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Terry Leahy 2024
In the previous chapter I looked at Sylvia Federici’s account of the witchcraft hunts of Europe. Federici sees these phenomena of early capitalism in Europe as essentially similar to the processes of colonialism in the Global South. Likewise, the targeting of women’s traditional power in pre-capitalist economies and their resistance to capitalist inroads. In the context of early capitalist Europe and the later Global South, Federici finds a common thread. Capitalism is an attack on women’s power in pre-capitalist societies. Women’s resistance makes them a target of nascent capitalism in both contexts. ‘The counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were … the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans’ (Federici, 197).
Federici looks at this issue in relation to early colonial attacks on Indigenous resistance in the Americas. In particular, the Spanish and Portuguese inroads into Latin and South America. ‘The charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of local populations’ (163). An initial period saw the colonial authorities attempting to force the natives to become Christians. When this failed, the Spanish colonial powers treated the local people as in league with the devil and applied the technologies of the witch hunts to this resistance. Local people were encouraged to name witches in their midst. These devil worshippers were duly executed at the stake or killed by hanging. As she points out, it was difficult to convince local people to treat their traditional religions as devil worship and difficult to break up the solidarity of Indigenous communities through these strategies. On the other hand, the terror inspired by these tactics certainly helped to break local resistance to colonialism.
My own sense of the narratives she describes is that anti-colonial resistance was not, in most cases, a gendered response but was coming from both men and women — reacting to the sufferings imposed by the colonial regime. Forced labour in the mines, usually ending in death, was a typical imposition. My main objection to this analogy is Federici’s claim that as in Europe, witchcraft accusations were aimed at women for the most part. Corresponding to a gendered resistance to capitalist colonialism in the New World — as in the Old World. For example, she argues that in the Yucatan and Peru, women were most likely to be charged with witchcraft because they were the ‘staunchest defenders of their community’ (Federici 197). I do not find this backed by the detail of her accounts. One example mentions trials of 75 Indian heretics between 1536 and 1543. These ‘heretics’ were ‘mainly drawn from the political and religious leaders of central Mexican communities’ (Federici 197). In other words, they were mainly men. Other cases fit with Federici’s interpretation. In 1660 in Huarochiri, 32 were convicted in an inquisition against idolatry — 28 were women. According to Federici, this was because women were most strongly defending the old ways. It may have been because the inquisitors expected witches to be women. Or, as in Europe, because they were more likely to be named by anonymous informants as the least powerful members of their communities.
The following accounts consider these issues in relation to other parts of the colonized world and to similar arguments in relation to gendered resistance.
The Chipko struggle
An earlier version of Federici’s argument is the ecofeminist classic by Vandana Shiva ‘Staying Alive’. I will look at her analysis of the Chipko struggle in India. The word ‘chipko’ refers to one of the central tactics of this movement to save Indigenous forests. Protesters go to the forest and hug the trees, defying those who have come to cut them down. The popular strength of the Chipko struggle comes from the local peasant women of the north of India. The movement began in the early 1970’s, though similar struggles go back hundreds of years. Beginning in Uttarakhand, in the Himalayan North of India, the Chipko movement spread throughout the country.
The background to the Chipko struggle is the removal of forests from the control of peasant communities and the privatization or state control of these resources, with consequent environmental problems. Traditionally, the peasants of India used their forests for medicinal herbs and wild food, for tree fodder and grazing and for gathering wood for fuel. The supply of water and the stability of the water supply was also dependent on the forest cover. When the British colonized India they declared by a stroke of the pen that all communally owned forests were now under the ownership of the state. Gradually, they took these forests out of the hands of subsistence peasants and redeveloped them as part of a timber industry. During British rule, the main use of the timber was to supply the British military and industrial machine. Trees in the Himalayas were primarily cut to make railway sleepers. A similar policy has been continued by postcolonial governments, who have concentrated on the commercial uses of the forests. Often, timber has been cut only to be exported to wealthy countries. Forests have also been cleared to use the land for cash crop farming. The cutting of forests in mountainous areas has caused soil erosion and mudslides, flooding, and the drying up of ground water supplies. Recently, state policy has favoured the replacement of indigenous forest diversity with eucalypt plantations, suitable for the timber industry. This eucalypt monoculture kills local understory species with a leaf fall containing eucalypt terpenes – oils that are toxic to local vegetation. Each of these developments has harmed the peasant communities which have relied on forests for some part of their subsistence.
