Posts Tagged ‘Culture & Language’

Goddess Laksmi and Cultural Traditions of Rice: Implications for the Status of Women

August 2, 2011

Bidyut Mohanty, Institute of Social Sciences (Delhi)

There is worldwide concern at the falling proportion of girls among youth populations in developing countries, especially in China and India which are otherwise making news as rising economies. Recent census figures in both countries present a still increasing gender gap and thus an alarming trend toward an expanding ‘female deficit’ over the decades. A deeper analysis of this phenomenon indicates that it is related in no small measure to the non-recognition of the economic value of women’s contribution to production processes and household work.

A glance into traditions of economy and culture can provide clues to solving this problem. The historical experiences of Asian societies, especially rice-growing regions, show that even in a prevailing patriarchal milieu, recognition of women’s participation in the agricultural process and household management has contributed to enhancing the status of women. This is illustrated by study of a social reform initiative in Eastern India which shaped popular consciousness in the sixteenth century through a literary creation rooted in the myth of goddess Laksmi, in which practices from the rural economy and the household helped convey a socially transformative message whose ritual observance continues on a mass scale until today and laid the foundation for a relatively more egalitarian and gender-just society.

The 16th-century regionalization of Indian culture accompanied the rise of great kingdoms and the unfolding of religious transformations. Regional languages challenged the dominance of Sanskrit by producing a rich variety of literature, while the great epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata were translated into local languages and adapted to local cultures. The Laksmi Purana (Laksmi Vratakatha) reflects this tendency. The purana genre is a popular Indian scripture, particularly in the tradition of Hinduism, that usually depicts the story of a goddess or god and sometimes imparts a radical message to the masses of common people. The Bhakti movement provides the example of social reformers like Balaram Das, who wrote the Laksmi Purana. This wave of the sixteenth century Bhakti movement in Odisha differed considerably from earlier phases insofar as it provided a social and philosophical orientation to the movement. Its two main sects challenged the existing patriarchal and caste hierarchy and the subordinate role of women by recruiting members from all castes, and advocating that the status of any individual be based on work, rather than birth.

The goddess Laksmi, known traditionally as the consort of Lord Vishnu, is regarded in Odisha as the consort of Lord Jagannath and resides with her husband within the boundaries of his temple at Puri while enjoying her own separate temple in his sacred precinct. The twelfth-century Jagannath temple is still considered the most important in Odisha since the god has always been recognized as the main deity of the royal family and the region itself.

In the sixteenth century different sects of the Bhakti movement worshipped Lord Jagannath, who was regarded as the incarnation of both Vishnu and Krishna. Thus the Jagannath temple became an important site for the reformers to impart their radical social messages. Balaram Das used the precinct of the temple to recite his purana among the women.

Laksmi is also known widely as Annapurna, provider of the bounty of rice. Examining the way Laksmi is conceptualized reveals her links to the cultural practices of rice cultivation. Women generally uphold cultural practices, and rice culture is no exception. The unique place of this grain in shaping the lifestyle of the people whose sustenance and livelihood depend on it is seen in the fact that only rice is associated with a goddess – Laksmi. In rice-cultivating regions in India, each stage of production is carried out on an auspicious day and rituals are performed. Odisha, a predominantly rice-producing state, knows various rituals marking stages of rice cultivation such as ploughing, transplantation, harvesting, and storage. Thus rice and Laksmi are interchangeable concepts in local imagination, and in the rural areas rituals have been performed from the sixteenth century until today. Women try to observe these rituals with devotion lest the displeasure of the goddess affect the harvest and bring starvation, concerns that ensure care and attention to the process of production. During the annual worship of Laksmi, women still recite the purana written by Das.

The purana story reads like this. Once Laksmi went out of the temple of Puri in disguise to observe devotees worshipping her on her designated day. She was disappointed to find only one untouchable woman worshipping. Being pleased with her, Laksmi went to her house and granted her a number of boons. On returning to the temple her husband Jagannath, provoked by his brother Balaram, rebuked her and demanded that she leave the temple since by visiting an untouchable household she had become an out-caste. Offended by the lack of appreciation of her visit to a devotee irrespective of caste, she cursed the brothers to be deprived of food until she fed them. She vowed to teach them a lesson by showing her own capabilities, and since she was in charge of the all the food grains of the mortal world as well as household affairs, she saw to it that the brothers went hungry. She resorted to this punishing act also realizing that otherwise men of the mortal world would not care for their women.

