Harvesting Identities: Youth, Work, and Gender in the Indian Himalayas

Abstract

An examination of young people's lichen collection in the Indian Himalayas shows how youth in the global South can imbue their work with meaning, manage their work practices, and sometimes transgress established norms in specific work settings. Building on fifteen months' intensive field research in the high Himalayas, this article describes how young men and women have used the opportunity provided by lichen collection to contest or reaffirm gendered subjectivities and acquire a sense of dignity, even in the face of extraordinary hardship. As a counterpoint to Western accounts of children's geographies, this research illustrates how gender and caste inequalities shape children's lives, highlighting the role of local space in mediating children's agency, and stressing the importance of examining young people's subjectivities. The nature of development in a location marginalized by global and regional circuits of capital is deeply contradictory.

Un análisis de la recolección de líquenes por jóvenes de los Himalayas de la India muestra cómo la juventud del Sur global puede imbuir su trabajo con significado, administrar sus prácticas de trabajo, y algunas veces transgredir las normas establecidas en entornos de trabajo específicos. Basándose en quince meses de investigaciones de campo intensivas en los Altos Himalayas, este artículo describe cómo las mujeres y hombres jóvenes han aprovechado la oportunidad proporcionada por la recolección de líquenes para rebatir o reafirmar subjetividades preconcebidas y adquirir un sentido de dignidad aún frente a extraordinarias dificultades. Como contrapunto a los informes occidentales de la geografía de niños y jóvenes, esta investigación ilustra cómo las desigualdades de sexo y casta conforman la vida de los jóvenes, recalcan el papel del espacio local en la mediación de agencias de jóvenes y hacen hincapié en la importancia de examinar la subjetividad de los jóvenes. La naturaleza del desarrollo en un área marginada por los circuitos de capital globales y regionales es profundamente contradictoria.

Key Words:

• children's geographies
• gender
• Himalayas
• India
• lichen collection
• work

关键词:

• 儿童地理学
• 性别
• 喜马拉雅山
• 印度
• 采收青苔
• 工作

Palabras clave:

• geografía de los jóvenes
• género
• Himalayas
• India
• recolección de líquenes
• trabajo

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council, U.K., and St. John's College, Cambridge, for funding the research on which this article is based, and to the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, for my attachment there in 2002–2004. I am indebted to the people of Bemni village and to my research assistant, Anita Rawat. In addition, I would like to thank Craig Jeffrey, Chris Philo, Audrey Kobayashi, and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹ A long history of literature on sociologies of work has explored the social and cultural dimensions of labor (Hodson 2001). Research within geography (McDowell 2000; Gidwani 2001; Katz 2004), history (McKibbin 1990; Berlastein 1993), sociology (Willis 1977; Bourgois 1995; Breman 1996), anthropology (Lem 1999; Freeman 2000; Parry 2003) and development studies (Lerche 1999; Jackson 1999, 2000) has explored the complex links among work, identity, and social practice. These authors broadly agree on the importance of work as a social and moral sphere in addition to its utilitarian or economic functions. Joyce (1987) argues that work has no intrinsic value and cannot be understood except as a part of the discursive fields of which it is an integral part.

² In a moving passage that partly inspired my own work, Willis (1977, 52) argues that: Despite harsh conditions and eternal direction [in the workplace], people do look for meaning and impose frameworks. They exercise their abilities and seek enjoyment in activity, even where most controlled by others. Paradoxically, they thread through the dead experiences of work a living culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat. … These cultures are not simply layers of padding between human beings and unpleasantness. They are appropriations in their own right, exercises of skill, motion, activities applied towards particular ends.

³ Katz (2004, 96) describes play as: A psychological reservoir, an oasis for imagining things and themselves differently, for experimenting with various social and cultural relations, and for exercising what Walter Benjamin (1978) called the mimetic faculty, where, in acts of seeing resemblances and creating similarities, the power of making something utterly new lies coiled. But Katz also warns against placing too much faith in play as a means of disrupting, criticizing, and, still less, transforming, social and economic conditions in rural Sudan. Her emphasis is perhaps more on children's “resilience” in the face of change, and their capacity to “rework” forms of dominance, than on possibilities for active “resistance.” Katz (2004, 242) maintains that the type of small acts of resistance described by Scott and Willis are “simply not enough to transform the social relations of opposition and exploitation that are the cornerstone of so many people's daily lives.”

⁴ For example, even as Kakar (1978) usefully challenges notions of a “universal” experience of childhood, he simultaneously generalizes about the “Indian child” based on the close observation of just a few individuals (Trawick 1992).

⁵ The 1983 National Sample Survey estimated that 17 million children are engaged in child labor in India (cited in Kabeer, Nambissan, and Subrahmanian 2003, 352). The 1991 Census data suggest 11.29 million working children. Conceptual and methodological limitations in data collection have given rise to a category of “nowhere” children (Chaudhri 1998), who are neither registered in school, and therefore excluded from school enrollment data, nor in forms of productive work recognized by official statistics, and therefore excluded from labor force data. Kabeer, Nambissan, and Subrahmanian (2003, 352) point out that according to the 1991 Census there were 92 million nowhere children in India.

⁶ See Mawdsley (1998) for a nuanced discussion of the several factors responsible for the emergence of the Uttarkhand struggle.

⁷ Among the most prominent demands of Chipko activists were calls for more raw material allocation to local people, the abolition of large-scale extraction by nonlocal forest contractors, the hiring of locally organized labor cooperatives for timber felling, and regulation of external competition to privilege local entrepreneurs (Jayal 2001; Rangan 2001).

⁸ In the 1930s the British created lists of formerly untouchable castes and indigenous tribes deemed eligible for special government assistance, the so-called scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs).

⁹ Large-scale transhumance—involving relative long-distance seasonal migration—continues to be practiced by tribal pastoralist groups in Chamoli District, such as the Bhotiyas (Hoon 1996; Nautiyal et al. 2003).

¹⁰ On the changing agricultural economy of Chamoli District and neighboring regions, see Sarkar (1998), Chauhan and Bhatt (2000), and Palni, Maikhuri, and Rao (2001).

¹¹ Although there are many differences between the nature of patriarchal dominance in various north Indian settings, the broad contours of male dominance that I describe here are mirrored in the more detailed discussion of adult gender norms in, for example, Mehta (1996), Jeffery and Jeffery (1996), and Wadley (1994).

¹² The emergence of lichen collection as a rural industry in Uttarakhand forms part of a broader increase in the economic utilization of nontimber forest products in South Asia (see, for example, Nautiyal 2000; Pande and Pande 2001; Sharma 2001; Dhar et al. 2003)

¹³ By contrast, the FD sought permits from each of the two main lichen traders in the market town. These traders were forced to pay Rs. 5,000 for every truckload of lichen leaving the area for sale in the plains. Anecdotal reports from other parts of Chamoli District suggest that large amounts of lichen are being extracted from the region. I am unaware of any studies that have examined the regional economy of lichen extraction.

¹⁴ Although the official dates for the government school holidays in 2004 were 7–22 January, in practice they extended from the last week of December until the first week of February.

¹⁵ My research among young women would have been impossible for a man. See Dyson (2005) for a full discussion of how aspects of my positionality affected the research and changed during the course of my stay in Bemni.

¹⁶ A literal translation would be: “One jelabi [a type of sticky sweet], two samosaa [a fried snack], who can trust big sister Janey?”

¹⁷ These aspects of my positionality are discussed at more length in Dyson (2005).