A good example of the way Shiva describes the Chipko movement is her account of the struggle at the village of Reni in the Alakananda valley. In 1970, there was a major flood and landslide. Local women blamed it on the felling of trees in the catchment area. In 1973, a woman saw some men coming with axes to begin more tree felling. She and her companions surrounded the timber contractors, saying:
This forest is our mother. When there is a crisis of food, we come here to collect grass and dry fruits to feed our children. We dig out herbs and collect mushrooms from this forest. You cannot touch these trees.
A group of local women organized vigilance parties to prevent the trees being cut and got the government to agree to a ten-year ban on logging. Shiva’s account emphasizes the key role of local women in this protest.
Shiva sees the Chipko movement as an inspiration for ecofeminism world-wide. Tribal women can show the way through their traditional spiritual connection to a feminized nature and through their intimate understanding of harmonious and sustainable interaction with the natural world:
… they have the holistic and ecological knowledge of what the production and protection of life is about.
According to Shiva, the actions taken by British and Indian governments are based on a masculinized scientific view of forests. Working from the analysis given by Merchant, she sees the scientific perception of forests as a ‘reduction’ of the complexity of the forest to a number of simple ‘uses.’ A source of timber and profit. This ignores the forest as a complex of interacting biological parts. Socially, it reduces the forest to the needs of a colonial or postcolonial government for timber or cash. The complexity of pre-existing uses is ignored. As one part of a sustainable agriculture. The forests as sources for a great variety of products used for everyday subsistence. The importance of the forests for management of the water catchment.
Shiva presents the movement as defending the feminine aspects of the world, as conceived by local religious belief. Forests in India have been worshipped as the Goddess of the Forest, Aranyani. The forest as a symbol of the earth’s fertility is also worshipped as the Earth Mother, as Vana Durga, or as the Tree Goddess. In folk and tribal cultures, trees are also worshipped as Vana Devatas or forest deities. A more overarching identification of women and nature sees nature as the feminine ‘prakriti’, which combines with the masculine principle ‘purusha’ to create the world. The energy of prakriti is named as
‘Shakti’. These beliefs provide a living context for the actions of women (and men) within the Chipko movement. A good example is the statement of Itwari Devi, a village elder:
Shakti (strength) comes to us from these forests and grasslands; we watch them grow, year in and year out through their internal shakti, and we derive our strength from it. We watch our streams renew themselves and we drink their clear and sparkling water – that gives us shakti. We drink fresh milk, we eat ghee, we eat food from our own fields – all this gives us not just nutrition for the body, but a moral strength, that we are our own masters, we control and produce our own wealth. That is why ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ women who do not buy their needs from the market but produce them themselves are leading Chipko. Our power is nature’s power, our shakti comes from prakriti.
As a social movement the Chipko struggle combines the activist energies of two socially different groups. One is a middle class, Gandhian movement of social change. Organisers from this milieu have seeded the Chipko struggles, coordinating information and strategies. Some of these activists were women from the global North who had gone to work in India with the peasants. The second part of the Chipko movement is much larger numerically — it is the peasants who are defending their forests.
