reinterpretations illustrate the difficult cultural terrain women have to navigate in engaging in various forms of entrepreneurialism.
The creative appropriation of this global discourse of entrepreneurialism then became a “register” (Foucault 1987) through which women interpreted the effects of Fair Trade. The juxtaposition of sakaunu with the modern, small-business directives of NGOs enabled them to secure local resources on their own terms. To be just and “fair,” Fair Trade had to become more accountable to their everyday needs. Their appropriation also exposed the interdependence of global regulations with local patriarchies and with their desire to preserve their reputations and respect for their labor without giving up the idea of a “business.” When we look in detail at how women apply their newfound entrepreneurial subjectivities to make Fair Trade policies more suitable to their gendered political field, we realize they play off one kind of global ethics of empowerment against another, challenging the assumption that their agency lies in only reviving the indigenous, local, and communal (such as ghumāuri activities of women plantation workers). Even when they fall back on homegrown cultural resources like ghumāuri, one needs to understand that as a “traditional” practice ghumāuri has always been about sustaining the everyday needs of eating, living, and aspiring in a very different historical period.
Ever since I began this project eleven years ago, my colleagues and students have asked me “So does Fair Trade work for the women you research with in Darjeeling?” My default response has always been “It is complicated.” This response has been received with mixed feelings by my graduate and undergraduate students who still hope to do something good somewhere in the world. So many times they have asked me to take them with me to Darjeeling to help with Fair Trade. They have brought me boxes of Fair Trade tea from big grocery chains since these students are not members of co-ops, they are mostly working-class folks who are strapped with debt. Some of them know that I have a perspective on Tom’s shoes and I have discussed their guilt of privilege many times. But every time they ask me when they can come along with me to do “Fair Trade” work, I have hesitated and asked myself whether the structures are in place to translate their passion and potential hard work into something meaningful. Are they prepared to navigate the fault lines of the emerging global morality market with their commodified affect (see also Brondo 2013; West 2012; Freeman 2014)?
In 2013 my undergraduate students in “Anthropology of Gender” read an article that I wrote about women’s struggles with Sānu Krishak Sansthā. At the end of the class discussion one of them asked me why there is no Fair Trade store in her rural southern town. I really had no answer, I asked her to think about why. What kind of Fair Trade would her small-farmer family in Georgia want to see? While women in Darjeeling’s rural areas ask me whether in the USA everything is Fair Trade, in the United States some rural college students in Georgia do not understand why they cannot buy Fair Trade products in small towns so that they can help. The structural challenges of sustainable development are interconnected. Yet current transnational sustainability and social justice initiatives isolate products and people to be Fair Trade−certified in niches leading to partial solutions. Unless systemic questions about gender, work, consumption, profit, and everyday sustainability are raised by everyone to understand collective complicities and mutual responsibility in non-patronizing, non-essentialist ways, we shall only see Fair Trade, not Swachcha Vyāpār.