Abstract
This bold book marks a very welcome contribution to geographical scholarship through its 11 chapters detailing the mutual production of geography and gender. The editor points out the challenges that feminists in South Asia have faced in carving out a space for themselves in the geographical discipline and this book should fortify their claims for a central place in the study of South Asian geography. Adding to (still vital) descriptions of regional differences in women’s lives, the book engages with the broader ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and with the development of cultural geography in particular. Raju’s introduction admirably surveys these vast developments, although she unfortunately suggests (p. 1) that women are more intricately linked to place than men due to power hierarchies of public–private, thus reproducing the patriarchal dichotomy of space that is highlighted later in the chapter (p. 10). The space–place relationship was chosen as the geographical frame for the book, which Raju’s substantive chapter approaches through an institutional approach, describing place as ‘…having a distinct mark on the set of rules, codified, institutionalised, and recognized through symbolic metaphors that are shared and endorsed by those who occupy such space, importing it a certain overarching identity’ (p. 31). This informs her investigation of north–south divides in Indian gender relations, which provides an exposition of the very best sort of detailed geographical description and explanation, even if the detour into Vedic history and Aryan pastoralism smacks of the historical explanations so beloved of colonial ‘blue book’ compilers, historians and anthropologists.
The remaining chapters of the book range widely across South Asian experiences of gender, largely focusing on patriarchy and women’s attempts to craft out their own lifeworlds. The chapters are dense and thorough presentations of empirical research which cannot be done justice to here; the following are brief examples from some stand-out pieces. Erwér takes the gender paradox in Kerala as her focus, contrasting the state’s successes in development with the under-representation of women in decision-making roles. ‘Agency’ is taken to include such roles, alongside tactics such as bargaining, negotiation, deception, protest and reflection, which face not just structural economic challenges, but also direct sexual and gendered violence and indirect intimidation. Women’s organisations have sought to re-craft daily places into spaces of politics and discussion, through networking together nuanced, location based protests. Acharya also highlights ‘…the ways women place the geographies of bodily performance in their spatial relationships within the larger structural and cultural context in order to inculcate the ethos of political decentralisation in local institutions’ (pp. 185–86). She does this through her study of how female handloom cooperatives challenge state misunderstandings of the challenges women labourers face. The dilemma of tanti caste weavers is expertly portrayed: ‘Caught between old and new ways of labour, demand and values in the commercial trade, and tourist oriented handloom production, (work) is a survival strategy for them’ (p. 186). Acharya’s narratives relate the complex intermeshing of workspace, family, community, market and state that enframe women’s performances and exploitation. Jewitt and Baker unpick the association of women with the environment, highlighting the way such gendered geographies within 1980s ecological thought brought such assumptions into policy decisions. This chapter highlights men’s patrilineal and patrilocal power, which has excluded women from environmental knowledge; a series of insights that only emerge through detailed local studies. Halvorson’s study of child health in rural Pakistan is exemplary, highlighting the hardship of female agricultural labourers, their memories of freer, happier lives before marriage, and their highly specific understanding of what makes a healthy home.
What this brief survey suggests is a diversity not only of material but of approaches to ‘geography’ that goes way beyond the space–place dialectic. The book includes some excellent, traditional descriptions of geographical setting as the frame for homogenising development in Kerala, or for explaining women’s exclusion from agricultural production. But the chapters also engage with scale, including the suggestion that class works through ‘horizontal’ hierarchies against caste’s vertical divisions, and Acharya’s suggestion that the ‘…body not only becomes the “site” of knowledge, it provides a scale for the purpose of investigation and representations’ (p. 188). Networks also emerge as both a powerful frame of analysis and a series of existing political organisations, connecting communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia (Chapter 3), and connecting the private body to the public spaces of politics, even if ‘The flexibility, inclusiveness, and dynamic strengths of a network can also be a weak point in terms of long-term and sustainable strategic thinking’ (p. 147). The second chapter (by Thieme, Müller-Böker and Backhaus) highlights the dangers of an overly abstract network imaginary, however. Here, ‘Delhi’ is reduced to a placeless location over and through which Nepalese migrants are tracked, without any mention of their placing within that immensely varied cityscape. If the space–place relationship of the book’s title is exceeded, its focus on gender is perhaps an overstatement. While we get some sense of the roles men inhabit in restricting women’s access to labour markets, this is largely a book of feminist geographies, with little to say about male lifeworlds other than their repressive capacities. Given the discrimination South Asian women face, this may well be a strategic essentialism worth taking. Wide ranging, provocative and spatially astute, this book stands as testimony to the geographical challenges and resourcefulness of women, both within and without South Asian geography.