Development and Gender Capital in India

Change, Continuity and Conflict in Kerala

Shoba Arun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138221963
• eBook ISBN: 9781315409160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Indian state of Kerala has invoked much attention within development and gender debates, specifically in relation to its female capital- an outcome of interrelated historical, cultural and social practices. On the one hand, Kerala has been romanticised, with its citizenry, particularly women, being free of social divisions and uplifted through educational well-being. On the other hand, its realism is stark, particularly in the light of recent social changes.

Using a Bourdieusian frame of analysis, Development and Gender Capital in India explores the forces of globalisation and how they are embedded within power structures. Through narratives of women's lived experiences in the private and public domains, it highlights the 'anomie of gender' through complexities and contradictions vis-à-vis processes of modernity, development and globalisation. By demonstrating the limits placed upon gender capital by structures of patriarchy and domination, it argues that discussions about the empowered Malayalee women should move from a mere 'politics of rhetoric and representation' to a more embedded 'politics of transformation', meaningfully taking into account women's changing roles and identities.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Development Studies, Gender Studies, Anthropology and Sociology.

1 Introduction

The status of women as signifiers of human development has been examined much in feminist and development debates. Drawing on Karve’s (1965) observation that women in south India enjoy more social status than women in northern India, Dyson and Moore’s study (1983) highlights a positive relationship between female autonomy and demographic regimes related to social and health indicators and kinship structures. This thesis of the higher status of the south Indian woman than the north has been well cited throughout the Indian state of Kerala, receiving much attention in development debates (e.g. Dreze and Sen, 1996; Heller, 2001; Ravi Raman, 2010; Bhagwati and Panagariya, 2013). The state’s history of social mobilisation, and as a vibrant civil society with well-developed human capital. has positioned Kerala as a unique model of development (Tornquist, 2000). This book explores how sociological, feminist and development critiques of mainstream social enquiry could be “appropriated” to explore the distinctive aspects of Kerala’s society and economy. The central premise of this book concerns the anomie of the Kerala experience in both interpretation and the lived social reality of its women. It does so by engaging with a feminist-Bourdieusian framework to highlight the ambivalent role of gender capital within the hegemonic model of development. While the remarkable historic gains of women in Kerala are not without acknowledgement in this book, the study is motivated by the emerging evidence for contradictions and paradoxes on asymmetrical gender and power relations existing in both the private and public lives of the Kerala women. Many of the conceptual tools in gender and development discourses cannot fully grasp the complexity of gender relations as these are habitually constituted and reconstituted through intersecting social practices and social relations in diverse contexts. My own experience as a migrant Malayalee girl (denoting membership of an ethno-linguistic group of Kerala) from a small hill town in south India has made me reflect on nuanced theoretical approaches to gender roles and relations. My Malayalee parents were often ridiculed for educating their girls (having no sons was another grave social violation), while my peers were often married soon after puberty. Simultaneous and perpetual valuations and devaluations of gender and social practices often posed both as structural and as agentic factors in my life choices. My own teaching in sociology departments across a range of UK higher education institutions has also influenced my thinking and ideas about “sociological imagination” in theory and in praxis. As C. W. Mills (1959, p. 6) writes, ‘The Sociological Imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and promise.’ In many instances, such thinking relates to contemporary social concerns and social structures, including gender inequalities.

Kerala has undergone profound social development and demographic transition, bringing it much international and national attention. Whilst India ranked 130 among 188 countries in 2014 according to Human Development Report 2015 released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the country’s rank was 135 according to the 2014 report.

India ranked 130 among 188 countries in the Human Development Report 2015, deeming it a medium development country, with a Human Development Index (HDI) score of 0.609, Kerala scored a high of 0.79, suggestive of commendable indicators of basic human development and quality of life through literacy, life expectancy and standard of living. Nevertheless in 2010, the BBC reported on Kerala’s conundrum as a staggering economy, stating that it ‘needs a new contract between the state and its people to move ahead and build upon its enviable gains’ (The BBC online, 2010). Thus the development trajectory of the state has hinged much on its social and human development record amid lower economic growth; hence, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction offers a paradigm of social analysis, particularly through his concept of symbolic relations which include economic relations and Max Weber’s differential status, and going beyond Marxian notions of class hierarchy and economic power. His analysis of symbolic dimensions of social struggle and competition for capital helps explain forms of social reproduction and transformation. This analysis is highly relevant to the Kerala context, where material and symbolic power relations are at play, although discussions of material power predominate (see Fowler, 2000, p. 2).

