I was persuaded, a year or so ago, to take on the task of reading all the chapters in a book that Malcolm Cairns is pulling together (A Growing Forest of Voices, it’s called—a sequel to his 2007 collection, Voices from the Forest), both on swidden fallows in Southeast Asia. My task includes leading a ‘gender panel’ of experts to synthesize the materials presented on gender from these chapters. Some chapters fail to mention gender at all; others mention such issues in passing; and a very few provide rich description of women’s and men’s roles, respectively. Still fewer look at symbols, ideals, or values.
I have pulled together what we’ve found, and organized it in evolving drafts, see-sawing back and forth between an inductive approach of looking at the materials and building up a structure on the one hand, and trying, on the other, to link these findings to the conceptual framework outlined in The Gender Box (2013). Our synthesis remains ‘a work in progress’—partly because not all the chapters are available yet, but also because I’m struggling with a dilemma.
Most chapters in this book are written, reasonably enough, by scientists who look at fallows from either a production or a conservation perspective. They see human beings, men and women, as alternately problems or resources, and to some extent as beneficiaries; and they tend to write, if they attack the gender issue at all, about men’s and women’s division of labour, economic contributions, respective benefits—very practical, down to earth elements.
Gender scholars, on the other hand, tend to be far more interested in issues that are difficult or impossible to quantify: issues of value (social, not monetary), symbolism, ideals—the sources of people’s core motivations. Besides their (our) interests in the non-quantifiable, gender scholars use a very different language to discuss these interests, a language that is pretty much inaccessible to a normal biophysical scientist (and to much of the general population as well!).
This difference, and its relevance for the synthesis I’m struggling with, struck me forcefully last week. On Thursday last, Penny Van Esterik, a well respected member of our gender panel, made a presentation at Cornell University. She has concluded that in Southeast Asia generally, nurturance is a valued pan-human trait, not, as in the West, associated uniquely with femininity or women (look for her upcoming book with Richard O’Conner, The Dance of Nurturance). She also mentioned her pleasant and unusual observation (one I shared as well), on arriving in Southeast Asia decades ago (Thailand, in her case; Indonesia, in mine), that she and other women were generally greeted and reacted to as competent human beings—an experience at variance with much western experience. How does one portray such a fundamental observation, which has deep practical implications for the lives of Southeast Asian men and women, in such a way that it is not disregarded as idiosyncratic, personal and therefore irrelevant to those many foresters and ecologists with directly pragmatic human concerns?
My own eclectic background should give me an advantage in translating between these two very different realms of scholarly pursuit and ways of looking at the world. My career has shifted back and forth between women’s reproductive health, family planning, gender studies, on the one hand; and natural resources, forest management, agriculture, and gender on the other. I am familiar with both vocabularies and bodies of theory; yet still, bringing the two together in away that speaks to both audiences represents an enormous challenge.
Besides the issue of disciplinary language, there is a fundamental western world view, which has valued male things over female things. Although there are strong counter-currents to such ideas now, the western linking of male with good has resulted, Penny has argued persuasively, in an emphasis on competition and assertiveness—seen once in the West as male, and now seen perhaps as pan-human, traits. Certainly the natural resources literature emphasizes competition, negotiation, conflict and nearly completely ignores nurturance, sharing and cooperation—surely as ubiquitous as the former ‘masculine’ set. Nurturance is absolutely fundamental to human life. Without it, none of us would survive to adulthood.
I like Penny’s use of this term. When I’ve tried to write about my own observations in East Kalimantan, I’ve focused on Kenyah Dayak emphasis on sharing (e.g., The Longhouse of the Tarsier, 2009, or earlier in Beyond Slash and Burn, 1997). Ravi Prabhu and I struggled in the late 1990s, when we were developing the adaptive collaborative management program at CIFOR (http://www.cifor.org/acm/) with our shared perception that Asians focused on ‘cooperation’ more than ‘competition’; we wanted to build on that in our work. Both sharing and cooperation could well be subsumed under the nurturance concept.
I agree with Penny that the value of nurturance is far more widely acknowledged, accepted, assumed, in Southeast Asia than it is either in the West or in academic natural resource-related analyses. Few would deny that there are competitive and assertive women; but how many in the West are ready to acknowledge the nurturing behaviour of men? What besides nurturance is the protective ideal that many men support and enact? What besides a nurturing value is a forester’s or ecologist’s protection of plants, animals, the biosphere? And surely few have failed to observe the nurturance of most fathers with their own infants. Yet many (dare I say most?) ‘gender studies’ about men focus on ‘hegemonic masculinity’, domestic abuse, warfare, and drug use (e.g., The Other Half of Gender, 2006).
To return to my specific dilemma in this chapter, how do I incorporate this needed perspective of nurturance when the chapters provide so little nurturing ‘fodder’? How do I (we) make a ‘baby step’ toward a more balanced view of production and consumption, competition and cooperation, dividing and sharing? All of these are part of human existence and all have links to the fallows about which A Growing Forest of Voices is to be written.