A representative from Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company that today controls 65% of the global seed market for maize and more than a quarter of the world’s commercial seed market, is on record to have defined the problem to securing a Global Intellectual Property Rights Agreement as: ‘Farmers save seeds’—and thus they offered a solution: ‘Seed saving should be made illegal’.
The edited volume under review by anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa and sociologist Marilyn Porter focuses on a wide range of case studies from across the world related to ways in which women manage environmental resources. The book is a product of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) meeting held in China in 2009. The contributors to the volume show the connections between increasing poverty and global capitalist exploitation that negatively affects women’s access to resources. As recognized by the UN Security Council, since the 1990s, most conflicts around the world are related to disputes over natural resources, whether they are over oil, water, mining or access to land to grow crops. Women have played an important role in the peace processes.
This book as the author claims ‘draws upon her PhD dissertation written more than a quarter of a century ago’. She fears that the definition of ‘cultural history at that time was rather narrow and the broad spectrum that is attached today to this branch of historical study was unknown those days’. She apologizes for the narrative style of her compendium which she admits is ‘overburdened with data’ and is apprehensive about the ‘readability of the book’ because she admits that her ‘youthful enthusiasm as a researcher’ led to a kind of ‘data fetishism’.
What has sex work got to do with private water tanks or making of hair pins or average rainfall in Marathwada? In Street Corner Secrets, Svati P. Shah critically engage with the academic knowledge production which ignores such connections. She debunks the figure of the lonely sex worker lurking timidly among the shadows by the street or who remains confined within brothels. Instead she situates women engaged in sexual commerce firmly amidst thick descriptions of migration, informal labour economy, land speculation, urban housing projects, infrastructure underdevelopment of rural areas, ecological degradation, water scarcity, displacement, caste politics and gendered inequalities in the wage labour market. These also mark the compulsions or constraints surrounding the livelihood choices of women including sex work.
In 1981, the Kolhan Raksha Sangh, an adivasi political organization formed in Singhbhum in 1977, declared that Kolhan1 was a sovereign state, independent from India. A delegation of the representatives of this ‘Kolhan republic’ went to Delhi, and thereafter to England. The delegates claimed that Kolhan was legally outside India’s territory and was entitled to self-government under Wilkinson’s Rules since there was no official document of merger between Kolhan and the State of India.
While providing new opportunities to women workers, global capitalism, tends to both not only use prevailing gender stereotypes but rearticulates them. This is the core message of the book. Surveying women’s location in varied professions from high tech occupations, to traditionally male dominated professions, while there is exploitation, there is also a degree of agency exercised by women. Metro cities belying the assumption of a liberal, more accommodating spaces to women nonetheless re-entrench culturally engraved sociocultural norms about where women can work and what kind of work is permissible. Looking at different locations where they work like petty production work, home based work, modern professions that require education and special skills and training, what emerges is this: gender norms pose limits to what they can gain through equal wages and equal access to positions of power and leadership. Equal wages is sidelined by segmentation of work into gender segregated work.