Deprived of food, the brothers roamed the land until they finally landed on the doorstep of the household where Laksmi was living. Laksmi fed them, declaring herself an untouchable. Realizing his fault, Jagannath promised her autonomy to move freely among her devotees without caste barriers, and allowed members of all castes to share offerings to him without stigmatization as out-caste. Jagannath receives offerings of cooked food to this day.

As mentioned in the story, women were in charge of managing the food grains at the household level. Women’s participation in the reality of agriculture work today remains obvious in rice-farming areas. Scholars from Boserup (1970) to Joan Menchor (1978) and Pranab Bardhan (1974) have all pointed out that women contribute significantly to almost every stage of rice cultivation. It has been observed that the girl child has a better chance to survive in rice-farming areas compared to areas where wheat cultivation dominates. Evidence also suggests that both the infant mortality ratio and the gender ratio (males per hundred females) are lower, thus less adverse to women, in the rice-producing regions as compared to wheat producing.

Thus it is that the Bhakti movement of the sixteenth century left traces visible to this day in rural Odisha. In the purana story not only does Laksmi assert her autonomy but, more importantly, she challenges dominant caste discriminations and raises the status of women’s labor. In the present global context some important lessons can be derived from this example. For although India and China have adopted policy measures to protect the girl child, year after year the proportion of female children continues to decline despite growing signs of social and economic prosperity. Such trends seem to indicate that cultural attitudes and perceptions may now be one of the greatest obstacles that policymakers and reformers confront. Although they should continue to advocate policies that increase job opportunities for women, they must also turn their attention to developing strategies that enhance the perceived value of women’s contributions to economy and society. Local mythologies may offer fertile ground for such activism, as the Laksmi Purana so eloquently suggests.

Bidyut Mohanty, Ph. D (Delhi) is Head of Women’s Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in New Delhi. She has been a Visiting Professor in the Global and International Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the coordinator of an ISS and UNDP project on capacity building of elected women leaders in local government in India, and as well as of a project sponsored by the National Commission on the protection of child rights.

Suggested Reading

Bardhan, Pranab (1974). ‘On Life and Death Question.’ Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, August.

Boserup, Ester (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development, London, Allen and Unwin.

Menchor, Joan (1978). Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu: Past Origins, Present Transformation and Future Prospects.  New Delhi, Allied Publisher Ltd.

Mohanty, Bidyut (2008). “Status of Women in an agrarian Economy: Deconstruction of Oriya Laksmi vrata katha.”  In Shimkhada, Deepak and Phyllis Herman, The Constant and Changing Face of Goddesses: The Goddess Tradition of Asia. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Mohanty, Satya P (2008). “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as a Radical Pedagogy.” diacrities /Fall 2008

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Global Era Imaginaries: Myth Today

July 22, 2011


Victor Faessel, UC Santa Barbara

Since the 1950s, a concerted pushback against the narrative of secular modernity has followed post-colonial independence in many countries around the world and was accompanied by a proliferation of nationalist counternarratives grounded in ethnicity, religion, and shared memory. Indigenous traditions, myths, and histories became a rallying point. Yet this recovery often implied the recasting of traditions, sometimes reframing specific myths and mythic figures to assert exclusionary communitarian boundaries. In some cases this reaction was a form of resistance to the secular national state (e.g., political Islam, the Iranian theocratic revolution), in others it reflected tension with social groups seen to compete for scarce political or economic resources or was rooted in underlying animosity toward a near neighbor (e.g., Hindu nationalism). Not seldom was it a compounding of these and other factors, complicated by the legacy of colonial administration of institutions like the census, which fostered non-indigenous categories such as race, class, and property rights.

