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Feminism, Nationalism and Militarism

Feminism, Nationalism eee and Militarism

Constance R. Sutton, Editor

Published by the Association for Feminist Anthropology / American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the

International Women's Anthropology Conference

Copyright © 1995 | Association for Feminist Anthropology / American Anthropological Association All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America . ~ ISBN 0-913167-56-8 Typesetting by Caribe Computer Services, P.O. Box 721273, Flushing, NY 11372

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is hereby made for the financial support for this

publication that came from a grant from UNESCO’s World Decade for Cultural Development given to IWAC to examine the role of women in the construction and transmission of cultural heritages, and from AFA/AAA funds. The editor also wishes to thank the contributors whose commitment to

preparing their pieces for publication came from their shared sense of the need to provoke further research and discussion on the issues addressed in this book. And here special appreciative thanks goes to our interlocuter Cynthia Enloe whose research and writings on this topic have illuminated new ways of thinking about the nationalisms and militarisms of today’s world and for the new questions for research she raises in her article.

Of equal importance was the concrete work of preparing manuscripts

and proofreading final copy. For this I give praise to my graduate assistant Barbara Miller, and to Nicholas Bakos who helped with final copy proof-reading. Ram6n Bosque-Pérez of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquefios, Hunter College, CUNY, also deserves praise for his devoted work in preparing a camera-ready copy for publication.

To our children and grandchildren,

| may they live in a world that has learned to resolve conflicts —interpersonal and collective—

| without resort to violence or warfare

Contents Introduction Rethinking Nationalism and Militarism from a Feminist Perspective Linda BASCH uu .cccccccccccsccsccsscececssescccsssssssecesensaessessesseescesessstsssesesssssssssesesssssstsee O

Feminism, Nationalism and Militarism Feminism, Nationalism and Militarism: Wariness Without Paralysis?

CYNETNIA ENl0€ icseeccsceescceeereesess essere LD Anthropological Perspectives Feminist Perspectives on Palestinian Political Culture Under Occupation Davida WOO viccccccccsccscccsccsesesscsccesessscseecessesceseseesessssecessessssesssesssssesscessesssee OD

Postcolonial Nationalism: Women and Retraditionalization in the Islamic Imaginary, Malaysia

AINWA ONG viccccccecsererieeeeeesiseseesissessrsereee AB Inclusive Boundaries, Exclusive Ideologies: Hindu Fundamentalism and Gender in India Today Eva Friedlander ....ccccccccecscccceescssceesssscesesssesssssssessstssesesssssesssssssessssssssorseneees OL

Women and the War Show: T.V.’s Gendered Construction of the Homefront NING BYOWNE .....ccccccccccseecececsesecceccceceseestscsessecsssecsssssssssssesssssssssttsssssssssssccseees OD

CONTENTS

Of Arms, Men, and Ethnic War in (Former) Yugoslavia Bette Denich .iiciiescccssccsstessscenccssecescecseessscrsaesssesssessesssecstesssesserstersee OL

Warriors or Soldiers?: Masculinity and Ritual Transvestism in the Liberian Civil War Mary H. Moran .cccccccccccceteseseesessesssssseresesessessessssseseee 2D

From City-States to Post-Colonial Nation-State: Yoruba Women's Changing Military Roles Constarice R. SUuttOn ...cseccccscessssseseeseteeecseceecsessssenscsstensesssesssessestecesestetes OD

CONETIDUEOTS oo eee eeteeeteeessetestesesseesesseesseerssasesseesrsetessatssseeerss 105

Introduction: Rethinking Nationalism and Militarism from a Feminist Perspective

Oo Linda Basch

Manhattan College —

The violence perpetrated against women world-wide has reached staggering proportions over the past five to six years. Rape and other sexual abuses have become so pronounced that,

tugging at the consciousness of the world, they have finally become the subjects of prime time news reporting, international agency investigatory commissions, and feminist analyses.' We have begun to see that women suffer in particular ways from wars, from the economic and social dislocations following on industrialization and capitalist development, from the massive population movements underway since World War Il, and from nation-building projects enacted by countries as they negotiate

the rocky, narrow paths of national development. As the caretakers of children and often of the elderly and the disabled,

as those encouraged to capture the funds occupying soldiers eagerly spend on “rest and relaxation,” and as those sent to labor on global assembly lines newly situated in their countries, woman have a special view, born of their experiences. Yet their voices

are rarely heard in the political and military councils of their nation states.

|3

This volume, conceived in the wake of the Gulf War, addresses

, the role of women in nationalist projects, the close link between

, nationalist projects and militarism, and the privileging of masculinity in a militarized nationalism.

