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COPYRIGHT 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Introduction
The theme of the 15th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES), held in Florence, Italy during the summer of 2003, was "Humankind/Nature Interaction: Past, Present, and Future." The Commission on the Anthropology of Women, a unit of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), addressed this theme in sessions that focused on the impact of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberalism on the environment, economic conditions, and women's strategies for promoting collective well-being. The Commission's intent was to contribute perspectives that would underscore the significance of social analysis that is cognizant of gender, race, caste, class, and (trans)national identity as important axes of power and inequality affecting the kinds of relationships that human beings develop with the natural world as a culturally mediated and socialized biopolitical field. This essay offers a broad conceptual, theoretical, and historical context for situating this endeavor and for illuminating the salience of its interrelated concerns.
The Commission on the Anthropology of Women is made up largely of sociocultural anthropologists who work on questions related to gender and interrelated differences from a variety of theoretical and analytical perspectives broadly conceived as feminist. That is to say, our inquiry is, ultimately, related to advocacy for women's rights, conceptualized as integral to an expanded notion of human rights. In anthropological analysis, both gender and feminism are concepts that require qualification because of the diversity of ideas and the competing stakes in "the anthropology of women," the complex intellectual grounds upon which the Commission operates. The notion of feminism is used here in an encompassing way meant to include a wide range of ideological, cultural, and political positions, including some that would appear to represent contestations of the label as it is often used. My colleagues and I are interested in broadening the scope and parameters of how "feminism" is defined because of the importance of considering multiply inflected voices and forms of praxis that are, in varying ways, conscious of gender as a relation of power and opposed to patriarchy and all forms of sexism. Included in my understanding, then, are perspectives and struggles that situate gender in wider matrices of domination in which racial, ethnic, class, and caste stratifications along with pervasive heterosexist regimes and ageist hierarchies coexist and operate simultaneously to structure social relations, naturalize hegemonic elements of culture, and constrain life chances.
Kamala Visweswaran decenters gender in her claim that in the world beyond white middle class, Western women, the struggle for women's equality and human rights falls under the plural umbrellas of nationalism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, Islamism, and so on (1997: 616). She urges us to "understand gender as not the endpoint of analysis but rather as an entry point into complex systems of meaning and power," recognizing that "there are other equally valid entry points for feminist work" (Visweswaran 1997: 616), work that promotes advocacy for women's rights along with gender and sexual equality. Such a decentered approach is useful for framing the kinds of cross-cultural and internationalist dialogues that the IUAES Commission is committed to facilitating.
Interrogating Global Apartheid
The title and analytical focus of this essay-and of the ICAES session it was originally written for-was inspired by a speech made by the President of the Republic of South Africa before delegates to the World Summit for Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in August 2002. Thabo Mbeke urged the delegates to come to terms with the inextricable links that exist among global restructuring, deepening poverty, and the growing destruction of the natural environment. He underscored that the so-called New World Order, a world system dominated by a neoliberal agenda, is an unsustainable system of global apartheid in which there is poverty for many and prosperity for only a few. He stated that "[a] global human society ... characterized by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable. " He also "criticized the failure of governments to act on pledges made 10 years ago in Rio de Janeiro to pursue environmentally friendly prosperity" (The New York Times, nytimes.com, article: "At Earth Summit, Mbeki Slams 'Islands of Wealth'" Aug. 26, 2002).
His choice of words, specifically his use of the apartheid metaphor, cannot be explained simply because he is South African and, thus, accustomed to an apartheid- or anti-apartheid centered discourse. The concept of apartheid is being employed by a number of social analysts and critics, myself (Harrison 2002) included, who are concerned with the disparities of wealth, health, and life expectancy that are growing throughout the world today. Zooming in close to home in the U. S., Chuck Collins and Felice Veskel, authors of ECONOMIC APARTHEID IN AMERICA: A PRIMER OF INEQUALITY AND INSECURITY (2000), argue that socioeconomic conditions have declined in the U. S. since the "thirty years following WWII," when:
[p]rosperity was better shared among almost everyone in society than it is today ... During the last few decades, the economic rules of the game were changed, by wealthy individuals and corporations, and they can be changed back by people like us (Collins and Veskel 2004: 127).
They go on to say that economic restructuring has given rise to:
new pressures and ... alarming trends [such as:] less free time and more working hours, fewer households with health insurance, rising personal debt, declining personal savings, diminishing retirement security, growing number of temporary jobs, and rising college costs (129).
Collins and Veskel's description of the U. S. mirrors the international picture that June Nash (1994) draws in her analysis of the declining subsistence security that recent patterns of global integration are causing. This problematic trend is threatening to eliminate the last frontiers of subsistence, notably the subsistence systems and biologically diverse environments of indigenous peoples, whose knowledges and traditional resource-use practices have long embodied principles that sustain and renew the habitats within which they have lived.
According to advocacy researchers Salih Booker and William Minter (2001: 11): "the [apartheid] concept captures fundamental characteristics of the current world order missed by such labels as ... globalization or even corporate globalization. "They argue that global apartheid is not just a metaphor; it is a reality marked by the operation of "undemocratic institutions that systematically generate economic inequality." Their definition of global apartheid is:
an institutional system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain 'others', defined by location, origin, race or gender.
Because they and their dependents constitute the majority of the world's poor, 70% to be exact, women surfer the brunt of global apartheid's assaults, whether those assaults are manifest culturally, politically, economically, or environmentally. Women's critical and creative responses to these varying forms of structural violence are the focus of this essay, which will offer a range of answers to the question of what gender has to do with humankind/nature interaction and also the question of the role women are playing in redefining and expanding the terms of political struggle for sustainable environments and democratic strategies for economic development.
The Political Ecology of Conjuring Profits
A thematic focus on "Humankind/Nature Interaction" provides us with a valuable opportunity and mandate to rethink, from a multi-axial or intersectional perspective, the broader ecological context within which collective human life is currently being restructured worldwide. This process is proceeding according to the complex constraints and possibilities that exist in the early 21st century world: that is, the constraints and possibilities being presented by the restructuring of the market, the state, and civil society. The interrelated concepts of ecology and ecosystem denote the interactions among all living organisms and between them and their nonliving environment. This interaction is basic to an understanding of the dynamics of nature and all the material constituents of the natural world. It is also basic to understanding the human condition, the subject of anthropological inquiry.
Sociocultural anthropologists have interrogated the notion of "nature," often shedding light on the gendered meanings invested in it and examining the cultural constructs with which the world of organisms and nonliving natural phenomena is interpreted and represented. Some feminist anthropologists have privileged a radical constructivist notion of culture, neglecting the empirical reality of "nature" and "biology," lest women's subordination be attributed to their natural endowment as females according to the logic of an essentializing determinism. However, a critical rethinking of biology and nature, freed from the dangers of essentialism, is warranted. Beyond interpreting the symbolic constructions and representations that may figure prominently in sociocultural discourses, do feminist anthropologists have anything to say about the concrete natural environment and our responsibility to renew and sustain it for the benefit of human life...
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