This recovery and valorization of indigenous knowledge in post-colonial states posed a serious challenge to some of the foundational assumptions of Euro-American ethnography and comparative religious studies. Ostensibly scientific approaches came under fire for supplying ideological constructs that legitimized colonial rule, foremost of which was a dialectical other—the lethargic, darker-skinned “primitive” with his irrational beliefs, childish stories, and non-productive ways. This other served as a foil for the Enlightenment program which itself partly served to justify western domination and economic exploitation. As unquestioned and commonsensical as these prejudices had seemed at the time, this cultural script of the enlightened west has the form of a mythic discourse: a story broadly accepted by its primary audience of savagery overcome by reason, of backwardness transformed into (linear) progress vouchsafed by superior European “civilization” and, more recently, by the “providential” (and therefore exceptional) status of the United States of America as the light of the world.

Economic globalization displays western liberalism’s master narrative newly rationalized and reformatted: globally integrated “free” markets fostering “free” consumer-entrepreneur citizens and rising western-style “standards” of living. Global economic integration speeds the erosion of traditional lifeways in societies everywhere, yet this external pressure is resisted in different ways. Culture is resilient; it can be creative under pressure, can accommodate or integrate non-native ideological constructs and myths; indigenous narratives may be reshaped to concord with emergent needs of resistance and survival, as the cases of indigenous Hawaiian or Christianized Congolese groups demonstrate in different ways (Friedman and Friedman, 2008).

Against this backdrop, a consideration of myth in the contemporary global setting ought to recognize the term’s usefulness for identifying a form of narrative discourse bound up with ethnic, communal, religious, and national identities that are anything but static. Myth should be defined in a manner cognizant of the layered intersections of belief, political and historical consciousness, cultural reproduction, and human agency woven through social formations, and be sensitive to the diverse pressures confronting post-colonial and indigenous societies and subjectivities (deculturation, fragmentation, development and IMF agendas, exposure to global economic cycles). But a capacious definition of myth would also recognize that the current global situation presents multiple “modernities” and nationalisms that, while generating indigenous forms of distortion and erosion, also produce assimilative and creolizing tendencies that impact bodies of narrative tradition including myth, legend, and folklore.

Myth thus defined is clearly distinct from two uses of the word common today that remain bound to its dialectical position in Christian polemics, Enlightenment visions, and colonial projections. Today ‘myth’ is commonly equated with little else but organized deception, false belief, and anachronism—as a kind of ideological critique. A conception of myth that is faithful to its actualities must acknowledge the centrality of imagination and sentiment for individuals and social groups alike, and affirm narrative’s constitutive role where social imagination, sentiments, and agency intersect. Mythic stories typically hold a kind of authoritative status and/or possess explanatory value for a group’s members, be they entire nations, sub-national and ethnic groups, class strata, religious and diasporic communities, or subsets of any of these. Elites often hold up myths as this kind of authority. Myths are usually aligned with tradition and identity, yet they should not be equated solely with religious identity because secular identities and recrudescent or “invented” historical traditions may also ground themselves in myths. As core components of a group’s repository of images and stories, myths help to constitute and express a social or cultural imaginary, and supply discursive substance for ideologies. Myths are often set in a timeless or exemplary past, yet some convey the shape of imagined futures in the form of eschatologies, revolutionary goals, utopias, and dystopias. Both taken for granted and frequently evoked, mythic images and stories are always reinterpreted to meet the challenges of the present. Myths, as implicit appeals to group sentiments in maintaining, reasserting, or reconstituting communal order and identity, may be regarded as a mode of discourse. They count among the significant repertoire of scripts and images around which social groups cohere, but they may also be divisive, and over them members can and do contend. In sum, myths contribute decisively to the habitus, the nomos, and to the discursive and performative activity of cultural reproduction and social change.

It seems reasonable to count mythic stories among the artifacts of imagination that accompany every phase of human movement across global space and time. Implied with the human encounters of migration, trade and exploration is a dialectics of exchange and mutual influence. Cultural forms are thereby transported and transformed. This is entirely consistent with conceptions of the globalizing process that see it as an intermittent but longstanding and non-singular process.

