On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this > process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her > visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated > professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? Hey, Shiva sets off my bullshit detectors too, but this is an unfair hit. Mashing lentils isn't industrialized in Manhattan either. It's something that happens after cooking, like mashing potatoes. And it's not hard. One could reconcile Shiva's love of the small scale and fresh with your emphasize on the liberatory potential of industrialization for poor villagers by simply saying that it is easy to imagine ways to make these women's lives easier by industrializing differently. Like getting each village a specialized lentil harvester, for example. Or getting local factories to turn out simple metal grinders, like butchers still use to grind hamburger, which could mash lentils as efficiently as a food processor without needing any power. And investing in improving their local schooling and transportation networks. I grant that this would require overcoming her false binaries between technology and nature. On that point, I'm entirely with you. Michael