For many of us, the origins of this volume can be traced to the UN End of the Decade for Women Conference held in Nairobi

in 1985. This land-mark international women’s conference

4 | BASCH culminated a decade of consciousness-raising experiences focused on the diverse, yet often common, situations of women globally and locally. The International Women’s Anthropology Conference (IWAC) had a hand in organizing several panels for

the Nairobi meeting where women from around the world brought into dramatic focus the increased militarism of their countries and its impact on women. They dissected the common plight they faced vis-a-vis a militarized nationalism which made glaringly apparent the divergence between women’s issues and

state policies promoted by male leaders. They began to raise questions about the inevitability of these projects, the swollen military budgets they entailed, the diverting of scarce resources needed for investments in health, education, and social and community services and amenities advocated by women and seen as essential in correcting gender inequities (see Sutton in

this volume). Oo

In the six years since the Nairobi Conference, militaristic

ventures have increased, in seeming contradiction to the global | interconnectedness that has deepened and become more visible. In this context of escalating nationalist violence in the name of

nationalism, the roles and situations of women in these developments have become major concerns of the international feminist movement. It is against this background and in the context of the war the

_ United States waged against Iraq that IWAC, with the sponsorship of the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA)

of the American Anthropological Association, undertook to organize a panel on “Feminism, Militarism, and Nationalism: Issues and Contradictions” for the 1991 Meetings of the American

Anthropological Association. The aim was to theorize, from a feminist perspective, the seemingly contradictory and ambivalent positions of women in specific nationalistic and militarized

contexts. The format for the panel was the newly instituted “Anthropology and its Interlocutors,” created to encourage interdisciplinary conversations on issues of key theoretical importance to anthropology. Cynthia Enloe, a noted political scientist who has been examining some of the complex and paradoxical ways women become implicated in sustaining nationalism and militarism (Enloe 1990), was our invited keynote

speaker.

INTRODUCTION | 5 In her talk Enloe posed a series of questions that were wrapped

around four main points -- the multiple and divergent ways that national identity and militarization are gendered, the absence of

| the voices of women from nationalist and militarized constructions, the gender contradictions that characterize nationalism and militarism, and the contention that is emerging

between women and men over the shape that nations and militarization should take. Enloe mused whether women would

be left ever choosing between the roles of patriotic mother/ wife/lover/ widow, with loyalty to the male defined nation state 7 required as a condition of their citizenship, on the one hand, and

that of the marginalized feminist shunted to the fringes of national

citizenship, on the other. Alternatively, she queried, is a demilitarized nationalism in which women take a more active

role in defining the shape of the state possible? Women anthropologists, whose research experiences encompassed observations of various militarized situations, of ethnic conflict,

and of the nationalisms associated with newly emergent postcolonial nation states, responded to Enloe from the perspective of

their own ethnographic observations on the ways women were inserted in these processes. The papers in this volume, with the exception of Moran’s, are all revised versions of papers presented in this panel.°

| Much of Enloe’s paper chronicles her odyssey toward an understanding of the gendered aspects of nationalism and militarism and the gender contradictions that underlie these closely linked cultural constructions. Initially not seeing the differing experiences of women among the Hmong, Laotians, and Ghurkas whose emerging ethnicities preoccupied her, she

came later to understand the strategic import of women’s

- sexuality, reproduction, and child rearing in emerging nationalisms and the control which nation-states and nationalisms seek to exert over their community’s women and girls in their efforts to protect, revive, and create nations. Enloe also calls attention to the importance of exploring the

contestations involved in the militarization of nationalist movements, of “the formal and informal political struggles between women and men” not only over political agendas, but over “the relevance and meaning of the nation,” and over whose experiences -- of “humiliation, of insecurity, of solidarity” -- will define the community in its new national manifestation. She

urges exploration of the processes that have succeeded in

6 | BASCH silencing and diverting women from participating in discourses

- onthe shape the nation should take.

