Sightings of the State, Reflections of Self as Citizen: Self-Becoming in Development Encounters

Journal of South Asian Development

2020

This article examines the micropolitics of state-directed women’s collectives in India called self-help groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a setting where development becomes a means of counterinsurgency for the state, it looks at how rural women in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal use these collectives to negotiate with the state and make claims on state actors. The article argues that rural women aspire to new individual selves through their membership of SHG collectives. Women reimagined their selfhoods through their access to the state-sponsored public sphere and building new roles for themselves within it. The argument is presented in conversation with research on self-help groups and microfinance initiatives for rural women, and it builds on work that examines the unintended consequences of such development interventions for women’s lives.

“…Things are changing’, she asserted. This importance that she felt her had much to do with seeing and meeting the state (Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava, & Veron, 2005; Jakimow, 2014).…”

Section: State-organized Spaces For Women’s Collectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency

Journal of South Asian Development

2020

“…They have attracted considerable scholarly attention, with some writing about their utter failure to improve women’s lives in rural India (Dutt & Samanta, 2006) or address poverty (Pattenden, 2010). Others point to how SHGs enable limited empowerment (Sud, 2013), and despite ‘discipling’ poor women, they do open possibilities for women’s creative agency to make collective claims on the state and redefine citizenship (Jakimow, 2014; Kalpana, 2017; Sen & Majumder, 2015; Spary, 2019). Beyond SHGs, development-centric collectives of women in India have also taken on hybrid forms, such as the part-state, part-NGO empowerment project known as Mahila Samakhya (MS).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making

Journal of South Asian Development

Sen

2020

This introduction to the special issue lays out the importance of studying women’s collectives in South Asia. We argue in this issue that it is particularly important to examine collectives in this moment because transformations in South Asian women’s lives are increasingly described in individual terms in state policy and international development discourses. The emphasis on individual empowerment alone, however, effaces the subtle negotiations that women carry out with state actors, development workers, families, the market and their communities through collectives. The articles in the special issue examine how women’s participation in collectives and collective spaces enables them to imagine transformations in their lives. We also discuss the limitations of collectives-led transformation.

“…Since the state is central to my interlocutors’ aspirations and state-directed development spawns a hope-based imaginary of citizenship, this article builds on anthropological work on citizenship that goes beyond a definition to citizenship which is just based on rights and obligations. It situates itself in efforts to explore the multiple languages and meanings of citizenship, and to study citizenship through specific encounters, experiences, and subjectivities (Holston, 2008; Isin, 2008; Jakimow, 2014; Lazar, 2013; Lazar and Nuijten, 2013; Ong, 1999). As Aihwa Ong (1996: 737) writes, citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India

Critique of Anthropology

2020

Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens’ everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the erstwhile Maoist zones of eastern India, I show that, despite knowing the violent face of the state, poor women nevertheless rely on the developmental face of the state to hope for social transformation and imagine better lives and livelihoods. I argue that in doing so they engender an idea of hopeful citizenship.