Shiva argues that in both these wings of the movement, women dominate. Looking at the Gandhian activists, she traces the movement back to earlier initiatives by Mira Behn, an English woman. Mira Behn was one of Gandhi’s closest followers who moved to the Himalayas in the 1940s. Originally, she worked on cattle as central to sustainable agriculture and initiated a centre in the foothills. She moved to create an ashram further into the Himalayas after floods convinced her that the problem of deforestation was of major importance. Shiva also writes about Sarala Behn, who started an ashram for hill women and influenced another key female activist, Bimla Behn who spent eight years with Sarala. Shiva’s perspective is that the key male activists in the movement were actually inspired and led by these women. Sunderlal Bahuguna, who is widely acknowledged as a key figure in other accounts, married Bimla Behn, who demanded that he leave the Congress Party and settle in a hill village to initiate local action. Shiva also points out that Sunderlal had worked with Mira Behn. She argues that other key male activists, such as Chandi Prasad Bhatt, were drawn in by Bahuguna to support a movement ‘generated by women’s power’.
Some of the women Gandhian activists that Shiva mentions were from Europe. Mira Behn was the daughter of a British naval officer, and her name was originally Madeleine Slade. Sarala Behn, who continued her work in the next generation is also mentioned by Shiva as a key figure. She was also of British origin, her original name being Catherine Hillman. From the constructionist perspective, these origins are worth noting. If ecofeminism is socially constructed, its origins in India are both European and Indian.
Shiva’s second reason for identifying the movement with women, is her understanding of the basis of peasant support for the movement. As Shiva sees it, to begin with, peasant people of both sexes were opponents of deforestation and private and state ownership of the forests. Women wanted to save their forests, and the men wanted to prevent outside contractors from making all the profits from timber. Later, as contractors began to work with local men, there was often a split between the women, who used the forest for subsistence, and their husbands, who could make money by cutting timber as local contractors. In 1977, these divisions came to a head when the forests at Adwani were auctioned. Large groups of women from fifteen villages came to guard the forests and eventually repelled both the contractors and the police, who had come to support the timber cutters. These actions were led by Bachni Devi who was the wife of the local village headman, who was himself a contractor. Shiva sees this incident as revealing a split in the movement. The struggle became one in which women fought to maintain the power which was based in their traditional role as agriculturalists and users of forests subsistence. Men were undermining this power through their engagement in a new cash economy of timber production.
In turn Shiva relates this gender division to two other factors. One is the preference of western patriarchy to appoint men as ‘providers’ for their families’ subsistence through wage labour. Shiva sees the global extension of western patriarchy being expressed in this Indian situation, as it has been in other countries in the developing world. As other authors have pointed out, a common development of Uttarakhand society during the postcolonial period was the migration of men to the plains, leaving the women in charge of subsistence agriculture in the villages. A second factor is the traditional division of labour within Indian peasant agriculture. Shiva shows that women actually did considerably more agricultural work than their husbands in traditional peasant and tribal economies in India. When the cash economy came along, it could not provide sufficient income to service the needs of the whole family. So, women continued on with their traditional subsistence agriculture, while men were increasingly involved in the cash economy. Women believed that the best survival strategy was not to rely on cash income but to maintain traditional subsistence agriculture. According to Shiva, they ended up by fighting their husbands whose actions were undermining that production strategy. Ethically, the women supported their struggle by invoking the central spiritual importance of the forest ecosystem.
Other accounts of the Chipko struggle have a slightly different account of these gender issues. Other accounts focus on the Gandhian movement as a key factor and nominate as key activists the male leaders of this movement. For example, Guha specifies two central wings of the movement as the one inspired and led by Sunderlal Bahuguna and the one inspired and led by Chandi Prasad Bhatt. It was usually these figures who negotiated with government leaders and finalized settlements that protected forests – after prolonged local action had forced the government’s hand. For example, in 1980 it was Bahuguna who negotiated with the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to gain a ban on logging above 1000 meters and a fifteen-year ban on commercial logging (Lane 1993). It was Bhatt who first suggested the tactic of hugging the trees. He was responsible, as well, for organising the local village cooperatives which have been consistent opponents of commercial exploitation of the forests by the state and large companies.