The anthropological commentaries that follow Enloe’s paper

bring to bear understandings gained in historically specific ethnographic contexts. While none of the authors has been

engaged in active research on the relationship between

nationalism, militarism, and feminism, in light of present political

urgencies they have reexamined their ethnographic findings to demonstrate the gains to come from anthropological and feminist understandings of these issues. Enloe points out, and Moran underscores, that “it takes a lot of power to turn a man into a

soldier and a woman into the wife or mother of a martyr.” To overlook the ways that new masculinities and femininities are

shaped to mobilize national consciousness is to leave both maleness and what it means to be a woman in nationalizing and mo

militarizing contexts unproblematized. : Three of the papers focus on situations of increasing militarization, although none of those nation states -- Nigeria (Sutton), India (Friedlander), and Malaysia (Ong) -- were engaged in active warfare at the time of research or writing. These papers

describe the various and intense pressures placed on women, in

Enloe’s words, “to conform to a certain kind of femininity believed to insure military readiness and “national security’” (Enloe 1993b:23). Four of the responses describe situations of |

active warfare -- in Yugoslavia (Denich), Palestine (Wood), | Liberia (Moran), and the United States (Browne), and deal variously with the expectations placed on women to loyally support the war effort as a condition of their citizenship, with the victimization of women through rape and other abuses

including murder, with “everyday militarized motherhood” (Enloe 1993b:22), and with the diverse ways women become | enmeshed in militaristic and nationalistic constructions.

Two of the papers offer insights into the ways men search for and reconceive “manliness” in the building of militarized states. In the case of Yugoslavia, Denich argues, this occurred through

the creation of male warriors during the Cold War, in which universal military training became a shared experience and a rite of passage for all males so that manhood and the ability to fight became closely linked. This constant state of military preparedness combined with eastern European definitions of the “nation” as an ethnic community contribute to “a shared

INTRODUCTION 7 political culture” held by all sides, which established “military criteria for victory” rather than calls for conflict resolution or demilitarization. In Liberia, Moran chronicles the progression of male militarized constructs from that of “soldier” to “warrior” and then “commando,” transformations that she relates to the

, fragmenting of the Liberian nation into warring “state-making” camps divided along first ethnic and then personalistic lines. Soldiers, long imagined as the protectors of “the people” of a unified Liberian nation, were seen as part of a universal, allencompassing militarized masculinity. As the state fragmented,

however, the more generalized “soldier” construct discredited as the production of an oppressive state. It was replaced by the more indigenized “warrior” image with its traditional symbols, many of which were transvestite in nature,.an image associated with ethnically specific units. The latest transmutation, that of “commando,” is a hyper-masculine anomic agent reflective of U.S. Rambo film imagery. It is an image severed from both an indigenous or nationalist base and attached to competing leaders whose nationalist aspirations the commando probably does not share.

We see in all these papers that the deployment of new masculinities associated with nationalism, especially in militarized versions, is accompanied by changes inrepresentations of femininity and womanhood. The effects in West Africa have -

been particularly problematic. Sutton discusses how processes of West African state formation have appropriated women’s kin-based local powers. in order to legitimate and strengthen male-centered political control. In order to support expanding

and more wart-like political action, state formation and militarization have required the curbing and transformation of the centrality of women’s procreative powers -- long associated with spiritual, mystical power and invested with concerns for kin continuity, tradition, wealth, expansion and growth. Most of the papers deal with the varying and complex ways that militarized nation states deal with female sexuality, and the

7 increased male control over women that occurs as national identities become increasingly militarized and masculinized. In

Yugoslavia, the most extreme case presently of male public violence enacted consciously against women, rape has become an “instrument of war” perpetrated by all sides (Denich). Beyond the personal and private, rape is also a brutal and public show of

8 BASCH power and aggression directed toward the conquered -- both women and men. Denich argues that women have become

symbols in a contest between rival males that replicates “traditional forms of Balkan patriarchy.” Men’s inability to

protect ‘their’ women and control their sexuality and procreative powers has become equated with weakness. In other situations sexuality is treated more ambivalently and is rent with contradictions, as women are configured as symbols

of purity and honor, but also as objects of male violence and

oppression. Among Arabs in Palestine and Israel, Wood

documents how “family honor” is linked to the authority men sustain over the sexual behavior of women under their charge, which within the cultural logic of this system has important

implications for the sociopolitical positions of men. Describing | the honor killing of a young Israeli Palestinian woman, Wood , shows how in the politically and militarily fragile context of the intifada and Israeli domination, the risks women face as potential

victims of kin-generated male violence, even to the point of | death, exist in tension with the protection women expect to

receive from male kin. This tension gnaws also at the encouragement women are given to become more involved in political processes and as political activists.

