A few more days have given us a chance to think about some of the other aspects of the brief Vandana Shiva discussion that bothered us. We must agree with Jacqueline Romanow that Shiva's ideas tended to be dismissed with alarming haste and vehemence. What is apparently not fully grasped by many of Shiva's readers is that she is, among other things, trying to develop a set of cultural meanings and stories to guide and inspire popular struggle. Most pen-lers would regard the work of Christian liberation theologists with respect, and admit that it has been politically effective, even if they do not agree with it. If someone says "Jesus calls me ..." we don't (or shouldn't) automatically regard her as an idiot. But if someone says "Nature calls me," the tendency is to dismiss her as a vapid new-ager (or to think she's just looking for the loo). In the context in which Shiva is working, statements about "Mother Earth" have rich and powerful cultural/religious resonance, and have been undeniably politically effective. Now that doesn't mean this work can't be criticized, or that attention should not be paid to the problematic aspects of this use of popular culture, just as one might point out that drawing on the Christian Gospels for inspiration may also strengthen the patriarchal aspects of that religious tradition. But it does not deserve contemptuous dismissal. This debate has brought out one of the less-helpful parts of the Marxian tradition, which is that, blinded by the Enlightenment, it tends to consign all cultural traditions that fall outside Enlightenment thought to the Outer Darkness of tradition, ignorance, and superstition. The 3rd world becomes a place of cultural and historical stasis (remember the Asiatic mode of production?) waiting on the platform for the train of history, which brings western capitalism, industrialization, urban culture, and so on. If the locomotive is brutal imperialism, so be it -- at least people have been rescued from stupidity and inertia. Probably nobody on the list would put it in those terms, but this is how the western Marxian tradition is widely perceived. If we may respectfully take issue with Peter Burns' thoughtful essay, the expansion of the urban informal sector in much of the third world is not caused by the magnetic draw of urban culture, but by events which have denied people the opportunity to survive in rural areas. The lived experience, material and cultural, of people in the urban informal sector is sharply different from the experience and advantages that cities offer to most of us who participate on this list. Similarly we would resist the attribution of fixed cultural meanings to industrialization. We take the point about the material advantages that capitalist accumulation _can_ provide, but would point out that for many of the world's people they have not been manifest. And one can even fall back on the Marxian tradition, in Marx's correspodence with Russian leftists toward the end of his life, to argue that there are many roads not only to socialism, but indeed to accumulation. What distresses us is that this area of debate gets collapsed into a simple contrast between a rich Enlightenment-inspired tradition of Marxian thought on the one hand, and on the other hand a mishmash of people's worst stereotypes of misanthropic Malthusians, tree-cuddling crystal-worshippers, and romantic seekers of mythical pasts. Very little opportunity is provided for activists like Shiva to draw on their own histories and cultures. Thus while we stand by our earlier posting opposing the simple romanticization of Hindu culture, we do not mean to imply that this culture is a unified dismal whole, or even a single stable, unified, and static cultural system. Hinduism has always had internal struggles over its meanings, the contestants including both conservative Brahminical hierarchs and a variety of radical movements. (The notion most westerners have of Hinduism is the conservative caste-structured one, which the British found it convenient to foster.) Vandana Shiva is working in a complex, changing, and highly-contested cultural environment, and the fact that one can find highly, brutally oppressive practices in this environment does not preclude the possibility of also finding emancipatory tropes, stories, and systems of meaning. Shiva's position, as far as we can tell, is _not_ simply that all things rural are good. And Indian culture, like any other, should not be oversimplified or glibly totalized. A final example -- and we hope she'll forgive us if we read too much into a perhaps offhand and hastily-written post -- is Gina Neff's comment on "money lending in rural, traditional Indian villages" as a sign of their backwardness. First, there is no single pattern of the "rural, traditional Indian village," and we'd like to get a clear definition of what "traditional" means in this context, as there are few areas of rural India that have not undergone a variety of transformations in the last few centuries. Second, moneylending is not a simple phenomenon, being usually interlinked with a variety of other transactions, and taking many forms. (See Polly Hill's _Dry Grain Farming Families_ pp. 214-221 for a lucid description of the role of rural credit in two specific contexts; Hill also acutely mocks the colonial obsession with rural lending as a sign of backwardness.) Third, we would like to see Neff clarify why borrowing for weddings, rather than "productive" purposes, is problematic. Will Neff similarly denounce the willingness of millions of people in the United States to pay extortionate rates of credit card interest to finance the ritual Christmas exchange of expensive trinkets (not to mention unproductive journeys to see family members)? In Solidarity, S. Charusheela and Colin Danby
