Throughout rural areas of Darjeeling district, sirens ring out from tea plantations at 7:00 a.m. sharp, signaling the beginning of a busy workday not only for plantation workers but also for smallholding tea farmers who belong to a small farmers’ cooperative (Sānu Krishak Sansthā).1 Mostly women, these tea farmers live in villages outside plantation lands and are not formally tied to the state’s plantation bureaucracy. The Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) denies their existence in formal conversations. Yet on hearing the plantation siren, these women begin tending the tea bushes growing alongside other crops in their rocky backyards. The tea that they cultivate fetches ready cash income for their household maintenance if they are able to locate the right networks to send it to Darjeeling town for sale. According to Geeta, one such farmer, the siren had acquired increasing significance over time: “It reminds us that what we do and have done inside our farms for years is also valuable. The tea we women produce is the real organic that plantations want to buy. It is because of our daily task of procurement for our families that small-farmer-grown tea is sold at high prices on the world market.”
Geeta’s statement signals how new market-based sustainability initiatives such as Fair Trade and organic certification2 are challenging traditional tea production orthodoxies in Darjeeling—which had been legally and geographically constrained to plantation-based agriculture—producing material and cultural consequences for surrounding villages. For major plantations, the shift from industrial agriculture to sustainable organic production is costly and difficult (see chapter 2), opening spaces for communities and family farmers on the fringes of plantation country to grow organic tea and thereby to dream of a better economic future in a region characterized by economic stagnation, massive unemployment, and consequent out-migration. Yet new practices grounded in philosophies of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility have both positives and negatives: they have given smallholder families some hope for a steady agriculture-based livelihood, while simultaneously trapping them in precarious contracts, as I shall describe throughout this book. In the picture below we see one such farmer standing proudly displaying his compost while telling me that organic cultivation will make him as rich as a Punjabi farmer. Ironically, much of the agricultural success in Punjab state is due to high yielding green revolution technologies. This particular man and his family did not even belong to any cooperative like SKS. But living on plantation fringes producing a modest harvest of tea, he nurtured great hopes about having a co-op in his own area hoping to enjoy agricultural prosperity as promised in Green Revolution promotions seen in Figure 0.1.
Figure 0.1. Organic Farmer Dreaming about Green Revolution.
Therefore, it was not only women but also men who realized the economic potential of working in Darjeeling’s informal tea sector. Men likewise rejoiced in the siren and women’s enthusiasm to work. Biren Rai, who had been seeking a job in the local government and was an active member of a local political party, now began his day by checking paperwork in the newly formed Sānu Krishak Sansthā office, as an office bearer. Biren often told me:
Fair Trade and the women have made our cooperative stronger. We have to work like a panchāyat [local government body] and preserve the purity of our cooperative since our reputation is growing all over the world. If the cooperative grows, some unemployed men may find jobs here. Maybe one day there will be enough Fair Trade premium money from our tea sales.
Biren’s comments allude to the growing popularity of small-farmer-produced tea on the global Fair Trade market, and the hope and excitement this trend has produced among small farmers in remote rural villages or Darjeeling district.
Meanwhile, in the eighty-seven government-supported official “Darjeeling” designated tea plantations—only one-third of which have Fair Trade and Organic certifications—the 7:00 a.m. siren signals the beginning of another day of strictly monitored labor (thikā, wagework) for women tea pickers. Whereas women farmers in the villages find new purpose in Fair Trade and organic cultivation, women plantation workers perceive the new Fair Trade and organic certification policies as an additional layer of management intervention and disciplining of their daily work and social lives. These women detest conforming to Fair Trade regulations. Decreased green leaf growth during the first few years of organic conversion (Bisen and Singh 2012) reduced plantation workers’ seasonal extra cash income from exceeding their daily quota of collecting leaves. As Sushma explained in 2004:
Fair Trade has not assisted in our daily job of procuring for our families. For that we women have to play ghumāuri [informal savings and mentoring groups within plantations]. We have to keep looking for money to make liquor for local sale, buy rationed rice on the black market, rear chicken and pigs. If the plantation owner favors us then we sometimes get a chance to take out a loan from the fund.3
The skepticism about the potential benefits of Fair Trade and organic production stemmed from the inability of this transnational-trade-based sustainable development campaign to challenge the state-controlled wage structure within plantations. The meager wages made women’s job of procuring for their families’ basic needs extremely difficult, and most turned to various kinds of small but important entrepreneurial ventures to raise their standard of living.
That women have diverging attitudes and aspirations surrounding the new agrarian politics and change in Darjeeling is reflected in the preceding quotations. Women’s such deep contemplation of Fair Trade occurred in a context where authorities in the plantation bureaucracy and heads of tea-growing cooperatives in the off-plantation, rural areas of Darjeeling were noticeably celebrating and fetishizing women’s labor and expertise. The circulating discourses celebrated the value of smallholder women farmers and wage-earning women plantation workers in terms reminiscent of the global discourses about women’s empowerment that are central to Fair Trade propaganda and its acceptance in the West. They portrayed women as loyal, willing to take risks, entrepreneurial, responsible, knowledgeable, and hardworking, as evident from Biren Rai’s comments in the earlier part of this introduction.
Organic certification and Fair Trade are distinct: whereas organic certification focuses on geography and soil qualities, Fair Trade, with its emphasis on transparency and inclusion of the marginalized in the production process, valorizes women (Sen and Majumder 2011; Mutersbaugh 2002, 2005; Mutersbaugh et al. 2005; Mutersbaugh and Lyon 2010). On Darjeeling plantations Fair Trade and organic certifications always went hand in hand. Steady flows of visitors and officials of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) passed through the plantations and cooperatives, filming and recording women, often trying to document their natural and affective connections to tea. The smiling faces of women plantation workers were plastered on billboards all over Darjeeling town. Despite these Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-inflected narratives and imagery and the pseudo-feminist propaganda about sustainable development, I encountered both skepticism and creativity in women’s engagement with emerging discourses and resources emanating from the global drive for sustainable tea production.
Everyday Sustainability takes readers to ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives—Darjeeling—where Fair Trade ostensibly promises gender justice to minority women engaged in organic tea production on postcolonial plantations and smallholder farms. These women tea farmers and plantation workers have distinct imaginaries and everyday practices of social justice that at times dovetail with and at other times rub against the tenets of the emerging global morality market. This book enquires why women beneficiaries of transnational justice-making projects remain skeptical about the potential for economic and social empowerment through Fair Trade while simultaneously seeking to use the movement to give voice to their situated desires for economic and social justice. Everyday Sustainability illuminates the contradictions and complexities of the gendered ethical selves that emerge at the margins of transnational “conscious capitalism” initiatives designed to empower women. This is the first book-length comparative ethnographic treatment of Fair Trade from a postcolonial transnational feminist framework, a perspective absent from recent studies of Fair Trade.