In India, this ambivalence toward women’s sexuality is embodied in the janus symbol of the goddess Shakti, which ' expresses both creation and destruction. Incarnated as Durga, “the much loved daughter and mother,” Shakti assures purity and group preservation through reproduction and is a creative force. But as Kali, the wife (and hence outsider), Shakti is a

“potential source of disruption and pollution to be guarded against.” Friedlander asserts that the increasing worship of Durga and Kali in West Bengal in recent years expresses the ambivalence directed toward women. She sees this ambivalence

expressed in images in which women are graphically linked with sex and violence -- in films and on film posters that decorate

public spaces, for example -- yet which also portray women as victims. of violence and in need of male protection. In either case, women become objects of “vigilance and control,” expressed

in a variety of culturally distinct ways -- the rising dowry deaths, the reappearance of sati, and the use of amniocentesis to

ensure the birth of male offspring. Friedlander connects the remolding of symbols that evoke a gendered interpretation of

culture to rapid economic changes attached to capitalist

INTRODUCTION 9 penetration and industrialization, male migration and ensuing changes in gender roles, and the specificities of the birth and emergence of nation states on the Indian subcontinent with their attendant militarization and communal violence.

Browne, in her paper on the gendered construction of the homefront in the United States, created to capture support for the Gulf War, shows how representations of “manly militarism and nationalism” depend on selected versions of femininity and

sexuality. The hegemonic strands and symbols drawn upon

- harkened back to images associated with World War II womanhood. Women were depicted as heroized mothers, nurturers, and workers, with the feminized yellow ribbon serving

as the emblematic symbol of a family-centered moral

righteousness. Bypassed in the “gendered working|[s] of power”

_ (Enloe) to reshape symbols in support of a militarized nationalism, were the “tarnished” homefront images of the Viet

Nam War, when women as mothers and wives publicly challenged and questioned masculinized military action as a political solution. -

The papers also deal with the ways women become swept into the hegemonic cultures of specific nationalisms. Denich in

her article contrasts the earlier demonstrations by mothers demanding the return of their young sons serving in the Yugoslavian army, to the decline of this form of protest as “the escalating civil war pitted soldiers of each ethnicity against each

others entire populations.” This she sees as a measure of nationalism’s triumph in various parts of the former state. That women have become increasingly incorporated into the dominant

hegemonic construction as the war with all its atrocities has ground on is also demonstrated in the personal recounting bya Serbian woman of her own rape. The woman brought this experience to public attention over television against the strong objections of her family in part to show, in her own words, “that the Serbs are not the [only] guilty ones” (Laber 1993:3).

Part and parcel of the incorporation of women into the hegemony of masculinized nationalism is the increasing activism of women in male dominated movements, even though this road

is deeply rutted with pot holes. Several of the papers in this volume point to the myriad contradictions that punctuate these webs of involvement. Wood, in her discussion of the emerging activism among Palestinian women in the intifada, which has

20 Bass even succeeded in getting women’s issues onto the agenda, cautions against viewing these shifts as all-embracing or as leading to an enduring reordering of femininity and masculinity within the Palestinian state. In reflecting on the tension that continues to exist between women as political actors and as symbols of “family honor” linked to the continuing enactment of

male authority, Wood calls attention to the historically rooted

contradictions that coexist in most societies regarding the ordering of and between women and men. She concludes by arguing for the continuing importance of feminist work that helps break through the conceptual fog that masks these processes.

Ong is similarly concerned with the contradictions that mark

the involvement of women as actors in nationalist movements. She describes how in the Islamic revival taking place presently among middle class Malays in Malaysia, women see themselves as part of an imagined Malay ethnic community with its reliance on women realizing their roles as wives and mothers. As mothers

and wives, women are perceived as “replenishers of the population” and as guardians of community boundaries against engulfment by the numerically and economically strong Chinese. While this imagining of community requires that women vacate

the public sector for their homes, Ong argues that women “reinscribing themselves into a ‘traditional’ space must be seen as a maneuver to renegotiate the terms of male control” and to ' “gain moral authority.” In this way, Ong asserts, women have limited male authority and “renegotiate[d] power relations with men in the family and in society” -- for example, by speaking out against wife beating and other forms of violence. Ong argues

from this case that it cannot be assumed that nationalism represents only male interests or that women hold a separate a vision of the imagined state, although she is unsure how Malaysian women would see their roles in a context of

militarization.

