DFM WG1 Minutes 2023-04-26
WG1 (Gender and Social Economy)
Meeting Minutes
April 26, 2023
Discussions and decisions:
Mahfuzar Rahman: Women have a fundamental role in dried fish value chains in Bangladesh. In recent years, women’s involvement has strengthened. However, women’s involvement is contingent on certain kinds of support, which indicates an entry point to some form of intervention which is not adequately recognized.
Siddiqur Rahman: Adding to Mahfuz’s point, what do women actors do, or what creative strategies do they apply without having external support, e.g., GO and NGOs? Capturing their innovative strategies, struggles and how they negotiate is important to understanding women’s roles. Secondly, understanding and capturing young people’s, particularly women, aspirations, given the changing context, becoming an entrepreneur has not been recognized. Recognizing these aspirations and mainstreaming their innovation and strategies can be a source for other scholars.
Mahmudul Sumon: My involvement with the project is limited except for a visit to a production site in Kuliarchar, Kishorgonj. It was a fishing village involved in dried fish production, locally known as dangi production. We are interested in looking into how the women of the community are engaged in dried fish production. What sorts of relations do the women have in the processing works? What sorts of relations do they have with the male actors? We tried to address these questions through student research and produce visual ethnography. I am also interested in the knowledge system: how knowledge is shared within the family and transmitted to the next generation.
Derek Johnson: I am seeing a connection between what your are saying and what Mahfuz has said, women’s key engagement in dried fish value chains. You are suggesting careful documentation of the engagement and exploration of how those work. We mentioned both the structure and conduct of the chains; the knowledge sharing and relation building indicate the conduct of DFVCs.
Aklima Akter: My field findings show that the patriarchal constraints women face in DFVCs and strategies to overcome them differ from those written in many papers. Many of the dried fish female labourers and processors I talked with have different thoughts about communication, and they need space and require supportive intervention from the government. We must explore and focus on women’s thoughts and voices to overcome the limitations.
Nireka Weeratunge: In terms of approaching the feminist issue, I am always cautious when the feminist approach is zero on women. It is about gender relations, not about women. If we talk about gender, then we have to look at both men and women all of the time, not only on women. Some of the readings point to it when we talk about production, that is, relations of production or gender relations of production. We have also looked at intersectionality in terms of class, caste, ethnicity, religion, and so on. In Sri Lanka, we did a gendered value chain analysis looked at the gender relations at each of the segments. We found differences in gender relations, which cannot be explained by caste, class, religion or none of these variables. I am more interested in looking into space, time, and agency regarding gender relations. My bigger interest is how to look at the networks, historical relations, how the capitalist relations work and how that shapes gender relations and their agency.
Derek Johnson: What Nireka has said takes us to the social economy dimensions of DFM, thinking about space, time, and place as the constitution of gender relations.
Nireka Weeratunge: The reading particularly focuses on capitalist production and the market and how they shape and interact with gender. We need to extend our focus from market to state, market, community and family. It is not only the genderedness of people but space as well. People talking about male sea and female sea. The sea itself can be gendered. Here comes the symbolic anthropology: how you perceive space.
Derek Johnson: It raises a methodological question, then: how do we pay attention to these particular social economies of production or gendered social economy of production? It also indicates commonality.
Nireka Weeratunge: It’s about patterns; patterns in the way the market works, patterns in terms of gender norms, practices or patterns of how the state works. It is about the diversity of each space.
Eric Thrift: The diverse economic perspective is a useful approach to the economy, although not specific to gender. It is a useful way of thinking about the economy, not just about what happened but also why. Secondly, related to that, how could these different types of values potentially be captured and communicated through commodity chains as well? It is an interesting area of investigation for me.
Derek Johnson: It brings a theoretical and a practical point. The theoretical point is that the diverse economies perspective is a rethinking of the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a less deterministic perspective and pays greater attention to the agency quality of engagements in non-capitalist relations. The practical point is how commodity chains can better recognize the values or contributions of women to production.
Emdad Haque: I have two reflections; the first one is more general not specific to my contribution. In terms of value chains, in the upper stream, there is a diverse involvement of women and spaces in the processing segments. What is missing in the big picture is the roles and space in the middle and lower of the value chains, e.g. arotder. In terms of economic power, women are missing in the developing world. It will be quite an original contribution to this part. I have two comments here: -1. What is causing these structural barriers? 2. How do we address these constraints?
