SUNY series, Praxis: Theory in Action. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. xix, 251 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6713-9.
Since 2004, Debarati Sen has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on fair trade and strategies of sustainability and social justice among women tea farmers and plantation workers in Darjeeling, India. Everyday Sustainability draws from her extensive research to bring readers a critical study of fair trade in Darjeeling’s tea industry. Unique for its foregrounding of women’s narratives, this ethnography is a valuable contribution to sustainability studies and an important text for scholars, students, and practitioners studying women’s work and sustainable development in South Asia.
The ethnography unfolds across eight chapters. The first four chapters examine the historical and economic structures of tea production and ethnic marginalization of Nepalis in Darjeeling and outline women workers’ places in fair trade as a form of sustainable development and social justice. The second half, chapters 5 through 8, move into those established structures of power and exchange—the interstices of fair-trade operations such as women’s mutual aid groups, or ghumāuri, small farmers’ cooperatives such as the Sānu Krishak Sansthā (SKS), and finally women’s own kinship and communal relations. Complexly detailed accounts of tea production and women’s subjectivities around politics, work, and their households ground the ethnography’s structure and purpose well.
Two overarching thematic foci in Everyday Sustainability are location and action. In chapter 1, Sen draws from Visweswaran’s seminal work on “homework” (1994) to purposefully interrogate her own privilege and authority as a researcher and her longitudinal study follows what Piya Chatterjee (2009) calls an “imagined bridge” between activism and scholarship. This framing is a welcome counter to the all-too-familiar silences in development and sustainability scholarship around ethical questions of data collection, privilege, and inequality. The book is also a timely and needed intervention as the first feminist ethnography on fair trade in tea production in the Global South.
In the remainder of the ethnography, Sen connects this commitment to a politics of location with a scholarly commitment to a politics of action in her research and approach to studying gender justice and fair trade. She situates this politics of action within postcolonial and feminist scholarship but also engages anthropological debates on sustainability, development, and the ethics of social justice. The core of the ethnography rests on the concept of gendered projects of value. This concept captures how Nepali women working within “ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives” (4) navigate their everyday sustainability and the valuation of their work. The concept extends to a host of actions that women take on: self-making and rhetorical strategies of withdrawing from fair trade (“swachcha vyāpār”), less visible or extra-legal informal economies, narratives of survival and creativity, and counter-hegemonic modes of self-governance that directly question and often disobey neoliberal governmentalities of market speculation.
Gendered projects of value actively distance women’s articulations of survival from the more traditional narratives of political economy in sustainability studies. Sen presents strong evidence that Darjeeling’s women workers do not buy into the “virtual environments” through which fair trade claims validity. In careful, longitudinal tracings of women’s actions in the ghumāuri, small farmers’ cooperatives, and households, Sen presents the excesses of women’s collective action without running into the danger of romanticizing their agency. Rather, she calls out the essentialist claims of eco-feminism and acknowledges the ethical concerns around women’s representation in fair trade marketing, the mistranslations of women’s investments in sustainable development, and the re-embedding that drives fair trade. At the same time, she celebrates women’s creativities and struggles to survive and make meaning out of their lives. Sen concludes with a call to see gender and sustainable development at the intersections of the realities of women’s vulnerability and livelihood diversification and to employ a praxis of “hybridity” (218) to understand how women challenge, appropriate, and adhere to the terrains they navigate.
Everyday Sustainability is a welcome contribution to sustainability studies that critiques the temporal dimensions of development that dictate the production of knowledge about what gender justice looks like on the ground. Sen incisively captures development in its timings and failures by seeing and accounting for women’s experiences before and after the time frame of fair trade projects. She actively refuses the obligation to centre on programs themselves; instead, she focuses on the social fields that fair trade enters and the enactors who inform its operations. The ethnography forcefully refuses to affirm the cleaner, more top-heavy ethnographies of sustainable development. Particularly evocative are Sen’s narratives of risk, policing, and invisibility in chapter 6, stories of unemployment among young boys like Manju in chapter 7, and the discussions of clean hands, colourism, and “what tea workers do to make life more bearable” (203). These sections make Everyday Sustainability stand out as an ethnography that is committed to keeping readers discomforted but simultaneously invested in the connections of intimacy and exchange in which Darjeeling’s workers are enmeshed.
This book has a few perceived shortcomings. Transitions within chapters and across theoretical discussions could be clearer due to editorial issues, but these smaller concerns do not take away from the ethnography’s broader impacts. An in-depth theoretical engagement of anthropological debates on the home and household would have strengthened the ethnographic sections on household gender dynamics, and key theoretical engagements, such as that of Iversen’s work, would have been more effective if introduced earlier in the text rather than in the last chapter. Finally, more detached theoretical invocations—for instance, of Spivak’s catachresis—while intending to deconstruct imaginaries of goodness in social justice regimes, pose the potential risk of being less accessible to wider undergraduate audiences.
These minor issues aside, Everyday Sustainability is compelling and praiseworthy for its vision to push feminist ethnography beyond the reflexive gaze and into the intersections of privilege, caste, and location. Sen’s desire for “justice imaginaries” beyond economy, environment, and society raise important questions that are at the heart of debates in cultural anthropology today—namely, whom do we cite and how honest are we when we do research and write about the work that we do? Her foregrounding of honesty rather than hubris in fieldwork is a productive praxis and reminder for teacher-scholars to think more carefully about what gets sanitized and what has been erased from the ethnographic narratives of our ancestors and our learning alike.
Mythri Jegathesan
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, USA