Message 49: Margreet Zwarteveen
A short answer to Chris Perry - (nice to meet again after a long time, even if only virtually, and continue our debates) for a longer one on precisely the issue of science and 'gender and water' and the scientific status of gender and water knowledge, I refer to my thesis (about to be published): for the irrigation world, Norman Uphoff was among the first to realize that we live in a 'post-newtonian' age. Robert Chambers, in a slightly different tone, came to a similar conclusion in arguing for reversals of 'normal irrigation professionalism'. All this in the 1980s. In my view, gender and water knowledge evolves in parallel to those post-newtonian, post-modern, post-colonial ontologies and epistemologies, and indeed feminists have been at the forefront of challenging 'normal' science in arguing that it is 'masculinist' in at least 3 ways: most scientists are men, ways of scientific reasoning and choices of language and metaphors are gendered and scientific excellence is associated more readily with Masculinity (the ideological rather than the real world version of it) than with Feminity. This is particularly true for irrigation 'science' .... Questioning and re-thinking what science is about is an intrinsic part of 'gender and water' knowledge, and of the feminist water project - a questioning and re-thinking that extends to ontological definitions of irrigation systems (and objectives of irrigation), and indeed of re-thinking whether what have always been treated as 'symptoms' are not, in fact, underlying causes of mal-performance - or (to use Chris's metaphors) of questioning and redefining the 'ilnesses' and 'cures' in order to establish the effectiveness of existing treatments. It also extends to epistemologies: to what are accepted as truth claims. In other words: if "gender and water" appears to challenge and question what irrigation science is about, than it is doing precisely what it should do - something that may indeed be hard to digest for those whose reputations and powers depend on hiding behing the old objectifying cloaks of positivist knowing and science...
The question is NOT (as Chris seems to think) whether or not irrigation is used for feminist goals - but gender and water knowledge starts from the realization that irrigation (projects, interventions, management models etc) always and everywhere are gendered and have gendered effects and outcomes. In the past, these have largely been unintended and tended to be treated as some sort of 'collateral damage' to meeting the higher goals of food production and water efficiency. Gender and water knowledge has helped and still helps to see that gendered structures (divisions of labor, inheritance, kinship), gendered identities and gendered systems of knowing are importantly shaping the ways in which performance goals are achieved - and such knowledge should therefore be an intrinsic part of irrigation knowledge, even for those just interested in food and fibre objectives. The difficulty - and one that importantly fuels the mentioned challenges to established ways of irrigation knowing - is that such knowledge is difficult to turn into 'generic' statements: the meaning of gender is not only always contextual, but it is also and always socially constructed (and thereby evading universal definitions) and contested. (This, by the way, is also something that complicates the entire e-discussion).
Interestingly, I thus arrive at a similar conclusion as Chris Perry: old irrigation science and 'gender and water knowledge' are incompatible. What I do with it is nevertheless different: I reject and question old irrigation science, and argue that it requires serious transformations in order to meet present-day complexities - whereas Chris rejects 'gender and water knowledge' on the basis of 'old' (and as I argue masculinist) scientific standards.
Cheers! And have a drink on my birthday, which happens to be today, Margreet