Myths constellate themes, plots, and character types that continuously infuse the universal human activity of storytelling, and so perdure outside of the traditional, community-constituting stories and cosmologies in both high/classical and popular literatures as well as in film, TV, manga, video games, etc. The ongoing work on mythic images and themes is carried forward here, for reception and reinterpretation are not limited to text-literate audiences for whom cultural canons are matters of schooling. Diasporic communities, multi-ethnic families, overseas migration, and of course media stimulate the global flow of peoples, stories and images, and thereby generate sensitivities toward cultural others that intensify myth making, adaptation, and use. Myth remains bound to the dynamism and vitality driving the globalization of culture.

Victor Faessel is Program Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Secretary of the Global Studies Consortium. He is also Managing Editor of the Encyclopedia of Global Studies (Helmut Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds., forthcoming from Sage Publications) to which he has contributed an essay that is the basis for this adaptation.

Suggested Reading
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (1983). Verso, 2006.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota,
1996.

- – -. Fear of Small Numbers. Duke, 2006.

Bottici, Chiara. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge, 2007.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 2nd edn. Eerdmans, 1998.

Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. Chicago, 1998.

Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm and Jonathan Friedman. Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization. The Anthropology of Global Systems. AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State from Christian Militias to Al-Qaeda. California, 2009.

Lal, Vinay. Empire of Knowledge. Pluto Press, 2002.

Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth. Chicago, 1999.

Nandy, Ashis. Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion. Permanent Black, 2002.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. “Representing the Rise of the Rest as Threat. Media and Global Divides.” Global Media and Communication. 2009 (5:2), 221-237.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon, 1978.

Steger, Manfred. The Rise of the Global Imaginary. Oxford, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke, 2004.

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The Role of Universities in Cultural Heritage Protection

May 20, 2011

nullDr. Helaine Silverman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The global tourism industry has generated intense interest in and pressure on major archaeological and historic sites around the world. In addition, ethnic, religious, political and environmental disputes have arisen around some of these places. The field of cultural heritage management addresses these and other issues. This brief paper discusses two important cultural heritage management and research projects conducted by faculty affiliates of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP) at the University of Illinois. Their work highlights the role of universities in cultural heritage protection.

In 1992 Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, Gujarat state, India, that had been built atop the site considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu god, Rama. Deadly riots between Muslims and Hindus ensued. Ten years later, 57 Hindu train passengers were killed by Indian Muslims as they returned from Ayodhya, an attack prompted by Hindu preparations to build a new shrine in Ayodhya. Hindus immediately retaliated for the train attack and soon Gujarat was engulfed by bloodshed and widespread destruction of homes, shops and religious sites. Seen alongside UNESCO’s mantra that cultural heritage belongs to all humankind and must be respected, protected, and embraced, the violence in Gujarat challenged the idealistic notion of universal cultural heritage.

This was the context in which four professors from the Department of Landscape Architecture, in association with Indian partners from the Baroda Trust, undertook a heritage conservation project at Champaner-Pavagadh, a Hindu-Muslim contested site in Gujarat. The landscape intervention plan formulated by my colleagues Amita Sinha, James Wescoat, Gary Kesler and D. Fairchild Ruggles aimed to connect the residential population of Champaner city with the sacred hill of Pavagadh and in so doing mitigate the explosive potential of this pilgrimage site. They paid equal attention to the existing medieval mosque and to the Hindu pilgrimage summit so as to conserve culturally hybrid sites. Their design enhanced historical paths, water features and human settlements (Sinha 2004; Sinha et al. 2003) and “harmonize[d] contemporary tourist and pilgrim interests; illuminate[d] the manifold historical contribution of Sultanate, Rajput, Jain and tribal groups; and thereby deepen[ed] contemporary appreciation of the pluralistic cultural legacy at Champaner-Pavagadh” (Wescoat 2007). Their plan also encompassed local community development by means of shop houses and communal spaces (Sinha et al. 2005).

Their achievement of multiple goals was demonstrated by the fact that while Gujarat burned, Champaner-Pavagadh experienced far less physical destruction. Only two years later the Illinois team helped India gain World Heritage Site status for Champaner-Pavagadh as a testament to its “perfect blend of Hindu-Moslem architecture” and its continuous Hindu pilgrimage landscape.