A focus on women’s justice imaginaries (their perceptions of social justice) and related entrepreneurialism is particularly timely in the present moment, when feminists are debating and mobilizing either for or against the privatized political playing field of neoliberalism, with its myriad possibilities and limitations (Prughl 1999; Pulido 1996; Wright 2006). Everyday Sustainability underscores how some of the poorest women in Darjeeling have found creative ways to negotiate the “market.” Since 1947, they have engaged first with the developmentalist state, then with the transnational market-based justice paradigms that strategically celebrate them as authentic subjects for empowerment because of their “indigenous” organic tea production methods.
The neoliberal market has indeed found its pristine subjects to protect and empower. But how do women tea producers navigate this market-based system? Why do they need to engage in a politics of counter-vigilance against Fair Trade’s global imperatives? How do they master different strategies of sometimes shielding themselves from and sometimes engaging with Fair Trade to defend their individual and collective aspirations for economic and social justice? How do these divergent engagements with Fair Trade shape their subjectivities and their community and family lives?
What was amply clear in my eleven years of sustained ethnographic engagement with women on plantations and on surrounding smallholdings was that Fair Trade rarely benefited these women, and it did so only when women developed their own situated pathways of cultural and economic entrepreneurship to make Fair Trade work for them. In their innovative maneuvers they sometimes rejected Fair Trade in the interests of protecting their reputations and sustaining their everyday business enterprises through other means, such as the ghumāuri mutual aid groups on plantations. Women members of the smallholder tea cooperative plotted and planned critical engagements with Fair Trade bureaucracy and community patriarchs to ensure “transparent” Fair Trade, ironically. At each step they were building social sustainability (Cruz-Torres and McElwee 2012) on the margins of the hegemonic global Fair Trade movement through creativity and entrepreneurship, which interestingly, went completely unnoticed by the movement’s advocates and bureaucrats.
Valorizations about women were double-edged and provided frequent fodder for rumination and reflection among women plantation workers and tea farmers trying to comprehend the changes in their communities and workplaces. Though they encouraged women to see themselves as important, such valorizations were also a ploy to appropriate women’s labor and time. There was misrecognition in the strategic recognition of women’s expertise, knowledge, and commitment to work in community and global propaganda. Women workers and farmers were simultaneously the targets of both valorization and exploitation by a patriarchal village structure and a male-dominated plantation bureaucracy. Prior to Fair Trade women had been exploited both inside and outside plantations, often in the context of multiple patriarchies (Chatterjee 2001; Grewal and Kaplan 1994) that restricted their ability to leave their village and their accepted activities. Fair Trade transformed traditional patriarchies by thrusting the roles and responsibilities of entrepreneurs, supervisors, and decision makers on women, without granting them rights to resources and recognition in their everyday struggles. This book explores how women tea farmers and plantation workers negotiate with and contest new modes of capitalist exploitation that are couched in deceptive language of agency, freedom, and emancipation.
Geeta, Sushma, and Biren Rai’s assertions of value derive from their exposure to the governing practices of Fair Trade, which operate through valorization of rural life and fetishization of women’s labor to invent and perpetuate an organic tea tradition in Darjeeling. When local plantation managers interested in trading with small tea farmers would bring Fair Trade officials on tours, or representatives of local NGOs promoting rural development would bring in independent tea buyers, they would often extoll the virtues of women’s maya (love and care) for tea production. Then the women smallholders would be photographed in stereotyped poses that mirror the images in state marketing materials for Darjeeling tea. For their part, the women tea farmers distinguished themselves as superior to women plantation workers in their everyday cultural discourse; for example, by portraying themselves as indigenous artisanal tea producers. Such fetishisms also mask the everyday appropriation of women’s labor and time in the process of bringing Darjeeling’s marginal tea producers into the ambit of Fair Trade. Women in these tea-farming households were particularly critical of the periodic demands on their time and labor since they are engaged in the actual harvesting of tea and carrying out Fair Trade and organic training. Women plantation workers, meanwhile, followed a strategic path of avoiding Fair Trade–related activities on the plantations where they worked.
Fair Trade and its emphasis on organic cultivation precipitated a sea change in Darjeeling’s postcolonial tea production history, as detailed in chapter 2. A transformation in the preferences of Western consumers has led to significant reorganization of tea production. Though plantations continue to dominate the scene in Darjeeling, the logic of tea production is very gradually shifting from Fordist plantation methods to new contractual arrangements. In the postindependence period and building up to the 1990s plantation agriculture focused on increasing productivity using “green revolution” technologies—mostly chemical fertilizers. Technology carried more importance than specialty branding or perceptions of quality. Plantations aimed to increase efficiency and hence the quantity of tea produced, just as any factory producing commodities for the market would.
After the 1990s, however, tea was reinvented in the West as a health and culture good (Dolan 2001, 2008). This new mindset required a different kind of production regime that plantations were not prepared to implement. Initially, the Fair Trade movement recited the mantra of empowering marginalized producers in the global economy, and even now in the certification process, Fair Trade institutions avoid using the word “plantations” in their publicity materials, instead calling them gardens, large farms, or “hired labor organizations” (Fairtrade India 2013).
International Fair Trade standards banned the use of chemicals. The quality and ecology of the tea leaves became more important than quantity. Heightened consumer demand for sustainable, chemical-free tea challenged the plantations’ hegemony as producers of tea for the global market. In this new scenario plantation owners had to employ savvy marketing and strategic CSR campaigns to reinvent themselves as champions for small-farmer-grown tea, often by misrepresenting wage laborers as smallholder farmers. As a result of such practices, Darjeeling, especially the coffee-producing southern region, now has the largest number of plantations with Fair Trade certification of any state in India (Fairtrade India 2013). “Asia leads in the plantation-based Fair Trade. Specifically, this region accounts for 80 percent of the world’s Fair Trade tea plantation workers … supplies 49 percent of all Fairtrade workers in the world, it accounts for 12 percent of all Fairtrade farmers” (Makita and Tsuruta 2017: 5). “India is Asia’s largest supplier of Fairtrade producers within both categories of organizations, comprising small farmers and hired labor respectively. … For the category of hired labor organizations, India is the largest supplier of Fairtrade workers globally … In Asia 21 percent Fair Trade premium revenue comes from tea, whereas tea constitutes only 5 percent global Fairtrade premium” (Makita and Tsuruta 2017: 6).
