Recasting culture to undo gender: a sociological analysis of Jeevika in rural Bihar, India

Paromita Sanyal, Vijayendra Rao and Shruti Majumdar

No 7411, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper brings together sociological theories of culture and gender to answer the question ? how do large-scale development interventions induce cultural change? Through three years of ethnographic work in rural Bihar, the authors examine this question in the context of Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view of culture. The paper argues that Jeevika created new ?cultural configurations? by giving economically and socially disadvantaged women access to a well-defined network of people and new systems of knowledge, which changed women?s habitus and broke down normative restrictions constitutive of the symbolic boundary of gender.

Keywords: Gender and Law; Population Policies; Gender and Development; Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems; Anthropology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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