My colleagues are emphatic that their conservation/protection plan succeeded because it was not premised on the sacred hill summit alone. Rather, they approached Champaner-Pavagadh as a complex environment with integrated social, economic, political, religious, and natural features. Also, they were able to make a long-term commitment to stewardship of the site, eschewed a narrow focus on building preservation, and brought to the project an academically deep understanding of the Mughal Empire, Hindu sacred landscapes, Indian politics and history, and local traditions.

Luang Prabang, Laos, offers a different scenario of heritage protection. Luang Prabang was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, in part as an emergency measure taken by UNESCO against its imminent destruction by a major Chinese highway that would soon run through the middle of the beautiful ancient city en route to Vientiane. The highway was diverted to comply with UNESCO requirements and Luang Prabang is currently praised as “an outstanding example of the fusion of traditional architecture and Lao urban structures with those built by the European colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its unique … townscape illustrates a key stage in the blending of these two distinct cultural traditions” (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/479).

My School of Architecture colleagues—Lynne Dearborn and John Stallmeyer—traveled to Luang Prabang to study its historic built environment and its management by the Maison du Patrimoine. In the 2010 book resulting from their fieldwork, Inconvenient Heritage, they observe that the official description (above) belies critical problems in the city, especially as generated by tourism. Once the communist government opened Laos to tourism in 1989 and legalized private enterprise, the city’s decrepit colonial villas began to be refurbished as hotels, numerous homes became guest houses, and restaurants and shops opened to service the needs of the tourism sector. Although dozens of reports have been filed with UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee since 2001 concerning threats to Luang Prabang’s built environment, Professors Dearborn and Stallmeyer found little attention being paid to the drastic changes that tourism has created in the lives of Luang Prabang’s residents. For instance, long lines of orange-robed monks on their early morning collection of alms (which reciprocally links them to the local population) now run the gauntlet past gawking, camera-toting tourists. And the internal multi-village organization of the ancient city has almost disappeared with the overflow of the tourism economy.

Dearborn and Stallmeyer’s analysis of the Maison du Patrimoine’s management plan reveals a singular representation of the city’s cultural heritage that erases “particular physical and socio-cultural pasts that are seen as unpalatable for tourists, are incongruent with contemporary development, or do not serve the political needs of the current Lao PDR government.” Luang Prabang today dutifully attends the needs of a global tourism industry but, as Dearborn and Stallmeyer observe, “the erasures necessitated by this process leave little room for the performance of locally embedded everyday activities or multiple readings of heritage.” Moreover, the World Heritage inscription and its resulting architectural preservation and urban redevelopment “have refined and redefined what heritage is in Luang Prabang, freezing the physical environment of the city as an imagined space/time.” The result is a physical environment increasingly transformed into a touristic display, rendering invisible Luang Prabang’s embedded, intangible heritage.

University scholar-practitioners are especially qualified to conduct cultural heritage projects. Our academic training makes us aware of the multiple conflicting institutions and interests that surround all cultural heritage initiatives. We argue that to undertake site protection with unquestioning adherence to adages of universal cultural heritage, or uncritical belief in the inherent value of heritage for the construction of identity, or to automatically advocate economic development through cultural heritage tourism, is to invite failure on the ground. Because we are not a profit-driven business, are reasonably unconstrained by time (at least until our grants run out), and have a university base, we do not operate in the service of influential interest groups and we are sensitive to local stakeholders whose voices typically receive inadequate attention from those in power.

Hopefully, as more universities develop programs in cultural heritage, like CHAMP’s, and their graduates move into the field of heritage management we should see greater success in the democratic management and benign sustainability of all kinds of cultural heritage sites and intangible traditions.

Helaine Silverman is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the director of CHAMP (Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices).

References Cited and Recommended

Dearborn, Lynne and John Stallmeyer
2010            Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Logan, William S.
2007            Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 33-52. Springer, New York.

Ruggles, D. Fairchild and Helaine Silverman (editors)
2009            Intangible Heritage Embodied. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine (editor)
2010            Contested Cultural Heritage. Religion, National, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine and D. Fairchild Ruggles (editors)
2007            Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Spinger, New York.

Sinha, Amita
2004            Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park: A Design Approach. International Journal of Heritage Studies 10(2):117-128.