At one of the plantations where I conducted research, the manager constantly spewed Gandhian notions of purity and simplicity and declared that he was going to give all the land back to the women in ten years. Other plantations declared themselves leaders of Darjeeling’s small farmer movement because they formed strategic alliances with smallholder farmers, who, as I detail later, are not legally entitled to produce or export Darjeeling brand tea, and therefore have no choice but to rely on plantations to market and process their produce resulting in new contracts (see also Watts and Goodman 2004).
Figure 0.2. Ama (Mother of the house) Hand-Rolling Green Tea in SKS.
The social and political life of sustainable tea production in Darjeeling is concealed in out-of-the-way places hidden by the aesthetics of plantation landscape reified in popular travel writing (Koehler 2015; Wright 2011). Here is an excerpt, “Coffee in India might have the moment, but Darjeeling tea has romance—not in the colonial vestiges of how a tea estate in structured, but in the green hills, in Darjeeling and its backdrop if majestic, icy Himalayan peaks, in pure mountain air and vintage Raj-era bungalows … The romance is also in the tea themselves: struggling artisans in the truest sense … using methods and tools that have changed little in a century” (Koehler 2015:227−28). Academic engagements with the tea industry also tend to focus on plantations alone (Sharma and Das 2011). The advent of Fair Trade may generally mean business as usual within plantations, but outside of them Fair Trade has engendered new expectations of emerging from the precariousness of rural life, plagued with massive unemployment and male out-migration and substance abuse. While the tea plantations formally employ about 60,000 workers, informal tea production is common among the rural Darjeeling population of 1,118,860 (Darjeeling Census 2011), especially in the Kurseong and Darjeeling subdivisions. The state categorizes any tea grown outside of its eighty-seven recognized plantations as illegal for sale, but there is a sizable informal tea market that flows through plantations now made possible by the necessities of Fair Trade and organic standards.
Late Capitalism and Fair Trade in Darjeeling
These changes occur in a wider context of global capitalism where there are new articulations between the formal and informal sectors (Sanyal 2007; Goodman and Watts 1997, 10) in the “developing” world. The guiding narrative that sustained tea plantations immediately after India’s independence was one of modernization to enable production for a global market in a space that brings together capital, labor, and resources within a formal ambit of wagework. In this framework, non-plantation Darjeeling is a vast stretch of unknown and unacknowledged population and space—a wilderness that contrasted sharply with the uniform, managed, geographically homogenous, monocultural, and manicured aesthetic of the plantations. The two pictures below show the contrast between manicured plantation landscape (figure 0.3) and the unkempt lands of the non-plantation tea growers (figure 0.4).
Figure 0.3. Aesthetic of Plantation Monoculture (Kaman).
Figure 0.4. Aesthetic of Non-Plantation Tea Production (Basti).
Throughout India planners and policymakers view informal economic spheres as throwbacks to the past (Breman 1996, 2003; Jhabwala et al. 2003). On the assumption that they would progressively be absorbed within the formal sphere of the modernizing Indian economy and agribusiness of plantations, informal sectors rarely have sites of state intervention. But these beliefs are increasingly belied by the dynamism of India’s informal sector—which policymakers now call the jugaad economy—signifying a site of tremendous entrepreneurship, creativity, and social innovation (Majumder 2015; Sengupta 2015). As the nature of economic development interventions started changing, both within and outside India, the articulation between the formal and the informal sectors became increasingly flexible and engaged in productive tension.
In Darjeeling, Fair Trade ushered in a convergence of these two related yet different global trends. The non-plantation areas came under the umbrella of NGO interventions or of NGO-mediated government interventions, sometimes through microcredit-based rural development under National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) and later promotion of organic cultivation to tap into global resources promoting sustainable development. Fair Trade regulations, pushed foreign buyers and owners of plantations—where the soil was too contaminated with agrochemicals for organic production—to explore outlying areas to source globally marketable organic tea leaves. Darjeeling, thus, was drawn into a late-capitalist logic of transnational trade that valued heterogeneity in crop production, small farmers, the informal sector, and entrepreneurial women. So, rather than being absorbed into the sphere of wagework, the informal economy is developing intricate connections with transnational circuits of trade and commerce. What we see in Darjeeling is a subtle unfolding of late capitalist logic of heterogeneity, household labor and self-exploitation, and weakening of labor unions in which boundaries between plantation/non-plantation and private-intimate/public become increasingly porous.
All of these transitions were enabled by region-specific gendered social structures and dynamics of tea production. In this book I engage feminist ethnography with the unfolding of emerging global political economic processes to establish the centrality of the informal, clandestine sphere of tea production, the intimate gendered structures (Stephen 2003, 2005; Freeman 2014) that support the trade of Darjeeling tea through gendered small-scale entrepreneurialism, and the cultural lens through which women in rural Darjeeling understand and work within transnational trade and justice regimes. Additionally, I focus on “everyday sustainability”; that is, practices and processes through which women actively learn about emerging market-based sustainability and justice regimes and evaluate their effectiveness in addressing their everyday community-level struggles over resources, representation, and entrepreneurship.
The unfolding of transnational justice regimes (like Fair Trade) in rural Darjeeling remains puzzling to many smallholding women farmers, even as they hope it will improve their future prospects. The advent of such regimes has suddenly lent importance to their views about organics but also burdened them with new demands on their time, such as attending various community training programs. Women find the heightened attention being paid to them upsets their daily schedule of tea production. Instead, they find themselves preparing elaborate meals for mostly white guests in their homes who pester them to share their views about Fair Trade-organic tea. Some are interrupted in the middle of their workday to tidy themselves for photographs they are told will travel far. At other times they find themselves forced to challenge the male leaders of their local cooperative to get Fair Trade funds. Due to these time-consuming activities women often debated skeptically whether Fair Trade advanced their own economic and social projects. Fair Trade and related development ventures in Darjeeling were evaluated from the vantage point of situated gendered projects of value as I elaborate in the next section.