An account of the Reni action that is based in Bhatt’s own narrative, gives him and his activists a much more prominent role than that suggested by Shiva’s account. In 1973, Bhatt and his activists began to gather support in the villages against the government plans to auction 2,500 trees in the Reni Forest. He reminded the villagers of the dangers of floods caused by deforestation and two colleagues remained to spread his message. Chandi Prasad then went to Dehra Dunn to appeal to the forestry department and contractors to abandon their plans to auction the trees. Failing in this, he warned them of the local resistance. The government decided to subvert this anticipated resistance by offering to pay the men of the Reni village compensation for land the government had claimed fourteen years before. Payment was to be presented some distance from the village. The contractors arrived at the village after the men had left. A little girl spotted the contractors, and Gaura Devi organised the women of the village to confront them. The contractors withdrew from the forest. When the men returned, they learned about the women’s surprise victory. Rallies were held and a constant watch organised. Finally, Chandi Prasad was invited to the state capital to meet with the minister. After a two-year delay, the committee that had been set up recommended that there be no logging and the government put a ten-year ban on logging. This account differs from Shiva’s in a few ways. It stresses the key organising role of Bhatt and his group of activists and emphasizes their important role in negotiating with the government. It suggests that the men of Reni were also strongly opposed to the logging but were tricked into being absent when the contractors arrived — leaving the women to carry out a resistance which was supported by the men.
Despite this, other accounts do give support to two central ideas of Shiva’s. It has been women peasants who have been the strongest local supporters of the Chipko actions. Even Guha, who is sceptical about the feminist analysis of Chipko, admits that women were more consistent participants in peasant resistance than men, and traces it to women’s roles in traditional agricultural production. As well, there seems no doubt that there were a number of incidents in which men and women were opposed over these issues and women resisted deforestation against the wishes of the men. Shiva mentions the incident at Adwari described above. An example mentioned by Bina Agarwal is an attempt to establish a potato-seed farm by cutting down an oak forest in Dongri Paintoli village. The men supported the idea because it would bring in a money income; but the women opposed it because it would mean longer treks for fuel and fodder. Lane mentions another event in Vadiargh in 1979, where men were bought off with bribes and the women from Kemar, one hundred kilometers away, came and camped to stop the logging. Both Agarwal and Lane see these clashes as symptomatic of a situation in which women had most to lose through commercialization of the forests.
Looking at the Chipko struggle, we can consider how it might be viewed as ecofeminism. Shiva identifies the ‘reductionism’ of the scientific view as masculinist and patriarchal. This reductionism fits with the social construction of masculinity. It is a use of science to legitimate actions which disregard the variety of purposes relevant to the forest ecosystem. As science it only notices those purposes most dear to the hearts of powerful men in government and industry – timber for the British Empire, or export income for the postcolonial Indian government. So, it fits the analysis of patriarchal masculinity as distancing and competitive. This ‘reductionist’ science is based on an emotional distancing from the purposes of the many plants and animals that make the forest their home. It does not take them into account when it evaluates the forests purely as a timber producing resource. It distances itself, as well, from the purposes of other sections of the human community. It promotes a policy which causes both flooding and drought. It distances itself from the multiple uses of the forests made by tribal and peasant agriculture. It ignores women’s traditional uses of the forests. In all this, it is a science which fits with a socially constructed masculinity.
Looking at the peasants involved in the struggle, a gendered analysis of capitalism fits well. Within western patriarchy, since the capitalist period, men’s power has been based in their control of the cash economy – paid work and capital ownership. As western patriarchy and capitalism came to India, they brought this social construction of gender with them. It seemed only natural in this cultural context to appoint local men as employees within the cash economy and to confer power on them through this appointment. Since the cash economy excluded women, it was only to be expected that women would attempt to retain power through their connection to the traditional subsistence economy. This is one factor that was relevant to the support that peasant women gave to the Chipko struggle. The other factor, as noted above, is that traditional agriculture gave women a very close connection to the forests, because of the way their agricultural role tied them to activities such as the gathering of fuel and fodder.