Sinha, Amita, James L. Wescoat, Jr., Gary Kesler, and D. Fairchild Ruggles
2003            Champaner-Pavagadh Cultural Sanctuary. Gujarat, India. Design proposal and report (48 pp.) submitted to Heritage Trust, Baroda, India. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign.

Wescoat, James L., Jr.
2007            The Indo-Islamic Garden: Conflict, Conservation, and Conciliation in Gujarat, India. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 53-77. Springer, New York.

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Creating the Global Studies Curriculum – A Space for the Local?

July 13, 2009

Jack Luletulips-japan

In Fall 2006, Lehigh University created an undergraduate major in Global Studies. In this essay, I examine theoretical, methodological and pedagogical approaches ultimately chosen for the new curriculum. In particular, I consider our attempt to emphasize the local in our global study.[1]

Discrete research and teaching on global topics had gone at Lehigh for more than a century. However, the attacks of 9-11-01, just 90 minutes from our university, galvanized faculty and students to more fully internationalize Lehigh’s campus. Faculty took on the role of globalizing research and teaching.

One of our first theoretical and pedagogical decisions: Out of the many ways in which a university might internationalize curriculum and research, we decided to focus on globalization.

A number of factors lay behind the choice. One was focus. In some Global Studies programs, students choose from an array of courses, sometimes hundreds, tied together only by virtue of international content and concern. Globalization gave us a subject of study for teaching and research.

Another factor was the importance of the subject: No matter how it is defined – and we have some faculty who deny its existence – globalization must be considered one of the defining terms of modern life.

A third factor was its interdisciplinary potential: We have four colleges – 18 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences alone – and yet each discipline was engaged in studies that took up globalization.

In Spring 2006, we submitted a proposal to create the Globalization and Social Change Initiative. It was immediately accepted – and funded. I had headed one of the working groups and was asked to be director of the Initiative. By Fall 2006, we were up and running.

I should explain what is meant at Lehigh by an “Initiative.” The concept, at one level, is similar to a research institute or center. Primary functions of the Initiative are to foster and promote faculty research.

Yet at Lehigh, and other campuses, research institutes do not get involved with the undergraduate curriculum, nor do they sponsor extracurricular student clubs and activities.

The concept of an Initiative allows us to support almost any activity on campus that falls under the rubric of globalization and social change. We do traditional center activities, such as hosting research symposia and conferences. But we also created the undergraduate Global Studies major and plan a graduate degree in Global Studies. Too, we sponsor international student clubs and activities. The breadth is rich and satisfying.

Why an initiative in “globalization and social change?” Again, theoretical and pedagogical considerations guided us.

Globalization, we felt strongly, is not simply an economic process. This was important for us to emphasize as we worked alongside our colleagues from the business college.

We believe that globalization, while surely an economic process, is also historical, social, religious, cultural and political. Globalization and social change, we felt, signified our scope.

With our understanding of globalization and social change in place, we set out to situate that understanding within the curriculum. Like many programs, we felt that a primary strength of Global Studies is its interdisciplinary nature. We tried to create a markedly interdisciplinary curriculum (and courses).

An introductory course presents students with competing notions of globalization and then proceeds through modules, each showcasing how the study of globalization is undertaken in different disciplines: history, political economy, culture and anthropology, political science and international relations, communication, sociology and others.

Students then work their way through a core curriculum made up of course work from more than eight different departments, courses specifically tailored for the major: globalization and history; the political economy of globalization; culture and globalization; politics and globalization, global communication, globalization and religion, and more. Advanced electives and a capstone research seminar round out the curriculum.

However, the Global Studies curriculum is only one part of the major. Following the work of Appadurai (1996), Pieterse (2004), and others, we felt that globalization is fruitfully studied at the local level – “the global production of locality” (Appadurai, 1996, 188). We debated how to give our students experience and tools for understanding the ways globalization is negotiated within local contexts.

As a start, we require intermediate language proficiency of our students, the equivalent of four semesters. We encourage – and gave serious consideration to requiring – a major in a foreign language but ultimately felt the credit requirements for a double major would be too intense. But language is a tool for understanding and we wanted our students to at least experience language instruction, to understand the connection between language and culture, and to know that the world does not speak English.

