Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling

Description

Illuminates the contradictions that emerge within conscious capitalism initiatives that are designed to empower women. Everyday Sustainability takes readers to ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives—Darjeeling, India—where Fair Trade ostensibly promises gender justice to minority Nepali women engaged in organic tea production. These women tea farmers and plantation workers have distinct entrepreneurial strategies and everyday practices of social justice that at times dovetail with and at other times rub against the tenets of the emerging global morality market. The author questions why women beneficiaries of transnational justice-making projects remain skeptical about the potential for economic and social empowerment through Fair Trade while simultaneously seeking to use the movement to give voice to their situated demands for mobility, economic advancement, and community level social justice. Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 List of Tables......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 14 Abbreviations......Page 18 Note on Transliteration......Page 20 Introduction......Page 22 Late Capitalism and Fair Trade in Darjeeling......Page 30 Gendered Projects of Value......Page 33 Gender and Sustainability......Page 37 Empowerment Lite?......Page 40 Everyday Gendered Translations of Transnational Justice Regimes......Page 43 Making Gendered Sense of Fair Trade......Page 46 Overview of the Book......Page 47 Chapter 1 Locations: Homework and Fieldwork......Page 50 Fieldwork: Pressures to be a “Conventional Anthropologist”......Page 51 Informant, Interlocutor, Researcher, or Activist?......Page 55 Note on Methodology......Page 59 Chapter 2 Everyday Marginality of Nepalis in India......Page 64 Politics of Recognition......Page 66 Struggles of Darjeeling Nepalis......Page 71 Chapter 3 The Reincarnation of Tea......Page 78 Plantations and the Reincarnation of Tea......Page 79 The Shadow History of Tea in Darjeeling......Page 85 Sānu Krishak Sansthā: The Cooperative of “Illegal” Tea Farmers......Page 87 Fair Trade in Darjeeling’s Tea Sector......Page 95 Fair Trade and Plantations......Page 98 Unions, Joint Body, and Fair Trade......Page 100 Conclusion......Page 103 Chapter 4 Fair Trade and Women Without History: The Consequences of Transnational Affective Solidarity......Page 106 Encounters......Page 108 Rituals of Witnessing......Page 111 Recollections and Documentation of Witnessing Fair Trade......Page 115 Fair Trade and Privatized Political Fields......Page 119 Conclusion......Page 123 Chapter 5 Ghumāuri: Interstitial Sustainability in India’s Fair Trade−Organic Certified Tea Plantations......Page 126 Survival Narratives......Page 127 Gendered Transitions in Regional Labor Politics......Page 129 Ethnicized Subnationalism and Plantation Labor Politics......Page 131 Chhāyā......Page 134 Competing Communities, Interstitial Spaces......Page 138 Conclusion......Page 144 Chapter 6 Fair Trade vs. Swachcha Vyāpār: Ethical Counter-Politics of Women’s Empowerment in a Fair Trade−Certified Small Farmers Cooperative......Page 148 Smallholder Tea Production and Fair Trade in Darjeeling......Page 152 From Debating to Contesting Fair Trade......Page 154 Middlemen, Gendered Spatial Politics, and the Government of Women’s Work......Page 162 “We Are the Police of Our Own Fields”: Gendered Boundaries within Sānu Krishak Sansthā......Page 167 Conclusion: Empowerment Fix?......Page 171 Chapter 7 “Will My Daughter Find an Organic Husband?” Domesticating Fair Trade through Cultural Entrepreneurship......Page 174 “She ate my work:” Women’s Work and Household Relations within the Plantation......Page 178 Household Relations in the Cooperative (Sānu Krishak Sansthā)......Page 185 Household Conflicts in Sānu Krishak Sansthā......Page 189 Household Politics and Public Discourses of “Risk”......Page 193 Consequences of Differential Visibilities of Women’s Work......Page 199 Chapter 8 “Tadpoles in Water” vs. “Police of Our Fields”: Competing Subjectivities, Women’s Political Agency and Fair Trade......Page 202 Being “Tadpoles in Water” vs. “Police of our Fields”......Page 205 Ghumāuri vs. Women’s Wing Meetings......Page 212 The Politics of Clean Hands vs. the Politics of Clean Trade......Page 223 Conclusion......Page 228 Conclusion: Everyday Sustainability......Page 230 Notes......Page 242 References......Page 252 Index......Page 266