Gendered Projects of Value
Darjeeling, thus, is an important site in which to examine how social reproduction strategies of smallholder women farmers and tea plantation workers play out vis-à-vis new capitalist appropriations of labor and resources—evident in women’s new collective entrepreneurial ventures or strengthening existing ones like ghumāuri. Social reproduction in the late capitalist context has been the focus of many critical assessments of varying responses to reorganization of production under global capitalism (Harvey 2014; Fraser 2013; Gidwani 2008; Chari 2004, Katz 2001b). In this book I propose that we broaden our understanding of social reproduction from narrow economistic concepts like “need economy” as espoused by economist Kalyan Sanyal (2007; also see Majumder forthcoming) and instead focus on the cultural, economic, political, and affective work involved in social reproduction. Scholars and activists (whether Fair Trade promoters or local development activists) should take note of the reality of gendered everyday entrepreneurialism in rural areas as manifested in the households of both farmers with small landholdings and wage laborers with no formal access to land or other major assets. These everyday entrepreneurialisms sustain livelihood and community in rural areas. Women plantation workers and smallholder farmers are critical actors in Darjeeling’s precarious informal economy, as amply demonstrated in the subsequent chapters. What Fair Trade has done is to provide a new context for the poorest segments of India’s informal economy to articulate a gendered critique based on their everyday struggles over social reproduction and cultural production.
The symbolic, subjective, and self-making elements in a need economy (that is, reproduction), take on distinct cultural forms that constitute an individual’s or group’s self-image in the context of situated political economies (see also Freeman 2014; Karim 2011). Therefore social reproduction is not simply about meeting needs, as Sanyal proposed, but also about everyday cultural production, which relies on but is also in tension with the profit-driven corporate economy. Examining the tensions and relations between processes of cultural production, social reproduction, and cultural reproduction, as feminist scholar Priti Ramamurthy (2003, 2010, 2011) proposes, is exponentially more useful for understanding practices and meaning-making around Fair Trade (see also de Certeau 1984). Cultural reproduction thus constitutes the abstract and complex categories that people inhabit as wageworkers, consumers, or entrepreneurs, to use the hegemonic definitions of states and NGOs. For instance, in the context of Andhra, Ramamurthy foregrounds how men and women of lower-caste agricultural families systematically accumulate capital to further identity-based cultural productions in everyday life that redefine their gender and caste-based social positions in the regional cultural and political economic system.
Drawing on Ramamurthy, I view women tea workers’ cultural productions as more complex than simple social reproduction in terms of an economic logic that inevitably categorizes them as completely dominated by or completely resistant to Fair Trade. Rather I see them re-articulating global discourses and categories of cultural reproduction available to them for purposes of empowerment. Their goal is not simply sustaining production relations infused with patriarchy, but rather self-making which gives rise to contestations of Fair Trade, patriarchy, and collusions between the two. Their everyday social, cultural, and economic entrepreneurial activities to support their families and their own aspirations become the vantage point from which they understand and engage with global sustainable development policies.
Acknowledging and documenting these nuanced entrepreneurial forms of economic and affective life marks the cutting edge of feminist anthropological work in recent time. Everyday Sustainability takes these engagements in a new direction where such entrepreneurialisms become the focal point of gendered engagements with the emerging global “morality market” (Chowdhury 2011). As feminist anthropologist Carla Freeman urges in her recent work on the Caribbean middle class, such an acknowledgment of gendered entrepreneurialism requires us to understand it as dynamic:
… always in formation—akin to the processual work of class, gender, race and culture—and inextricably bound up with these dimensions of identity … entrepreneurial labors increasingly exceed the formal boundaries of productive enterprise to include everyday facets of social reproduction (i.e., work ‘at home’ and work ‘at work’ bleed into one another), they seem to permeate every crevice of conscious and even unconscious life. (Freeman 2014, 2−3, emphasis in original)
Women in Darjeeling present themselves to interlocutors (like me) and to themselves as complex subjects of emerging transnational rights discourses that stretch the static frames of women’s agency, without understanding how women navigate global and local power structures in their everyday lives. One can locate these emerging cultural productions in these women’s everyday discourses around sustaining their families as well as in their delicate navigation of categories of social reproduction that restrict them to static roles of “housewife,” “worker,” “daughter,” or “mother.” Women constantly find these identifications limit their possibilities for sustaining themselves and their families. The new categories of cultural reproduction emanating from Fair Trade/transnational justice discourse—which valorize them as skilled, powerful, and happy—do not enable us to understand the challenging cultural terrain women navigate in terms of their everyday mobilizations and maneuvers around household and community.
The simultaneous valorization and devaluation of women in the emerging discourses and practices of Fair Trade compel women in small tea-farming homes to prioritize their own ambitions in order to challenge the discursive frames and practices through which local and transnational communities interpret their needs and advocate policies for their “empowerment.” Women tea producers transform the disciplining tendencies of well-meaning capacity-building initiatives by advancing what I call their own “gendered projects of value”—a key ideological and material threshold of discourses on everyday sustainability. These projects adhere to the distinct gender roles present in Darjeeling’s rural areas. Women plantation workers and women farmers are drawn to different strategies of self-making as a result of their navigation of distinct micro-histories of tea production, class formation, and the effects on their intimate lives. These gendered projects of value manifest in new collaborative entrepreneurial initiatives that women in rural Darjeeling undertake based on their mutual experiences of labor and procurement for their families. They are not just born out of simple kin networks, labor unions, or political parties, but out of decades of contesting local developments’ individualized and or limited women’s empowerment strategies, which collude with male patriarchy and ignore women’s grounded micro-strategies. Fair Trade for them seems continuation of patriarchal local development.
In Darjeeling these gendered projects of value are expressed in performative acts that operationalize women’s individual and collective aspirations. Sometimes women enthusiastically participate in Fair Trade, accepting and almost enacting the “survival narratives” that Fair Trade publicity materials promote, giving interviews to certifiers, voluntourists and posing for clichéd pictures of “third-world empowered women.”
At other times they either strategically withdraw from and mock Fair Trade capacity-building practices, or revitalize their own informal collectives that celebrate their work, body, and creativity. In these shifting strategies of conforming, withdrawing, and informally organizing, one can locate the embryo of counter-hegemony (Sen and Majumder 2015). Women’s adherence to gendered projects of value also alerts us to take note of forms of self-governance that question “neoliberal governmentalities” (Karim 2011) hereby expressed in Fair Trade.
In non-plantation areas gendered projects of value manifest in women tea farmers’ collective efforts to question patriarchal cultural categories—such as dutiful housewife—that spatially limit their entrepreneurial ventures. Women collectively mobilize to establish themselves as housewife-entrepreneurs, a role that both Fair Trade policies and local patriarchs deny them, exposing them to gendered shaming as “businesswomen.” In this process women question why Fair Trade fails to support their efforts to challenge existing practices of social and cultural reproduction that undermine their entrepreneurialism.