We also require two courses in one Area Studies program (and strongly encourage at least a minor), such as Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and others. Like Appadurai, we felt that Area Studies, though contested, still provide “a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world” (18).

Finally, we require Study Abroad, either a full semester or two six-week summer sessions. We believe that immersion in another culture is essential for our students’ education. We help students seek out service learning projects while abroad.

With good advising, students match language, Area Studies and Study Abroad. For example, a Global Studies student studying Spanish will take Latin American Studies classes, and study and work in Chile. We encourage students, while abroad, to pursue the intersections of the global and local, of “how global facts take local form” (Appadurai, 18).

The program – the Global Studies curriculum with the localizing experiences of language instruction, area studies, and study abroad – is in its infancy. Still to be determined: What are the educational – and life – outcomes of this particular balance of global and local in study of globalization?

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2004). Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Jack Lule is the Joseph B. McFadden Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Director, Globalization and Social Change Initiative at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

[1] Versions of this essay were presented to the Global Studies Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 2008, and the Global Studies Association North America Annual Conference, New York, New York, June 2008.

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Tourism, Sex, and Beirut

June 26, 2009

Ghada Masri
Beirut - Aerial View

Rebuilding a city is an enormous undertaking for any society.  In the case of Beirut, rebuilding is a constant state of affairs.  The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), and most recently, the Israeli attack and siege of the city in summer 2006, is cause to reflect on this cycle of destruction and reconstruction.  My work in Beirut focuses on the physical reconstruction and design of the city.  Yet, when questioned about these processes, my informants regularly alluded to the increasing sex-tourism in downtown Beirut.  This brief article relates some of my findings regarding sex-tourism in Beirut as expressed to me by locals, tour guides, tourists, and some who worked within the industry.

Beirut serves the pleasures of its tourists.  It is the chameleon city, catering to any desire. As many locals and visitors liked to say, ‘anything you want can be found in abundance in Beirut.’

Two types of nightclubs operate in Beirut—nightclubs and super-nightclubs.  The financial exchange for sexual favors may or may not occur in the nightclub setting.  Super-nightclubs contain nudity and strip shows, and hold the expectation that sexual favors will occur at the right price.  Those women who become good dancers are no longer expected to perform sexual acts, but may do so for a considerable price.  The young women contracted as dancers are often unaware of the true nature of the work they are expected to perform.  When they do arrive in Beirut, the hiring contractor (the ‘pimp’) illegally confiscates their passports and forces them into sex work through the super-nightclub circuit and through special hire.  Women who refuse are violently raped and beaten.

Lebanese law permits prostitution, but requires that brothels be licensed.  In an attempt to limit legal prostitution, the government has restricted the granting of new licenses.  Thus, many brothels and prostitutes practice illegally. In 1998, then President Amil Lahoud passed a law forbidding brothels where women had rooms and beds for sex work.  However, to bypass this law, the official status of these establishments changed to “nightclubs,” where women were picked up and taken to other locations, permitting the shadow operation of the sex industry.  The official law permits the government to claim a restrictive stance on prostitution, yet reap the benefits of increased tourist revenue from those seeking sexual adventure.

Beyond the projection of Beirut as a playground, the sexual consumption of female bodies becomes a tourist attraction.  Additionally, the consumed bodies are not merely marked as female, but certain bodies are sold as commodities of higher or lesser value based on national origin.  This is reflective of the global order and hierarchy between nations. Near the top of this value pyramid are women from Belarus, Ukraine, and Romania who take approximately US $1000 per night (most of this going to her pimp).  Women positioned with lower value are Ethiopian who cost US $25 per nightly entertainment, followed by Filipino women and finally, Sri Lankan women, who take 10,000 LL (US $6.50).  The lower valued women also tend to operate independent of the night clubs and tend to cater to local Lebanese men.

A more recent addition to the sex industry is an increase in participation from Iraqi women.  Those who have lost their husbands to the United States bombardment of Iraq, find their way to Beirut, via Damascus, into the sex-work industry.  For most, this is their only means of survival, especially if they have no other training or skills in which to support themselves.  If they are young, their pimp will sell them as virgins, which fetch the highest price in the sex market (US $1000 +).  Moreover, the pimp usually contracts with a medical doctor who performs hymen reconstruction surgery on the young women so that they may be resold as virgins.

