Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma Recent documents in Aradhana Sharma en-us Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:19:30 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/4 http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/4 Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:55:29 PDT Aradhana Sharma http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/2 http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/2 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:25:09 PDT The experiences of two programs aimed at poor rural women in India suggest that postcolonial contexts might give us reason to reconsider commonly accepted characterizations of neoliberal states. An anthropological approach to the state differs from that of other disciplines by according centrality to the meanings of the everyday practices of bureaucracies and their relation to representations of the state. Such a perspective is strengthened when it integrates those meanings with political economic, social structural, and institutional approaches. Although the two programs examined here originated in different time periods (one before and the other after neoliberal "reforms") and embodied very different ideologies and goals (the earlier one being a welfare program that provided tangible services and assets and the later one an empowerment program aimed at helping rural women to become autonomous rather than dependent clients of the state waiting for the redistribution of resources), they were surprisingly alike in some of their daily practices. In a postcolonial context with high rates of poverty and a neoliberal economy with high rates of growth, what we witness is not the end of welfare and its replacement with workfare but the simultaneous expansion of both kinds of programs. Aradhana Sharma http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/3 http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/3 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:25:09 PDT This article explores the politics and practices of a state-initiated, feminist-conceived empowerment program for rural women in India through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Structured as a government-organized nongovernmental organization (GONGO), the Mahila Samakhya (MS) program seeks to empower and mobilize marginalized women for self-development and social change. The program's GONGO form and empowerment goals articulate with neoliberal logics of self-care and destatized rule to reshape the postcolonial liberalizing state and governance in India. Neoliberalism and the everyday practices of the MS program construct the Indian state as a distinct and vertically encompassing, if ambiguously gendered, entity. The organization's hybrid form and its employment arrangements and work practices end up reinforcing some of the very social inequalities and welfare-based ideologies that its empowerment focus seeks to challenge. Nonetheless, collaborative governmental projects for subaltern women's empowerment, which involve feminist, activist, and state actors, offer spaces of political possibility as well as risks in a neoliberal context. [neoliberal governmentality, state, empowerment, feminism, India] Aradhana Sharma http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/1 http://works.bepress.com/aradhana_sharma/1 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:25:08 PDT Aradhana Sharma