On plantations, women workers’ gendered projects of value are discernible in their efforts to navigate (a) discipline practices based in shaming, and (b) male envy in the community and their own households over their steady employment. Women plantation workers’ everyday work and family lives are organized around “performative obedience” expressed in agentive narratives of their ability to run the plantation from its margins. Women mock Fair Trade’s vacuous celebration of their skills that does very little to improve their lives. As I will show later, most women plantation workers avoid Fair Trade initiatives and instead turn to clandestine mentoring spaces like ghumāuri groups.
Analyzing these everyday gendered projects of value from an ethnographic perspective was useful for understanding how poor women articulate what they value in the context of their everyday sustainability. It provides a glimpse into their everyday evaluation of emerging sustainability regimes as well as how they prioritize certain economic, political, and cultural projects. Grounded exploration of “gendered projects of value” and its effects on household and community life, as well as on women’s individual and collective subjectivities, is critical for understanding existing justice imaginaries. It draws us into the drama of everyday sustainability in the Darjeeling tea industry.
Gender and Sustainability
Analyzing the current state of global engagements on gender and sustainability from the vantage point of “gendered projects of value” holds a distinct benefit. When looked through the prism of women’s desires and their micro-entreprenurialisms the current state of sustainability discourse appears to be far removed from acknowledging the creative entrepreneurial work women are doing to sustain their families and communities. Although James Wolfensohn declared at the UN Conference on Women in Beijing the centrality of women to sustainable development and social justice (see Sharma 2008, 19) the policies that were formed inspired by Wolfensohn’s motto fall short of sustaining women’s creativity in meeting their community’s needs since it moves away from the welfare model of women’s development. It emphasizes self-sustaining entrepreneurialism, therefore its motto: “trade not aid.”
Paul Rice, chairman of Fair Trade USA (previously Transfair USA) remarked in a recent interview that Fair Trade would pay hidden dividends in farmers’ and workers’ increased self-confidence and pride as they solved their own problems with Fair Trade’s support. The message that Rice and the overall Fair Trade establishment broadcast echoes the World Bank’s sustainable development paradigm inaugurated in 1997, when Wolfensohn advocated “sustainable development that is people centered and gender-conscious, that seeks equity for all and empowerment of the weak and vulnerable everywhere so that they may be the producers of their own welfare and bounty, not the recipients of charity and aid” (Serageldin 1998, 4). My decade of research leads me to wonder whether the self-appointed foot soldiers of the global sustainability movement are at all ready for the confidence, creativity, and critical entrepreneurial work of women beneficiaries, as I discuss in chapter 3 and 5.
The World Bank’s $24.5 million Gender Action Plan, whose motivational force was “gender equality is smart economics,” has been severely critiqued by feminist scholars and practitioners because of its inability to address structural inequities (Harcourt and Nelson 2015; Kabeer 1999; Sharma 2008, Cornwall 2014). For instance, Fair Trade—a movement intended to protect the interests of the structurally vulnerable in the postcolonial world—has ended up certifying plantations, the very vestiges of the colonial tea trade, as authentic heritage—rebranding them as “hired labor organizations” or “large farms” to reduce the stigma.
Feminist scholars advocate more attention to the intricate workings of culture and power in keeping women from their own ambitions. In pushing for more attention to social sustainability, feminist scholars foreground that a true commitment to sustainability has to reckon with existing power structures that hinder inclusivity, produce vulnerability, and prevent access to resources for women in their communities (Gezon 2012; Gunewardena and Kingsolver 2008). Current feminist research on sustainability regimes, such as sustainable agriculture, is often “drowned out by research from the natural and sometimes even social sciences that tends to see sustainability as concerning only measurable outcomes” (Pilgeram 2011, 375). Still, feminist political ecologists constantly remind us to consider “gender as a critical variable in shaping resource access and control, interacting with class, caste, race, culture, and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change, the struggle of men and women to sustain ecologically variable livelihoods, and the prospects of any community for sustainable development” (Rocheleau and Thomas-Slayter 1996, 2). Mainstreamed gender catchwords increasingly appear in policy documents but feminist objectives are rarely incorporated into assessment or implementation of individual projects. In fact what is even more shocking is the disavowal of feminist frameworks in the frenzy of collecting gender related data. This disturbing trend is symptomatic of much research on gender and sustainability, which gloss over difficult questions of community-oriented long-term feasibility of interventions (Bercker et al. 1999).
Despite these assertions, the idea that social sustainability should be an important consideration in sustainable development policy or practice remains on the margins. Maria Cruz-Torres and Pamela McElwee (2012) note that before 2012 only three papers published in the respected journal Sustainable Development had focused on women and gender in sustainability initiatives. They also reference a recent citation index search of critical environmental social science journals, in which only 3.9 percent of articles referenced gender, sex, or feminism. Many of the current sustainability indicators (such as ecological footprinting) and market indicators (such as Fair Trade product sales) do not adequately factor in gender equity (Smith 2015) or other indicators of social sustainability (such as racial inequality) in the processes of assessing and modifying current initiatives. Anecdotal survival narratives of women saved by Fair Trade fill YouTube and other websites, but there is little solid research on how women understand emerging sustainability initiatives like Fair Trade. Such research would move us beyond the gender audits that reveal only numbers and not how sustainability is lived, practiced, and dreamed about under tough economic conditions through situated “gendered projects of value.” Everyday Sustainability is poised to close this gap.
A focus on gendered projects of value (and associated identity-based cultural productions) directs us to an understanding of processes and moments through which rural women actively produce conceptions of sustainability based in the context of their livelihoods (Rocheleau 1995; Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997). Women plantation workers and small farmers participating in Fair Trade–Organic certified institutions create culturally appropriate categories of sustainability practice within the structural limitations on their lives. In this way poor women are not merely passive recipients of sustainability initiatives, they have their own justice imaginaries. Documenting and strengthening these collective efforts would remedy the lack of attention to social issues in the triple bottom-line approach—economy, environment, and society—popularized by Jon Elkington (1997).
