Construction of Third World Women's Knowledge in the Development Discourse

Despite the vast literature that questions the separation between indigenous and scientific knowledge, rural Third World women continue to be indigenized and their knowledge upheld as the new path to sustainable development and biodiversity. By drawing on ethnographic examples from the Kumaon Himalayas in India, this paper examines the construction of women's knowledge and asks how, in practice, women's knowledge is produced, circulated, and shared. It draws attention to the politics of knowledge and argues that women's knowledge is a product of everyday practices of labor and livelihood that are shaped by culturally contingent relations of power and authority. By describing everyday conversations, meetings, and explanations, the paper shows that there is a great deal of informal exchange between women and men that mutually shapes their knowledge and confronts the idea that women's knowledge is distinct. Moreover, women's knowledge, it is argued, is not a neatly packaged information box but a set of relations shaped in contexts of social inequalities, local histories of conflict, and colonial and postcolonial interventions. While the attention to women's knowledge is welcome, the paper cautions against looking at women as embodiments of special knowledge, and makes a call for examining the cultural politics of power and authority that marginalizes women and their knowledge. 1 Photograph, 23 References. (Original abstract - amended)