Another struggle with different gender implications
In other instances, a set of similar local struggles do not fall into these gendered patterns. The particularities of global capitalist production also produce contexts in which men become the leading figures in grassroots resistance to ecological destruction. So in Brazil, Chico Mendes organised the resistance of a union of male rubber tappers to deforestation. This deforestation was being brought about by an alliance between the Brazilian government and beef barons, who wanted to clear the rainforests to provide grazing land. The rubber tappers’ movement against deforestation was supported by male dominated environmentalist organisations in the wealthy countries. Environmentalists from the international urban middle class also helped to create alliances between the rubber tappers and the Indigenous people of the Amazon. The indigenous people were also threatened by deforestation.
In many ways the rubber tappers struggle in the Amazon is parallel to the Chipko movement. In both cases, a group of local people who have made a traditional economic use of the forest are resisting forest clearing. In both cases, the clearing of the forests is inspired by an alliance between a central government and business interests. In one case, the vagaries of capitalism pit local women against the deforesters; in another case the vagaries of capitalism pit local men against the deforesters.
Capitalist patriarchy comes to the Global South
As capitalist imperial power comes out of Europe, colonizing the rest of the world, it is facing up to very different patriarchal gender regimes. The early response of colonial governments is to enslave or kill off the local population without regard to gender. Beyond this, capitalism begins to institute a regime of paid labour, not unlike the regime of the home countries. What they are most likely to do in this process is to attract the most powerful gender in the local population by offering them paid work. Access to the monetary economy. In mining, landed estates or manufacturing. Doing this, they are making assumptions about money and gender that are already entrenched in the rich countries. Treating men as breadwinners. On the other hand, to maintain the colonial advantage of super exploitation they are not actually paying these men a living wage. They are assuming that women will supplement the family’s cash income by engaging in at least some subsistence production. Tying women to their villages and further closing off their options to move to urban cash employment.
As Federici mentions, this new patriarchal development is not just a cultural phenomenon of capitalist patriarchy coming out of Europe. It is also enabled by women’s role in reproduction. It is harder for women to achieve the mobility necessary to chase new opportunities in paid employment opened up by capitalism in the Global South. As in Europe a traditional patriarchal gender order is maintained by a set of events that also advantages men relative to women in the subordinate classes.
So, what are the political implications? Women must defend community resources against new capitalist incursions. To maintain the subsistence production necessary to keep the family going. While the men are elsewhere, employed or looking for a paid job. This is why the example of the Chipko struggle is, as Shiva argues, something of a model for the politics of gender and capital in the Global South. This is not because women are innately closer to nature. It is because the colonial imperialist regime puts women in this position — defending community subsistence resources against yet new incursions of capitalist appropriation.
Another example is the struggle against commercial fishing trawlers that has taken place on the Indian coast. While men are getting jobs in commercial fishing, women are losing access to a cheap protein resource for their households — from artisanal local fishing. At the same time, this is by no means a universal phenomenon. In low paid industrial jobs in much of the Global South, women are preferred as workers. Those left behind in the villages struggle to get by without their support for local food provision.
The Southern African example
I want to finish this account by making a few comments coming out of research in Southern and Eastern Africa. In the countries colonized by the British, a typical pattern was for less agriculturally productive regions to be set aside as ‘native reserves’. The idea was that women would stay on the native reserves conducting household food provision for their families. Meanwhile men of working age would go into urban areas to get jobs in the towns. Or get jobs on agricultural estates owned by white people to do paid work. Or get jobs in mining. This arrangement was enforced through laws restricting the movement of rural people. Families were not permitted to migrate to the cities. Only those with paid employment, the men, would get temporary permits. The remittances brought home by men were intended to provide necessary purchased inputs for the household economy.