Moran, in her study of the Liberian civil war, views the incorporation of women into the armed struggle -- often in tight

fitting military uniforms and carrying weapons that seem oversized for them -- as more problematic and less clear. While this “participation in armed struggle” -- largely through the > acceptance and reproduction of western images -- might alter

the status of women within “the fractured nation state” and

INTRODUCTION 1] “liberate” them from feminine traditions, such involvement at

the same time both “emphasizes and commandeers their sexuality.” Moran sees the relationship between this reworking of gender and nationalist constructions which will define post-

war Liberia as still unclear. ,

The papers in their totality indicate the complex ways women

become involved in the diverse nationalisms of the twentieth century, underscoring the importance of bringing a feminist analysis to bear on this phenomena. Implicit is the policy issue - of whether women would, if they could, give a different spin to

, budgets that today are spent on the production or purchase of arms rather than on the projects women’s groups have advocated:

building schools and houses, underwriting health, sanitation, and local food production, and developing local economic resources. Enloe argues that only by raising feminist questions about militarism and war and problematizing the masculinities and femininities created to support these processes can we break

the analytic cocoon that prevents us from fully understanding the implications of these constructions for the present and future lives of humans. NOTES 1. Yet while rape in Yugoslavia and the gender vulnerabilities it reveals have captured public imagination and outrage, these war-time atrocities do not nearly encompass the range of violent acts perpetrated against women. A Fact Sheet recently prepared by a United Nations agency (IWTC/UNIFEM Resource Center 1992) on acts of gender violence and abuse directed against women globally reported, among other abuses, 11,259 dowry-related murders of women in India over the last three years, an estimate regarded as low; over 1 million U.S. women using emergency medical services in a year for injuries related to battering -- more than for auto accidents, muggings, and rape combined; approximately 386,000 rapes of women a year in South Africa; rape

and/or abduction of 39% of the women found among the Vietnamese boat people; and wife abuse against 67% of the rural women and 56% of the urban women in Papua New Guinea. . 2. Eva Friedlander and I were co-organizers and co-chairs of the panel. We extend special appreciation to Sue Ellen Jacobs, the 1991 Program Co-Chair for

| the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) and to Jane Collins, AFA Chair at the time, for their support of the panel’s concept and its sponsorship at the 1991 AAA meetings. Additional thanks are due to June Nash, who not only assisted in identifying many of the panelists and clearing away obstacles,

_ but who was also a commentator on the panel. 3. Mary Moran’s paper replaces that of June Nash, who had to withdraw

her paper from the volume because of time constraints. 7

12 | ___BASCH REFERENCES Enloe, Cynthia | 1990 Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International

Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993 The Women Behind the Warriors. Women's Review of Books. Vol. X(5): 22-23.

IWTC/UNIFEM Resource Center 1992 (Oct.) Fact Sheet on Gender Violence: A Statistics for Action Fact Sheet. International Women’s Tribune Centre. mimeo.

Laber, Jeri .

1993 Bosnia: Questions About Rape. New York Review of Books. Vol XL(6): 3-6.

Feminism, Nationalism and Militarism:

Wariness Without Paralysis? Cynthia Enloe | Clark University

I came of age intellectually and politically (a bit belatedly) at

Berkeley in the mid-1960s. It wasn’t an undifferentiated “Berkeley.” I, like anyone coming into political consciousness, made thejourney ina very specific context. Mine was the graduate student subculture of a young comparative politics discipline, at

a time when Southeast Asia was just beginning to loom on American academics’ intellectual horizon. Despite the large Asian-American, Chicano and Black communities just outside its gates in Berkeley and Oakland, in the nearby farming valleys and across the Bay, the University of California was itself in the

mid-1960s a largely white institution. There were few tenuretrack women professors (none among the 50 in political science). It was news when the first woman was chosen to be Head TA. Feminism was not yet in the Berkeley lexicon, and neither I nor most of my friends noticed that the very word “woman” scarcely ever crossed the lips of political science lecturers. What was on our minds was nationalism. In seminars and coffee houses we friends and earnest graduate students - from Vietnam, Israel, the U.S. and Sierra Leone - tried to figure out whether the Communist Party’s success in China was the result of nationalist resistance to Japanese invasion or of effective mobilization of land-hungry peasants. We looked at the new African states through the lens of the nationalist movements which had given them birth. We were just starting to pay attention

to the emergence of nationalist thought within the AfricanAmerican community, as the civil rights movement was being

overtaken by the Black Power movement. When the U.S. : 13

14 | ENLOE government’s involvement in Laos and Vietnam crept from political manipulation toward full-scale military intervention, we criticized a Washington establishment that didn’t seem capable of telling the difference between hollow puppetry and nationalist legitimacy.