A common perception by many local Beirutis is that behind the wealth displayed by the Khaleej, is moral ‘filth’ in their beliefs and practices.  Rami, a young man who is subcontracted to paint the newly erected facades of the buildings in downtown, holds an additional job as a driver for one of the super-nightclub pimps.  He explains his perception of downtown Beirut and its connection to sexual consumption.

“Half the people downtown don’t buy anything.  It’s nice, but there are nicer and cheaper places.  It’s [downtown] not for us; it’s not for the Lebanese—not for the wages of two days work for one night here.  It’s made for tourists, mostly al-khaligiya [Arabs from the Gulf] … the Saudi tourist goes two places, downtown with family and supernights with prostitutes … Saudis are filthy, I wouldn’t work painting their homes.  When you work for them, they own you.  The Khalij are dirty and if you sit with them, you get disgusted watching them eat—even though they have money, they stink.  Once I went to pick up some women from a Saudi after they had stayed with him.  They had bruises all over them.  Many Khalij like rough sex … mostly they beat the women.”

Rami’s attitudes were shared by many other Beirutis.  The city’s downtown is seen as not belonging to them, but rather for tourists, specifically those from the Gulf States in search of sexual adventure.  The location of sexual adventure in BCD is witnessed by many Lebanese as a place that permeates with moral corruption that presents a danger to Lebanese society as a whole.  Linda, the wife of a lieutenant in the Lebanese Army said she does not visit the central district at night during the summer tourist season, especially not with her young fifteen year old daughter.  She explains that, “The Khaleej come every summer and destroy our city.  They have money, but they are still dirty and uncivilized.  They are a bad influence on our society and young women.”  Although needed for economic growth by the state and the tourism industry, sex tourism is perceived to make Lebanese culture vulnerable to uncivilized Khaleeji morality.  This contradiction is further compounded by yet another, namely the tension between conflicting notions of morality and civility, as Lebanese struggle to define themselves as modern and western.

Based on the manner in which sex tourism is discussed, the presumption is that only Khaleejis are engaged in sex tourism.  The belief that European men would not come all the way to Beirut for sex with European women and the assumption that Lebanese women do not engage in ‘that sort of behavior,’ serves as an organizing principle to understand the emphasis on Khaleeji sex tourists.  This basis permits the construction of the Khaleej as a dirty moral danger to Lebanese culture.

Lebanese women are also involved in sex work, however, they only prostitute with foreign men for fear that in providing sexual services to Lebanese men, their families and local communities may find out.  This is a key strategy used to manage reputation, a most valued social capital that influences all aspects of one’s life.  A woman’s reputation alone is not only at stake, but the reputation of her kin which can have devastating effects on clan networks and economic access.

The myths of modernity and rebirth drape the image and reputation of Beirut as a place of desire where the fantasy of consumption, designer goods, and commoditized bodies are possible.  Beirut’s cosmopolitan spirit, taken to excess, as many things are in Beirut, encompasses its tourist consumption of sexualized and nationalized female bodies.  Beirut’s cosmopolitanism is turned into an “international buffet” where women of the world, whose bodies are nationally marked (i.e. Ukrainian, Ethiopian, Syrian, and Iraq), are presented on a sampling platter to the highest bidder—giving new meaning to ‘national cuisine.’

Through the prevalent myths of Beirut’s resurrection, contradictions emerge between western modernity and moral corruption on one hand and Khaleeji (eastern) morality and sexual desire on the other.  In one sense, they are both viewed as corrupting by different segments of the population.  Middle and upper class communities, desiring their own pleasures and economic benefits from westernization and Lebanon’s inclusion in the global economic system, mimic western styles and mannerisms and look upon the Khaleeji tourists as animal-like—made wild by their sexual urges.  The presence of Khaleeji tourists during the summer months offends the sensibilities of many self-defined ‘cosmopolitans’ residing in the city.  Khaleeji men walking with their two or three wives and their children in tow through downtown Beirut (the heart of the city and the nation) fills many Lebanese with concern and threatens the perception of Beirut as a modern, cosmopolitan, city with a characteristic ‘Lebanese culture’ and identity.

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