Women affected by sustainability policies are constantly assessing the value of these regimes in the specific cultural contexts where vulnerabilities and inequities of resource use emanate and are magnified as global power structures work through them. In beneficiaries’ minds issues of social sustainability are primary, since gendered actions on the ground provide the cultural terrain on which sustainability policy and practice takes hold. Because women are in charge of the everyday sustenance of their families, their assessments of the feasibility of sustainability policies is of primary importance. The focus on women has to be non-essentialist—more feminist materialist (Agarwal 1994, 2010) rather than ecofeminist. In the Indian Himalayan context, Shubhra Gururani (2002a and b) cautions against the empty celebration of women’s knowledge of forestry in emerging discourses of sustainable forest management. For her it is of utmost importance that we consider that women’s “practical knowledge may be locally specific, but it is not locally bound, as local interests and global discourses of environment and development often inform the contours and substance of such knowledge” (2002, 320). Therefore Liza Gezon (2012, 237) emphasizes, “Women are thus important to sustainability discussions because of their tendency to be on the quiet but cutting edge of change. Women’s strategies are critical in defining local adaptations to outside pressures—pressures in conjunction with globalization or the movement of global capital” and associated regulatory regimes. An ethnographic focus on gendered projects of value can assist in the fine-tuning of current sustainability initiatives, whether focused on gender or not (see also Redclift 1994; Schroeder 1999).
Empowerment Lite?
At the heart of current transnational sustainability initiatives is a key contradiction: undermining the significance of social sustainability and the desire to unleash women’s entrepreneurial potential through better access to market forces and monetary investments (see also Cornwall and Edwards 2014). To counter the focus on monetary investment in current development policy and practice, some noted scholars of development advocate for designing acceptable value universals. Amartya Sen conceptualized “development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” (2000, 3). Through this formulation he questioned established ways of thinking about human well-being premised on income or commodity use. Expanding on his idea Martha Nussbaum developed a list of certain freedoms that she believes should be at the core of the “capabilities,” or “human development approach.” Nussbaum defines the capabilities approach as a “comparative quality of life assessment and … theorizing about social justice” (2011, 18). It is organized as a set of key questions like:
What is each person able to do and to be? In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking not just about the total average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person. It is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may not exercise in action: the choice is theirs. It thus commits itself to respect for people’s powers of self-definition. (Nussbaum 2011, 18)
This model, premised on what Nussbaum calls political liberalism, emphasizes pluralism and deep concern over entrenched social injustice and inequality that result in capability failures. Nussbaum claims that her approach is most concerned with the question of human dignity and that she endorses the contemporary transnational human rights framework for mitigating issues of indignity in the quest for well-being. The emphasis on choice and freedoms evident in the preceding quotation also permeates donor-driven NGO interventions in India, which promote women’s rights. However, Nussbaum’s conceptualizations suffer from the lack of a feminist intersectional frame, which is essential to destabilize the one-size-fits-all approach to economic and social empowerment. She eventually reverts back to individual women’s loan access as a way for women to escape dependence and structures of violence (2011, 8).
Seeking an alternative to this hegemonic neoliberal frame of thinking about women’s empowerment, some feminists have called for greater attention to the communal and indigenous ways of being (see Karim 2011; Gershon 2011). A way out of the neoliberal impasse should not use the “traditional” and/or “indigenous” as a default template for authentic alternatives, since the traditional might not be the filter through which the poor always think about collective aspirations for social and economic justice (see Moodie 2015; Freeman 2014).
Everyday economic and social entrepreneurialism paves the way for situated counter-hegemonies to emerge that simultaneously builds on and critique development interventions. My focus is on women’s resilience (Katz 2001) and their complex engagements with and desires surrounding neoliberal economic policies (Klenk 2004; Ramamurthy 2003; Sharma 2008). Women in Darjeeling thus expose the hidden agendas of well-intentioned transnational justice regimes by enacting new social subjectivities that derive strength from global and local ideologies of both development and gender. For instance, women tea farmers are heavily invested in identifying themselves as housewives, but they also want to be seen as entrepreneurs. Thus women enact new roles based on new cultural productions that derive from collective memories of dealing with and navigating successive development regimes. Through skepticism and creative use of Fair Trade ideas, women test the sustainability of Fair Trade in their communities while procuring in a way that protects their dignity—putting an end to housewifesation (Mies 1982; Babb 2005), which is a characteristic feature of labor appropriation in India’s economy.
The activities of women smallholders compels one to think more about the significance of women’s informal collectives and networks in navigating global capital. Inside and outside plantations women question the efficacy of established development institutions (such as unions, cooperatives, political parties, and panchāyats). In pursuing this line of inquiry I join feminist scholars who are investigating women’s collectives and their power to create a vision of social change. Such collectives may come about as a result of governmentalization (Sharma 2008), may already exist in some form as a cultural resource, as in the case of ghumāuri:4 (March and Taqqu 1985), or may have come about in the context of navigating existing economic and cultural exigencies (Subramaniam and Purkayastha 2004). These collectives can be envisioned as homogenous spaces that enable capital accumulation or simply provide a space for resistance to such accumulative tendencies. But an ethnographic examination of the nuanced workings of these collectives and the hybrid forms they take—sometimes as a revolving credit group, sometimes as a safe mentoring space, sometimes as a parallel union—reveals that “informal networks involve the community in the process of decision making through the creation of social spaces for sharing experiences that are particularly empowering for participants. Unstructured by the imperatives of large and bureaucratic community based groups … [they] rework ideas and themes from the dominant culture in ways which bring forth hidden and potentially subversive dimensions” (Purkayastha and Subramaniam 2004, 8).
In this context women’s empowerment through collective action, albeit messy and sometimes ephemeral, “takes on a life of its own; it erupts, interrupts, and exceeds neoliberal regulative logics” (Sharma 2008, 196). In this book I highlight these collective excesses produced through women’s collective action in rural Darjeeling. I hope acknowledging the power of these efforts will move us beyond seeing simply how women cope with Fair Trade to how they adopt or reject it in making their collectives more sustainable. Women in rural Darjeeling thus demonstrate social innovation and social entrepreneurship, CSR social work buzzwords—with great finesse and sagacity.