Berkeley wasn’t a milieu, however, in which nationalist interpretations held a corner on the intellectual market. In the mid-1960s, liberal individualism informed the popular study of

electoral behavior. And Marxist.class analysis often made nationalist interpretations appear to us rather naive. Still, arising as it did out of the proliferation of new nation-states in the wake of the collapse of colonial empires, the discipline of comparative politics was infused with curiosity about how, when, why and with what effects people in any country developed a distinctly

national consciousness with effective national state institutions : to match. And that development, if and when it did occur, seemed to most of us a step in the right direction. Today I’m not so sure.

I’ve become too aware now of the ways in which men have

used nationalism to silence women, too conscious of how

nationalist ideologies, strategies and structures have served to up-date and so perpetuate the privileging of masculinity. In recent years I’ve come to see how nationalism - not inevitably,

but with notable regularity - can grease the wheels of ,

militarization, a process that ultimately marginalizes women.

Still, at the same time, I’m wary of my own new skepticism. Many of those who, in the morning light of the post-Cold War

era, are sounding the alarms against nationalist parochialism

seem more comfortable with centralized elites, cultural

hegemony, and unequal international divisions of labor. And these. critics rarely couple their critiques of nationalism to a call

for the dismantlement of patriarchy or pay attention to feminist , analyses of masculinity inside the nationalist movements. Too

many women, moreover, have broken out of the confines of | domesticity and carved out a space in the public arena through

nationalist activism for me not to weigh carefully its anti-

patriarchal consequences, even if they. fall short of full emancipation and are achieved in spite of, not in, harmonious alliance with patriarchal nationalist men. +++

Wariness WitHouT PARALYSIS? 15 My own work in those earlier heady years and for the next decade and a half (Enloe 1973a, 1973b, 1980a, 1980b) was remarkably uncurious about gender. I was so struck, for instance, by how different were Hmongs’ and ethnic Laos’ experiences of the Laotian national revolution, that I didn’t pause to ask whether women within each of these ethnic communities might be having

quite different experiences than their husbands, brothers and sons. A few years later, I was exploring how state officials wielded ethnicity to construct trustworthy state armies and police forces. But my intellectual world remained virtually _ ungendered. Fora fleeting moment in the late 1970s, I did muse

7 in print over how Gurkha villages were sustained when the British recruited so many of their men, leaving somany women to fend for themselves. But I didn’t pursue the question. Nor did

I ask whether the Nepali women whose sons and husbands joined the Gurkha regiments themselves were pressed to adopt hopes and rationales that were a feminized complement to the

more visible masculinized militarism (Tamang 1992). ] Having so little curiosity about gender, I naturally didn’t think to problematize masculinity. When I looked at the Soviet

military I saw Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian officers and conscripts organized in ways that insured a Russified state dominance. I didn’t see men. I didn’t ask about how the state military’s ethnic division of labor was shaping perceptions of masculinity among women and men within the Soviet Union’s various ethnic communities. One result of this stunning lack of curiosity was that I was analytically unprepared for the anticonscription movement led by women-as-mothers inside the ethnic Russian community in the 1980s. Another product was my surprise at the potency of militarism’s lure among men in at least | ~ some non-Russian ethnic communities in the late 1980s, derived from many men’s apparent desire to assert their masculinity in the face of both rival ethnic communities and the Red Army.

Along the Massachusetts Turnpike in the 1980s one would occasionally see the bumper sticker “Armenian Air Force.”

. Nothing more. Presumably no more needed to be said on the bumper sticker for the drivers behind to get a good chuckle. “Armenian Air Force.” Such an obvious oxymoron. Armenian masculinity was informed by victimization. It didn’t contain the

cultural stuff to send aloft a modern fighting force. But in the 1990s, the bumper sticker and any chuckles it once provoked

16 a ENLOE seem quaint. Its humor was based on a naively limited understanding of how Armenian or perhaps any masculinized nationalism could be militarized. Although it shouldn’t give me much comfort, I wasn’t alone

in my gender-blind analyzing. In his 1983 book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, for instance, left masculinity

and femininity unexplored. He described how Vietnamese, Khmer and Laotian parents encouraged “their children” to geta French education so that they could secure future jobs in the French colonial civil service (1983:127). Were mothers and fathers

diluting their national consciousnesses in the hopes that their daughters would obtain colonial bureaucratic jobs? More likely, |

it was their sons on whom such hopes were being pinned. Daughters’ futures probably were being fashioned as wives of .

sons-become-colonial civil servants. Yet a person working an

directly for the French colonialists and a person - a “wife” married to that bureaucrat would not experience identical nonnationalist cooptive pressures. As insightful and helpful as Ben Anderson’s and other landmark books of this era were in charting new ways to think about the creation of nationalist ideas, they

left nationalists - and pre-nationalists and anti-nationalists ungendered. Our understanding of nationalism suffered. For all the variables we revealed, for all the sophistication we

applied, we ultimately imagined the creation of a national community to be more simple than in fact it is.