Employed men would bring some money back to the village for the household economy. A common pattern was for men to attempt to maintain control over these resources by buying cattle. The cattle would be grazed on the common grazing land owned by the village and minded by apprentice young relatives acting as herders. It was a convention that men would gain prestige by accumulating more cattle and they were reluctant to sell them. In effect, they retained a retirement stake for when they left work. Cattle could be sold in a family emergency, an illness or expensive ceremony. While in many ways the patriarchy of the village was not compromised by this arrangement, women as heads of households exercized authority while husbands were absent.
To what extent has the conflict between capitalist encroachment and the defence of the commons informed this situation? To begin with, the original appropriation of the best land by white farmers is still a large part of the economic structure of these countries. This land has been lost to capitalist agriculture. The effect has been dependence on paid work and the commercial economy. Despite this, the community ownership of the native reserves has been a remarkably resilient feature of these economies. The independence struggles of the previous century have made it difficult to wind this community ownership back. Despite constant advice from economic experts to do this. A traditional chief may make arbitrary seizures of community land, trying to sell the land and make money. With local families defending their de facto ownership. Resistance to these developments has been intense from both men and women in rural families. There is a constant danger of sabotage and armed resistance if arbitrary seizures are too extreme. Land immediately adjacent to the residential village is most at risk while plots further out are safe.
In terms of gender, men’s ownership of livestock is a key aspect of gendered inequality. It also creates problems for the subsistence economy. The fact that half of the village land is used as a common grazing resource prevents this land being used to deal with food security issues. An example of men’s power in the villages and its impact on the very livelihoods of their families. Up to half of the children under five are stunted from malnutrition. Partly due to inadequate nutrition and partly due to gastric infections coming out of poor sewerage provision. As well, the push from governments, most NGOs and many local men is to use this local community land for cash crops of one kind or another. Imagining that this will solve food problems as people use their income to buy food. These projects rarely work and very often reflect the demands of men for employment. In other words, there is no outside support to improve the productivity of the agriculture that could in fact feed people.
There is a variability between men’s participation in agriculture for household food provision. In South Africa it is rare to see rural men tilling the fields and growing crops. If they are unemployed, they are hanging out in the village hoping for work or going elsewhere to find it. However, in Zimbabwe after the cash economy collapsed, many rural men returned to their villages and participated in feeding their families through their work on the land. There are a few projects for rural food security in Africa that concentrate on subsistence household food security. At least as an aspect of a more commercial strategy. For example, tree crops for sale and for household food, with a side project for growing vegetables for household consumption. Projects like this are most likely to be taken up by women. They see it as their responsibility to feed the family. In addition, men who are locally known as ‘strong Christians’ are more likely to join such projects. They see ‘providing for their family’ as something that can be achieved through household agriculture and not just from paid employment outside the village. They have a strong work ethic and reject alcohol consumption. The downside of this pattern is that men who have strong social connections with each other in the village — through drinking together and through traditional religious ceremonies — are hard to recruit to household food provision. To strategies of subsistence agriculture that may actually work for food security.
Conclusions
Taken as a whole, these examples suggest the complexity of the interaction of patriarchy and the commercial economy in the Global South. While there is some benefit in a broad brushstrokes’ narrative of how this all works, the detail is important. I think it is much easier to get at this if we do not assume that capitalism entails a particular type of patriarchy. We should not assume that capitalist patriarchy is an unchangeable package, the same across the heresies, the witch craze, the enclosure movement and the patchwork of struggles in the Global South more recently. Or even that capitalism itself, as a social imaginary and economic structure, implies patriarchy. Let us look at how this is playing out case by case. I mean for me, there is one sense in which patriarchy and capitalism are inevitably linked and this is not the one we hear about most. Patriarchy is an essential prop for capitalism because it creates some of the psychological foundations required for any class society. The expectation of hierarchy arising out of the patriarchal family. The competitive masculinity that turns boys to men in the patriarchal household. Like the radical feminists of the seventies, I am more inclined to see capitalism coming out of patriarchy than the other way around.