Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Let me just begin by bluntly sharing my response: Yes, I think so. Soumitro's blog postings about hunger in Tippecanoe county, the health emergencies that put people on the streets, and the children who throw their parents onto the streets got me both angry and upset. The stories of Melanie and Fiona left me wondering: What goes so fundamentally wrong in a society that it justifies negligence of parents amidst the individualistic pursuits for self satisfaction and material comfort? What makes a son kick out his mother out of his apartment? Where does the pathology of individualism become so extremely pathological that a child stops feeling for his mother as she runs out of a place to stay, sleeps in homeless shelters, and goes to soup kitchens and food pantries to meet her need for food? The roots of this pathology are perhaps in the narcisstic individualism of American society that elevates the self above all else, and celebrates this form of narcissism under the BS of l

It was difficult to interview Fiona – my last interviewee of the day – because her personality was so bang opposite of Melanie, who I interviewed right before her. For one, she spoke thrice faster than Melanie and kept narrating her story in an intricate web of verbal chaos – sans chronology, sans context. Over and over again, I had to steer her back to the issue of food insecurity – because although I know everything else feeds into it, there were a lot of other intricate personal details which she presented to me that I knew had no link whatsoever to her present situation. But she talked and talked and talked – akin to someone who speaks to herself – her face furrowed with many misfortunes that life had dumped on her. She had a prolapsed uterus AND a prolapsed bladder that caused urine retention. So she went every week to a local hospital so they could put a catheter in her. Her son-in-law had thrown her out and her sons won’t keep her so she divided her time between two local

For me, the toughest part of interviewing someone who is homeless or hungry is when they start to cry while telling me about their misery. Because at that moment, seeing what life can do to you, I see in them a reflection of myself. And I shudder to think: This could be me. Once upon a time, people like Melanie – educated, sophisticated and well-paid – had everything they wanted. But then everything changed. So when Melanie – a White, middle-class woman in her mid-50s, dressed impeccably in a chiffon top and dainty costume jewelry – broke down saying she went hungry almost every single day because she felt humiliated going to a food pantry for help, I could understand where her self-esteem was hurting. Years ago, Melanie was a nurse with a degree from Purdue and life was good till an autoimmune disease forced her to give up working. What followed was a web of misfortunes – divorce, her son running into trouble with the law again and again, a second marriage and subsequent death of

In the past two days I have been listening to the stories of community members participating in our hunger and food insecurity project, and their stories are very touching. The stories range from simple to complex. Simple in that some were simple mistakes that have cost them their livelihood. Complex in that some are constrained by circumstances beyond their control. The stories of hunger and painful experiences that continually rob them of the dignity of human existence. The stories are humbling in that majority of these voices are never heard yet, they are our neighbors. Though their stories are separate, yet related in that the trio who shared their experiences with me exemplify in different ways how everyday persons in our neighborhoods struggle to get food which is a basic necessity of life in a land of plenty. America is globally regarded as a land of plenty, but listening to these stories after stories makes me wonder aloud. Having been involved in a similar study in previous se

For anonymity’s sake, I will call him Ralph – a Purdue alum who once had everything he needed in life, until a rare form of arthritis debilitated him, elbowing him out of the workforce and leaving him in his present condition – homeless. Like my earlier interviewee, Laura, Ralph too had no bitterness in him, no animosity towards a system that had few safety nets for sick people, no one to blame, no anger at all – which surprised me – yet again. How does one do it? I wondered. But Ralph seemed to have no clear answer for his positive outlook. All he said was that when one suddenly found himself in a predicament like the one he was facing, one simply survived it – a simple choice between sink or swim. Unlike Laura, however, Ralph has no family members – being the only child of deceased parents who were the only children of their parents. He never married and is in no relationship at present. His friends – about five, who hadn’t drifted away – help him with gas for his vehicle and the

For anonymity’s sake, I will call her Laura – a face I will never forget and a story I will cherish for a lifetime. That is because within the scope of an hour-long culture-centered in-depth interview, I realized she – who couldn’t afford an apartment of her own and who wasn’t even sure where her next meal was going to come from – was nonetheless superior to me on so many different levels. She was wiser. Calmer. More patient. More level-headed. More grateful for whatever little she had. And her expressions of faith in God could well be turned into a motivational bestseller. I am not being sarcastic or remotely facetious when I say this. Listening to Laura discuss her fight with hunger and food insecurity in Tippecanoe County, I realized here was a person who was not willing to accuse a single individual or social system for her fate despite being faced with the most inclement circumstances in life. Born in a socio-economically depressed family, and growing up with a grandmother who w

In articulating communicative practices utilized by the North and West in marginalizing women in the global South, Dutta (2011) logically shows how local elites and Not for profit organizations are complicit in gendered marginalization of the Subaltern women often utilizing the rhetoric of participation, empowerment, and democracy to give legitimacy to their hidden agenda. My questions: Given the complicit role of local elites in the marginalization of its own people, should global corporations and Transnational Corporations be blamed for such acts of erasure and marginalization of women? Should local leaders who serve as conduit for implementing the neoliberal agendas of TNCs against its own people not be held accountable? Also on page 155, Dutta (2011) highlights how increasingly women from the South are recruited to the North and West where they are exploited as nannies and for domestic purposes at global sites of oppression. Again, should the local elites of such countries that

1) Based on the reading, how have current feminist studies ignored or even perpetuated misconceptions about women's relationship with neoliberalism? What sort of studies would you propose to highlight this relationship (i.e. correct what is missing in feminist studies)? 2) Other than embracing neoliberalist concepts of private property, how else might you resolve the tension between "women's work" and "men's work"? Along with this, how might you value "women's work" economically? In society? In government policies and structure?

1.)   How is the connection between consumption and overpopulation conceptualized in this chapter? What do they have to do with gender? And more specifically, what are the relations between overconsumption in the West and the problematizing of population growth in the Global South? 2.)   Given the discussion of the patriarchal biases and logics of neoliberalism that enact gendered forms of violence and marginalization, how can we begin to link this to similar logics and processes within the academy?

1) On what scale must a culture-centered health campaign be launched such that it not only disrupts the narratives of the dominant discourse in one particular context but also compels the neoliberal structures to sit up and take note of the difference that such a bottom-up initiative is capable of making? 2)W hile I do not underestimate the power of a grassroots initiative such as the Sonagachi HIV/AIDS Program (SHIP), I wonder to what extent such an initiative changes the way the mainstream, neoliberal health campaigns pertaining to HIV/AIDS in India operate especially in the context of sex workers elsewhere in Kolkata or in other Indian metropolitan cities?

1) Is healthcare a right that should be provided by the state? Privatizing health care makes it a commodity, but socializing health care leads to over-burdening the doctors, as described by the man who said "I stopped going to the state hospital. If something big happens, I will sell everything and go to the private doctor." (p.141).  What explains this poor marginalized man's priviledging of the private healthcare over the public healthcare? Along with that, what types of healthcare should be public? Given the current debate about making birth control available with insurance, does a neoliberalist reading of poverty shed any light on the correct approach? 2) The culture-centered approach priviledges an idea that the people who want to change their situation know what they need better (or as well as) the people from the dominant discourse, but the counter-argument is often given to similar ideas that just being in the situation doesn't necessarily make you better qua