Everyday Gendered Translations of Transnational Justice Regimes
Women’s collective mobilizations around and counter to Fair Trade in rural Darjeeling are deeply relevant for feminist scholars interested in the dynamics of the burgeoning global morality market driven by ethical biopolitics (Adelman 2008; Chowdhury 2011; Fernandes 2013). Organizations like the United Nations that formulate rules and regulations based on human rights and gender justice constitute emerging transnational justice regimes (Merry 2006; Goodale and Merry 2007). The work of these justice regimes is advanced by a global bureaucracy and a loose agglomeration of nonelected activists who try to save the poor from their plight through activism and imposition of Western standards of well-being and justice, which in my previous work I have conceptualized as “ethical biopolitics” (Sen and Majumder 2011). Cultural Anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2006) calls them “techno-ethical” regimes. The lessons from rural Darjeeling illustrate how women themselves, through constant negotiation and questioning of the values encoded in these justice regimes, translate global discourses of sustainability and empowerment to the context of their gendered everyday through catachrestic endeavors (Spivak 1993). Poor women can thus measure the success of Fair Trade only in its deconstructed, negated adoption. These micro-translations and actions based upon new meanings of Fair Trade form the core of “everyday sustainability.” We must understand these micro-translations if we are to understand how “direct-stakeholders” (Batliwala 2002, 395) work with transnational justice regimes.
It is also important that we rethink our notion of who translates global rights discourses for the beneficiaries and under what circumstances. Women encounter transnational justice regimes in their homes and workplaces, outside of the formal legal realms where processes of gender justice normally unfold. Through their advancement of “gendered projects of value” women strategically expose the inability of transnational justice regimes to limit the appropriation of women’s labor and time within existing production systems. Further, their everyday mockery of Fair Trade exposes how transnational justice regimes entrench the power of patriarchal production systems through deceptive language of women’s empowerment and inclusion. My book extends Ong’s assertion that transnational justice regimes are not encountering merely naked flawed bodies to be saved, but people with specific desires articulated through a determined attachment to situated self-making projects; that is, gendered projects of value and related economic and social entrepreneurialisms.
Feminists also concern themselves with how these new privatized rights discourses are translated in context for their intended beneficiaries, what Sally Merry (2006) calls vernacularization. She claims the translation, or mediation, process is central to the effective working of transnational justice regimes in specific cultural contexts. She writes:
Those who are most vulnerable, often the subjects of human rights, come to see the relevance of this framework for their lives only through the mediation of middle level and elite activists who reframe their everyday problems in human rights terms. … Grassroots women adopt this new framework in a limited way. (Merry 2006:219; emphasis mine)
While we can appreciate the role of middle-level activists in translating human rights in vernacular terms, in certain instances the mediators themselves might be agents of power in a patriarchal production system. And if that is so, we need to consider whether women may be doing their own mediation based on their critical commonsense developed in the context of their gendered projects of value. Long after the intervention of mediators ends, women continue to make sense of justice regimes in their own way, and we need to understand how they do so. The translations of smallholder tea farmers differ from those of plantation wage laborers. Women’s rights consciousness does not derive only from mediators but also from a place-based history of engagement with forces of power. FLO officials visiting Darjeeling, plantation managers, NGO workers, and cooperative officers all have ideas about what women in Darjeeling should be doing to better their lives, ideas which women often find limiting. Even as Fair Trade officials celebrate the creativity of Darjeeling’s women, these women often remind these officials and themselves that emerging discourses of justice might not enable them to become who they want to be in the community and household spheres.
The value of such situated translations is reflected in Rajni’s statement about the bustle of Fair Trade training programs in their community: “Women from our villages are famous in other parts of the world. The white people come and make films on us, take our photographs to many countries, but it is here in our villages that no one cares for us.” Her rebuke may not reflect a deep understanding of the Fair Trade philosophy as understood in the West, but it reflects a practical consciousness of the structural limitations in the gendered social field of her community, where people still do not care about women the way women would like them to. Rajni is articulating what postcolonial feminist scholar Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak (2002, 123) calls the lack of “realistic plans for infrastructural change” even in well-meaning women’s empowerment ventures. I juxtapose women’s own justice ideas with Fair Trade notions of empowerment in chapter 4 to demonstrate how women defend their justice imaginaries by questioning the directives of Fair Trade certifiers (translators in Merry’s terminology). Translation into context is impossible if the translator superficially interprets the gendered playing field.
Further, I uphold that women’s engagement with transnational justice regimes often takes an embodied form even if they are not fully fathoming the principles of liberalism and enlightenment ideals of which human rights inspired Fair Trade is a part (see chapters 7 and 8). Women often vent their skepticism toward Fair Trade by drawing attention to the deficient state of their own bodies, and the social body of which they are an integral part. Once engaged in deep conversation with smallholder women tea farmers about organic tea an older lady joked and asked whether her daughter will find an “organic husband.” I detail in chapter 7 how the metaphor of the organic husband was a way for this woman and many others to express apprehensions about the precarity of their everyday lives (Peet and Watts 1993). Women in Darjeeling are acutely affected by the chronic male unemployment and the massive male out-migration puts a strain on marital relations making women’s daily tasks of social reproduction extremely onerous. The idea of an “organic husband” was a way to express that despite much discussion of well-being of tea plants in the discourse of organic production no one really cared about the everyday sustainability of families producing tea. Women in Darjeeling find numerous ways of making meaning/translating of Fair Trade ideas in a situation where none of this Fair Trade material is easily available in Nepali—the local language in Darjeeling. Translation is also not a one-time thing; it has a social life, and translated discourses find new meaning based on time and context. Women’s collective ways of making meaning and translating Fair Trade organics for themselves somehow never find voice in these large discourses of saving the poor based on notions of individual autonomy, homogenized understandings of women and the reification of the “modern” first world as the agent of change (see Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Chowdhury 2011; Hyndman 2004). Women thus never become the imagined subject of governance as proposed by some scholars (Agrawal 2005).
Making Gendered Sense of Fair Trade
In this book I engage Fair Trade from a transnational feminist and postcolonial feminist frame deeply concerned with the neo-imperialist tone of current activism around women’s empowerment (Abu-Lughod 2013; Fernandes 2013; Chowdhury 2011). New Fair Trade solidarity practices that question neoliberal capitalist excesses ironically add sign value to Western consumer capitalism through harnessing the affective labor of liberal consumers and activists (Buttle and Gould 2004). It is thus imperative that we begin to document how “target populations” are making sense of emerging sustainability/justice regimes in the context of their everyday lives. My epistemological foundation lies in recent debates among transnational feminists on how best to engage with and write about the lives of poor women in a non-essentialist mode that celebrates their creative potential. The best way to do so is to uphold the everyday, as feminist anthropologists have always insisted and an idea that postcolonial feminists emphasize: “… issues concerning the most ‘backward’ parts of the world may claim the most advanced understanding of contemporary ‘reality’ ” (Sunder-Rajan and Park 2005, 66).