Development and Gender Capital in India proposes the use of a Bourdieusian framework, where gender is seen as part of the mutually constitutive relationship between field and habitus. The central tenet of Bourdieu’s capital relates to his conceptualisation of symbolic and cultural power, which feminists have appropriated. As elaborated in Chapter 2, gender was never central to Bourdieu’s analysis, though his work has continually influenced feminist theorisation and writings, particularly his social analysis that allows for interconnections of social divisions, such as class relations and culture. The Kerala model has drawn much from the higher levels of human, symbolic and cultural capital enjoyed by its women as a form of embodied gender or female capital. This model is manifest through its social policies, cultural practices and social change that have endowed women with higher levels of literacy and life expectancy, and also lower levels of fertility and maternal mortality rates. Thus the cultural and symbolic dimensions of female capital, termed here as “gender capital”, have played a significant part in the Kerala model. For example, in the 1920s Queen Sethu Lakshmi Bayi of Travancore rewarded women who went to university with an invitation to tea at the palace. In addition, the royal family followed matrilineal practices whereby the maharajah’s sister’s sons inherited the throne (The Economist, 2013). Thus, education – a key element of Bourdieu’s cultural capital – plays an important role in Kerala. In this respect, Bourdieu is similar to Durkheim’s sociology as Fowler (2000, p. 12) writes, ‘Durkheim has emphasised the significance of education for modernity’, although human capital is then elaborated into other manifold forms of capital. Bourdieu’s typology of capitals includes economic, cultural and social capital, where the last two forms of capital can be converted into the first form, akin to the Weberian concept of status and power. Through the use of the term gender capital (Huppatz, 2009; 2012), and unravelling forms of feminine, masculine and embodied capital, this book aims to move beyond the conventional framework of patriarchy that theorises forms of gender domination and relations. The notion of gender capital is particularly useful, as the Kerala woman is well noted for her female capital through notions of autonomy and has been instrumental in achieving the Kerala model of development through possessing higher levels of “human and cultural capital”.

However, as the book sets out to examine, the mere possession of capital – for example, education – does not necessarily mean an individual can realise a social advantage from such a resource, as to do this they must be “effectively activated’ (Lareau, 1989, p. 179), which relates to practices and interactions within social domains or fields. For Bourdieu (1984), the field is the social arena in which actors and their respective spheres of power compete for meaning and legitimacy; it is from this that habitus emerges. Thus, sites such as households, schools and workplaces are “fields” with structured spaces organised around specific capital or combinations of capital, where actors are involved in the “game” and “rules” as they stratigise and struggle over the unequal distribution of valued capitals, so they compete for meaning and legitimacy. The role of the family or the household and its impact on women’s subordination, particularly within development debates, has been much discussed (e.g. Kabeer, 1994; Elson, 1995; Agarwal, 1997). The family occupies a central place in feminist theory as women’s subordination has been intimately related to various forms of and practices within it – for example, women’s sexuality and reproduction, control over property, the economics of domestic labour and state regulation of family life (see Walby, 1997). Fowler (2000) notes how, although Bourdieu failed to grasp the changing characteristics of patriarchy within different periods (notably that of capitalist modernity), Bourdieu’s work does provide quality analytical tools such as “doxa” and the “illusio” of masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001). Bourdieu’s androcentric bias in his works has been well noted (see McCall, 1992; Laberge, 1995) through his patrilinear focus (see Silva, 2005; Huppatz, 2012) whereas gender is akin to a “secondary” principle (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 106) structuring the social space. However, Bourdieu recognises the strength of the structuring power of gender properties, as the volume and composition of capital is structured by gender properties within each social group. The following quote has been used repeatedly to show this ambivalent treatment of gender:

Sexual properties are as inseparable from class properties as the yellowness of a lemon is from its acidity: a class is defined in an essential respect by the place and value it gives to the two sexes and to their socially constituted dispositions. This is why there are so many ways of realizing femininity as there are classes and class fractions, and the division of labour between the sexes takes quite different forms, both in practices and in representations, in the different social classes.

(Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 107–108)

This led McCall (1992) to advocate the use of constructed femininity and masculinity as indices of class (capital) structure, which would rectify inherent male bias and thus conceptualise gendered capital (see McCall, 1992; Laberge, 1995). Gender traits, often classified as masculine and feminine, may or may not stem from biological or sexual identities. For example, the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell theorised gender relationships by exploring social structures and the conceptions and practices around masculinity. In particular, Gender and Power (1987) shows how interlinked structures produce particular “gender orders”, or “regimes”, through hegemonic masculinity. It highlighted how the division of three sets of structures – labour, power and cathexis – produce gender inequalities. Through this, gendered inequalities prevail, especially through gendered roles, for example through the gender division of labour, and power within the household. Similarly, masculinity pervades the public life as the labour market contains gendered hierarchies; political and decision-making positions similarly generally favour masculinity; and masculinity generally sets rules for sexual engagement and sexual behaviours, leading to gendered regimes within society. Such social constructions of forms of gender capital will be of prime concern in this book.