In terms of my involvement in the forthcoming volume, my involvement is more with the students working in the health and hygiene areas.
Colleen Cranmer: My reflection will be more empirical, what I have seen in the field. One example I give is how women’s informal labour at the village level creates surpluses that are being captured in the market. The Dunaway reading indicates value chain analysis often looks at the market, where households are disconnected. But it is very much connected to informal work, done from their home, and the market is exploiting them.
Gayathri Lokuge: What Collen has said resonates with what we found in the Cambodia Stack value chains analysis. Collen used the terms subsidizing the commodity chains. I also think of women’s work also subsidizing the household economy in a sense. The fluctuation makes it challenging to pinpoint women’s contributions. I am also, interested in how processing is seen as almost an extension of women’s reproductive roles in the household.
Kevin Edbert: There is an increasing interest in the psychological sphere of cross-cultural studies of how people understand their wellbeing.
Mirza Taslima: In our fieldwork, we found that the number of women as vendors in Dhaka is increasing. We also found a few women entrepreneurs; there was bargaining and negotiation regarding the ownership. I am interested in looking into how capitalism itself coordinates with patriarchy and contributes to gender relations over historical periods. I am not only interested in women and men relations but also between men; and how one man dominates other men.
Sujit: In my field, I found men doing the heavy duties and women processing the fish. Most of the labourers are local and connected with others in some way.
Sayeed Ferdous: One thing I found interesting, women’s involvement in economic activities is not a straight-cut or simple linear story of progression. Getting involved in economic activities does not mean being emancipated, rather, the example shows women have to negotiate with patriarchy, and they have to accommodate patriarchy, family norms, and values. It would be interesting for me not to get carried away with this story of rhetorical emancipation rather, it would be much more interesting to make grounded with the ongoing complicated and complex waves of relationships, which is often regressive. Since we have diverse access to the field and there are diverse stories, it would be very interesting to go beyond the deterministic structural interpretation.
Secondly, the idea of women as a heterogeneous category, we are not talking about a single category of women. Women are diverse in terms of space, location, religion and identities, and the work they are involved with. If we highlight these stories of differences, the research will be colourful.
One piece of information for you, Derek, one of my students has started working in the archives.
Tara Nair: As Nireka mentioned, space becomes important. One of the areas of interest is relations between women and the market and institutions. How market relations are shaped by and within a larger social-political relationship. The site we studied is a hyper-industrialist fishing hub, so it has all material characteristics. We are talking about the sphere of activities, which is characterized by multilayer and peculiarity. We are talking about a vulnerable, historically seen as an excluded and marginalized community. Another important thing is a very peculiar and modern market and very sophisticated market arrangements that determine interesting sort of patterns.
The debate right now in the developing part of this world is about how entrepreneurship can be leveraged to give people more power and gift people more agency. We are examining how true that formulation is. I think it is extremely important to critique the blind belief in entrepreneurship, defined whichever way. By looking at this particular market space, we would like to highlight the hidden inequalities in these kinds of arrangements. Sayeed talked about age; we really found that there is a very clear association between women’s differential vulnerabilities through their life cycles. Dried fish beautifully fits in that scheme. In our space, it is the older women who sell dried fish. If you look at the transition of women, when they are young, they sell fresh fish or do cutting or some processing work, but as they grow old and become immobile, they move to the dried fish business. Therefore, the relationship between fish and women needs to be examined.
It is high time to combine feminist theoretical insights with the new modes of capital accumulation. I work on financialization and how contemporary capitalism uses debt as an instrument to tie vulnerabilities of these market situations. This is another theme we can explore.
Holly Hapke: I was thinking of using a life course. I found it interesting that there are various levels of entrepreneurship among women; some fish traders are much more entrepreneurial than others. Because part of it is driven by life circumstances. Using oral history and work-life course analysis will be interesting in capturing those differences. I love the idea of women’s relations with the market.
Jayaprakash: It is good to be part of the team. I could relate my field findings with the discussion.
Derek Johnson: Stella and Prabhakaran, the DFM meeting is open, and if you would like, you can continue joining the meetings.
For the next meeting, I would like to request people to formalize their ideas for the kinds of contribution they could make to this collective output. I would like to assign the homework of beginning to develop abstracts. We will probably create space to put up the documents, the basis for discussions will then begin grounded on actual written documents.
We will follow up with the recordings and a quick meeting summary.
Thanks, everyone.