It is this granular perspective grounded in the gendered everyday that is sadly absent from existing work on market-based sustainable development ventures (Trestappen et al. 2013; Sen 2014). Approaching Fair Trade from the granular vantage point of gendered everyday “meaning making” opens up a space for examining numerous issues. First, how Fair Trade gains legitimacy through mobilizing gendered representational tropes with colonial roots. Through these tropes, Fair Trade bureaucrats and enthusiasts in the West imagine the political lives and “capabilities” of Fair Trade beneficiaries as a gendered postcolonial fantasy. Second, when Fair Trade enthusiasts engage in solidarity visits and Fair Trade–related “voluntourism” (Brondo 2013; Vrasti 2013) in the global South, their discursive and on-site engagement with women workers or farmers is influenced by their gendered representations of producers drawn from images in the media. I argue that the activities of these volunteers and voluntourists govern workers and farmers in informal ways while increasing Fair Trade’s acceptance as a development alternative in the global morality market. Third, this approach also reveals counter-political possibilities that emerge when Fair Trade’s meaning is decoded and rearticulated with situated desires for social and economic change based on gendered projects of value. Fair Trade is thus as much material practices that reflect unfolding power relations between the global North and the global South as it is a discursive domain meaningful to both consumers and women producers.
Fair Trade has aptly been described as an “economics of semiology” (Dolan 2008, 2010) since it is not just a process for ethical buying and selling of goods across nations, it is also a way of exchanging meaning between producers and consumers, often mediated by Fair Trade’s transnational bureaucracy. According to Keith Brown (2013, 113), “Fair Traders need to frame workers as impoverished, exotic, and needy to compel customers to support their cause.” As I show in chapter 3, Fair Trade enthusiasts in Darjeeling’s plantation and non-plantation areas operate on the basis of such commodity affects (West 2014). They engage in solidarity practices aimed at promoting Fair Trade and bettering the lives of workers and farmers. These solidarity practices also operate as “soft biopolitics” since they measure, witness, and document Fair Trade’s “success” on plantations and farms for cosmopolitan Western and Indian consumers.
Everyday Sustainabilty is an important contribution to the emerging literature on Fair Trade and associated consumer-driven sustainability and social-justice initiatives. It is the first book-length examination of women’s subjective understandings and use of sustainable development projects in a comparative framework. Scholars of Fair Trade in different cultural contexts have demonstrated how Western consumers are drawn to new forms of redemptive consumption, and how the biopolitical imperatives of Fair Trade have engendered new forms of privatized bureaucracies that seek to manage workers’ livelihoods in accordance with Western ethics of alternative development (Mutersbaugh 2002, 2005; Mutersbaugh and Lyon 2010; Mutersbaugh et al. 2005).
Everyday Sustainabilty categorically demonstrates how and why minority Nepali women tea producers nurture their own justice imaginaries and activities through practicing everyday ethical counter-politics both through and despite Fair Trade. Attitudes, values, imaginaries, and practices that rural poor women bring to the table of Fair Trade–enabled gender justice are largely absent from the recent literature on Fair Trade. In engaging with the Fair Trade movement and associated processes of organic certification from a feminist postcolonial framework, I close a major gap in recent studies of the Fair Trade movement and other market-based sustainability initiatives.
Overview of the Book
Chapter 1 details the methodology of data collection for this book. I use Kamalā Visweswaran’s (1994, 1997) concept of “home work” to complicate the circumstances of data collection. In chapter 2, I uphold the everyday anxieties of Darjeeling Nepalis related to their crisis in cultural citizenship within the Indian nation. Here I map the effects of Nepali subnationalism on Darjeeling’s plantation and non-plantation areas in terms of the cultural political economy of labor and gendered identity formation. In chapter 3, I detail from both ethnographic and historical perspectives the gendered political-economic realities in Darjeeling’s tea industry, with a focus on the Fair Trade, organic-certified tea industry. In addition to introducing the two distinct groups of women (smallholder tea farmers and wage-earning plantation workers), this chapter upholds where and how Fair Trade has affects on Small Producer Organizations (SPOs) like Sānu Krishak Sansthā and large Fair Trade-Organic certified plantations like Sonākheti and Phulbāri.
Chapter 4’s ethnographic focus is comparative, drawing on my ethnographic research in tea plantations and non-plantation tea-producing areas. I document the influences of a peculiar form of “voluntourism” related to Fair Trade and its effects on women’s place in plantation political life. I show how forces beyond formal bureaucratic regulation, through informal solidarity, further the Fair Trade governance regimes that regulate producers’ lives.
In chapter 5, I document the gendered dynamics of Fair Trade as it has unfolded on certified Darjeeling tea plantations. Two contradictory processes are at work here: On one hand women plantation workers’ “survival narratives” are receiving increasing visibility in Fair Trade publicity material. On the other hand, women have categorically eschewed existing collective bargaining institutions (that is, labor unions) and new privatized collectives (that is, Joint Bodies or worker-management partnerships) to promote their interests. Women workers instead engage in much more clandestine forms of collective organizing, namely, revolving credit and mentoring groups called ghumāuri.
Through ethnography of Fair Trade operations and their effects on a small farmers’ tea cooperative in Darjeeling, I describe in chapter 6 how women farmers in the community enact new ethical subject positions as they navigate multiple local and global patriarchies. I contend that Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen patriarchal/gendered power relations in producer communities, but that women tea farmers also creatively use specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own priorities and rupture the imbrications between Fair Trade and local patriarchies.
Having devoted ethnographic attention to the specific struggles of women plantation workers (chapter 5) and women tea farmers (chapter 6), in chapter 7, I compare these struggles and map their effects on household discourse and conjugal relationships. Women plantation workers and tea farmers engaged in forms of talk that upheld the communicative and symbolic dimensions of their work, with distinct effects on intra-household relations at the two sites. Fair Trade–related activities produced a new social landscape of community and household relations in the cooperative, which affected not only the “conjugal contract” but also social and economic relations among households of the extended family.
Finally, chapter 8, compares the political subjectivities of women plantation workers and women tea farmers in light of the institutional structures in which each is embedded. On plantations, women rarely challenge Fair Trade, systemic nepotism, or workplace hazards. Women smallholders, on the other hand, actively challenge both hegemonic male domination of the cooperative and adverse conditions at home. This chapter highlights how the different political subjectivities of the two types of women impact the scope of their collectives (ghumāuri: versus Women’s Wing) and corresponding efforts to force social change and gain a public voice. Women tea farmers and women plantation workers see themselves as very different kinds of ethical actors embedded in distinct institutions.