Bourdieu’s (1990; 2000) conceptualisation of social inequalities and their social reproduction is further explained through the concept of symbolic violence and its invisible nature, which facilitates domination in different forms that are embedded in everyday lives (Morgan and Björkert, 2006). For example, the prevalence and practice of dowry and inheritance in the Indian (or South Asian) context has implications for women’s status and experience, including dowry-related violence. Such structures of domination persist through Bourdieu’s symbolic violence – a violence that is ‘censored, euphemized, that is, misrecognizable, recognized violence’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 126). Feminist debates in South Asia often question trends in dowry practices, preference for sons compared to daughters, female infanticide and declining sex ratios which violate women’s agency in wider social relations (see Sharma, 1980; Kishwar, 1999; Purewal, 2010). Thus, gendered capital pervades cultural and symbolic practices, which could be referred to as doxa, or shared practices that uphold forms of domination and hierarchy within a patriarchal system.

As Krais (2006) argues, Bourdieu’s theoretical understanding of gender as a powerful principle of social differentiation opens up new analytical perspectives for feminist sociological theory whereby social practice allows space for resistance and change. For Bourdieu, the category “woman” is not a homogeneous, singular identity but is instead lived and intimately experienced ‘as a form of subjectivity inhabited through other categories’ (ibid., p. 166). Thus, Bourdieu’s theory opens up the possibility of social change and transformation by representing gender relations as socially constructed – an analysis concurrent with that of numerous socialist and materialist feminists (Moi, 1990). Furthermore, by integrating gender distinction into the concept of cultural capital (and habitus), Huppatz (2009) makes an important and useful distinction between “female” and “feminine” capital to understand processes involved in procuring classed and gendered workers and occupations. To gain a sociological understanding of the complex interactions between structure and agency through mobilities and new (and multiple) domains, habitus is a handy tool when seen as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). However, the concept of habitus is not rigid or stable; for example, Silva (2016) maps Bourdieu’s changing presentations of the notion of habitus from being unified to later fragmentation. Thus, while this book focuses on relations between social practices generated through habitus, it does so having adopted a more pliable notion of habitus to unravel both its structured nature and its restructuring simultaneously.

Aims

This books adopts a Bourdieusian lens on analytical and theoretical foci on gender, feminism and development, to unravel the gendered nature of Kerala’s social context. It investigates the interactions between social thought and ideas, practices and experiences, through several interrelated themes. First, it shows how global development and societal contexts are gendered spheres where men and women are positioned differently and participate in society and the economy differently; they do this through capitals/resources either available to them or legitimised through gendered processes and structures. The second theme delves into structural constraints and women’s agency. Its particular focus is how these are enacted through dominant patriarchal norms in private and public domains through gendered frames of domesticity and sexuality that value gender capital differently and shape (or change) their habitus through reproducing or rupturing global processes. The final theme recognises differences among women via an intersectional approach whereby issues of class, caste and ethnicity intersect with gender. Such differences manifest themselves through several inequalities that highlight multiple processes of symbolic domination and misrecognition. All three of these issues together show how forces of globalisation are partially embedded in power structures, including the nation state, but are done so in different ways that bring both opportunities and challenges for men and women, re-creating and reinforcing power relations that reflect tropes of agency, rhetoric and victimhood.

Development and change through global transformations

Boserup’s (1970) seminal work sparked an information revolution on issues concerning women in society regarding shifts in wider policy and academic thinking about development and gender issues. Subsequently, 1976–1985 (declared by the UN as the decade for women) was ensued by approaches to conceptualise women’s role in development processes. Many women in development discourses (e.g. the WID) reflect 1980s modernisation theories. Based on Western feminism, these theories focused on equal participation in work and education, reproductive rights and sexual freedom, whilst the gender and development (GAD) discourses focussed more on the social relations between men a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gender and development: a Bourdieusian framework
• 3 Situating gender capital in Kerala
• 4 Matriliny and kinship: transforming gendered habitus in semi-rural livelihoods
• 5 ICT and gender capital @work
• 6 Migrating gendered capital
• 7 Gendered violence and victimisation: symbolic violence and complicity
• 8 Asset accumulation and Adivasis: limits to legitimate capital
• 9 Conclusion
• Index