Developing women/tourist destination: Global relations and local processes at a women's craft-producing project in Nepal.

Abstract

In this study, I consider the intersection of women's development with global relations of production and consumption; in particular, I place women's development in the context of late-modern touristic practices and discourses. I argue that by locating women's development at the confluence of tourism, feminism, and development, we can begin to understand how the Janakpur Women's Development Center (JWDC), the ethnographic focus of my study, has become renowned for its success and why its wares are so popular among a certain sector of tourists. I demonstrate how the entanglement of a desire for unspoiled culture, an evolutionist orientation toward civilization, and a capitalist mode of relating combine with mainstream Western feminist perspectives to make women's development into a literal and figurative tourist site. Based on 15 contiguous months of ethnographic research in Nepal in 1994--1995, the story this study tells of women's development in Nepal is at once multi-stranded and multi-sited. I labor to identify the ongoing conflicts of interest that inhere in women's development at JWDC, and I attempt to understand the reasons for and effects of the growing touristic element within women's development. Taking JWDC as a case study, I focus on particular aspects and instances of women's development---for instance, at workshops and board meeting, in craft production, labor disputes, commercial exchanges, popular texts, and art exhibits. While my study demonstrates that one effect of women's development is the emergence of an even tighter grid within which project participants must enact their lives, it shows JWDC to be a site of maneuver as well as constraint, creativity and well as dislocation. And the multiplicity of interest that merge there serve to displace the political hegemony of any one such interest, creating new possibilities for envisioning and pursuing desires on the part of Maithil female subjects. I conclude that the multitude of local and international interests, as well as the plurality of culturally informed discourses intersecting at the development center in Janakpur has resulted in the emergence of a gendered, ethnic identity among the Maithil women who work there. This identity has external and internal faces, giving JWDC craft-producers the flexibility to maneuver in ways that promote the success of the project while also diminishing their vulnerability to exploitation at the hands of that project.