Of trees and forests

Gaining an empathy for trees is perhaps an occupational hazzard (I use the term quite loosely) for most socio-cultural Anthropologists. I speak metaphorically, of course. We work with and within relatively small groups of people, gaining confidences, building long-lasting relationsips and bridges along the way. We get to know the people we work with not just as members of larger communities, but as complex personalities with complex desires and aspirations. Is it any wonder then, that Anthropologists make for very bad liberals, and worse liberal reformers? Revolutionary reform requires one to look at the big picture, to think of change en-mass, macroscopically. If the lived realities of a hand full of people have to be sacrificed for this "larger good", some great and much-needed reform, so be it. If one concerns oneself with the minutae of human existence and the violence inherent in sudden change, one is not meant to be a reformer or a revolutionary...in the conventional understanding of these terms. 

Think of the veil, for instance (I know, I know...cliched). But really. I'm not talking about the hijab (a scarf of some sort worn to cover just the hair and ears), which frankly is a non-issue made disproportionately political. Think of the full-body veil--the naqaab or the burqa. Bluntly put, I don't like it. I honestly feel that it robs women of their person-hood in many ways, and places the onus of moral regulation too heavily on women's shoulders. This is an old and oft-made argument. And I know enough people who think that it should be banned, or that the movement for "liberating" Muslim women should be focussed on throwing off the burqa, and that only a revolutionary act of that nature can bring any change to the warped person-hood created by the full-body veil.  But as much as I think the burqa is a form of violence against women, I cannot bring myself to join this revolutionary cry and equate unveiling to liberation. I know too many women who are able to exercise agency in some measure simply because of the burqa. They are mobile because of the burqa; they have access to education and employment because of the burqa; they are able participate in public spaces (and public spheres) thanks to the burqa. In communities where "female modesty" is taken very seriously, the burqa allows them to leave the confines of their homes and become a part of a larger world. And while I am aware of the feminist discourses on patriarchal hegemony and a need to reject them, I cannot but conclude that any law, any mass and imposed effort or discussion to do away with the burqa would be an act of immense violence against these women for whom the burqa ensures a measure of freedom. *
Even in terms of the anti-sweatshop movement in the US, I find myself often on the "wrong" side of the debate. For as much as labour reform is needed, as much as labour conditions in sweatshops are dispicable and need desparate change, boycotting certain manufacturers can mean loss of much-needed unemployment, penuary and starvation for real people in the short-term. The long-term goal of labour reform requires the sacrifice of the basic requirements of human beings somewhere in Indonesia and Vietnam right now. And my conscience cannot entirely abide by this. 
Someone once asked me, "But isn't reform good? Isn't it necessary? How can you be against reform?" I'm not sure what the solution is. How can macro-changes be effected while ensuring that individuals caught up in these revolutionary moments of "reform" are not victims of violence, that their agency is not stripped from them for the "larger good"? Maybe the solution is the lack of one--that is, not that one side is conseded to be the right one and the other, the wrong, but that the battle is ensured continuance. That for every person who wants to ban whaling (or veiling), there is someone willing to stand up for traditional whaling (or veiling) communities; for every radical revolutionary who wants to reconfigure the forest, there is a naiively empathetic tree-hugger. Both sides may be nuts, but someone's got to do it. For descending into solipsism is not a happy option, methinks. 


* I personally think it's a good move when criticism of the burqa becomes part of the religious discourse and debate among Muslims themselves.  As with this example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290606.stm. This means that the anti-burqa discourse is framed not in third-wave feminist terms, which has so many problems of its own, but in terms of the worldview of those who veil or support veiling.