A corollary: we underestimated the amount and varieties of power at work in the construction of a national consciousness and anationalist movement. Consequently, we also underestimated

the power it took to build a new nation-state. We thought of ourselves as specialists in power, but we really didn’t know yet where to look for it. It is only now in the last several years, thanks to the impact of feminism on scholarly curiosity, that we are beginning to notice

that most of the nationalists in positions to have their ideas © heard and recorded have been men. Weare only today wondering what exactly that has meant both for nationalism as an ideology © and for nationalist movements as a form of social mobilization.

Becoming a feminist in the late 1970s (again, belatedly), I began to reread some of the renowned nationalist texts with new

Wariness WitHOuT PARALYSIS? 17 eyes. I began to search out the women, often finding them in the

shadows, or where absent altogether, scribbling them in the margins. I started to pay special attention to the relations between the men at stage front and the women in the chorus. For instance,

On a recent rereading of Pierre Vallieres’ classic Quebec nationalist autobiography, White Niggers of North America (1971),’

I found myself newly curious about his mother, and about her son’s anger at her. To young Pierre, his seemingly a-political mother represented the epitome of pre-1960s Quebecois passivity.

It was she who dampened his father’s working class Quebecois

. spirit; it was she who urged her uppity son to obey the

, conservative priests at school. Prodding French Canadians to throw off the twin oppressions of English domination and feudal

French provincial rule would require, Pierre Vallieres argued, overcoming the parochial, day-to-day domestic preoccupations of women like his anxious mother. |

Domesticity has been a contested sphere in Quebecois nationalist imagining and organizing. That in turn has meant that women’s relationships to men in the domestic sphere have been politically salient (Michele et al.:1987). It couldn’t be only on the plaza or on the convention floor that one had to fix one’s analytical sights to make sense of the evolution of nationalism, but on the kitchen and the bedroom as well. Feminist analyses reveal that nationalist movements are more suffused with power and evolve more erratically than most non-

feminist accounts suggest. By taking women’s experiences seriously, feminists disclose that women and men inside nascent

national communities struggle with each other over whose experiences - of humiliation, of insecurity, of solidarity - will define the community in its new national manifestation. Many of

the struggles between women and men during the formative period will occur on the floors of nationalist conferences or around strategy tables.* But most will occur when there is no one

| taking minutes. Thus, it will take oral histories - not only of women who became nationalists, but of women who held back,

or of women who joined but later became disenchanted - to uncover the actual processes by which women’s relationships with men shaped and reshaped any national community or

nationalist movement.

How have so many women been persuaded that women’s specific concerns could be put on the political back burner for

18 ENLOE the sake of the newly emergent or politicized nation? We need better answers to the question of why women’s calls for an end to domestic violence, equality in marriage, access to land titles, or appointment to leadership positions have been delayed, or why they have been robbed of nationalist legitimacy, or denied

it altogether. ,

Women Against Fundamentalism is a group formed in Britain

by Jewish, Arab and Asian Muslim, Hindu, white and Black Protestant, and Irish Catholic women in 1989, in the turbulently

gendered wake of the Rushdie affair. Its members have been developing an analysis that could be widely relevant to students

of nationalism. In seminars and newsletters, Women Against —

Fundamentalism have been tracing the ways that the most

conservative members of their respective communities have , used nationalist anger and hopes to mobilize wide support - . including support from the British state - for the perpetuation of the control and political marginalization of the women in their communities. Thus it is today that Asian British patriarchal male leaders are using nationalist rhetoric to persuade state officials

1992).° ,

outside their communities to allow them to run state-funded shelters for women victims of domestic violence (Yuval-Davis African American feminists have long struggled to carve out

a political space where they could speak of violence against women perpetrated by men both from within and outside their ' own community, without being charged by African. American men with nationalist betrayal. The 1991 Senate Justice Committee

Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings delving into accusations

of sexual harassment was just one more instance for many

African American feminists feeling squeezed out of a public arena. Rather than remaining silent this time, however, dozens i of African American women began to meet informally to discuss

not only the hearings but their difficulties in having their own

analyses heard. Out of these spontaneous and usually intense :

conversations - in Boston, Detroit, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago,

Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Los Angeles - sprung the idea of raising money to take out a full page advertisement in The New

York Times in which Black women would make their own

statement, without any organizations or any media’s filter.*Fifty thousand dollars was raised in small donations from women and

men of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds to pay for the

Wariness WitHour PARALYsIs? 19S. advertisement’s publication in the Times as well as in six prominent Black papers. Acquiring the space to speak can be costly to women in financial as well as political terms. A total of 1,603 African American women signed the statement. Their names - from Tania Abdulahad in Washington, D.C., to Deborah Zubel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - appeared in the ad when it was published in the Sunday New York Times on November 17,

1991, the week in which Clarence Thomas was sworn into his Supreme Court judgeship. _“AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN DEFENSE OF OURSELVES”

This was the group’s self-designed headline.’ “We are particularly outraged by the racist and sexist treatment of Professor Anita Hill, an African American woman who was

maligned and castigated for daring to speak publicly of her own experience of sexual abuse,” the signatories explained. They continued: We speak here because we recognize that the media are now portraying the Black community as prepared to tolerate both the dismantling of affirmative action and the evil of sexual harassment in order to have any Black man on the Supreme Court. We want to make clear that the media have ignored or

distorted many African American voices. We will not be

silenced.

They objected to the effort on the part of some Black nationalists to portray the Senate hearings conducted by an allwhite Judiciary Committee as solely a racist event. Likewise, they took strong issue with any white feminist commentators who portrayed the hearings as solely a sexist event: “As women of African descent, we understand sexual harassment as both.” The essential message the organizers and signatories insisted that readers of The New York Times, The Chicago Defender, and Atlanta Inquirer absorb was that African American women no longer would allow others to interpret their experiences, to pour their complex daily negotiations of a sexually organized racist society into a narrow, if politically comfortable funnel. Their

final sentence: “No one will speak for us but ourselves.” Which imaginings of any “nation” have been the ones that have proved most potent in the process of persuading, silencing, or diverting women? The Black women who signed the New York Times ad, the British white women and women of color organizing

20 | ENLOE the Women Against Fundamentalism rallies, the Francophone women trying to carve space to be heard in the on-going Quebec debates - each of them live complicatedly textured lives. Perhaps we will find that for many women, less “persuasive” than formal arguments about ideas and strategies have been the pressures of family loyalties, sexual expectations or sheer exhaustion.

Each of these possibilities, of course, cannot be explored

unless men in any period of nationalist mobilization are investigated in terms of their own family dynamics, sexual practices and unpaid labor. Because we still know too little about women’s experiences of nationalism, we have left ourselves ignorant of men - as men - in the histories of nationalism. If we

paid as much attention to the construction of the “patriotic father” as we have (productively, one should add) to the construction of the “patriotic mother,” what would we learn | about the uses of masculinities in the mobilization of national

consciousness? |

These often difficult and often “private” struggles between women and men over the relevance and meaning of the nation need to be charted over time. Commentators seeking to explain why nationalist concepts and agendas began to overtake older feudal notions of Kurdish identity among Turkey’s Kurds in the 1970s, point to the million or more Turkish Kurds who migrated

out of eastern rural villages searching for jobs in Ankara,

_ Frankfurt and Berlin. These urbanized migrants were the ones

who created new notions of Kurdishidentity no longer dependent

on loyalty to clan chiefs; it was migrants, especially those in Germany, beyond the reach of the Turkish police, who created new political organizations in which theories and skills could be

honed. When these urbanized Kurds, however, sought to bring | their new messages home to the villages in eastern Turkey, they often met with a cool, even hostile response. Kurds for centuries had been divided along clan lines; now a new rift was opening between urban and rural Kurds (McDowell 1989). But was that the principal gap? A majority of Kurds who migrated to Turkish cities and to Europe were men. So it was to increasingly feminized village societies that these freshly politicized nationalist men returned. Did this urban-rural gender gap encourage many of those men to imagine women in ways strikingly akin to Pierre Vallieres’ image of his non-nationalist mother? If they did, the likely corollary has been a reaffirmed sense among politicized

| Wariness WitHOUT PARALYSIS? 21 male Turkish Kurds that masculinity is the most reliable launch pad for nationalized political consciousness.

| The post-mobilization period of any nationalist movement whether it succeeds or fails in creating a state or carving out new areas of political autonomy - is a time of lesson-fashioning and

myth-making. Women as well as men have to live with those lessons and myths. They will form the bases of national identity and of strategies for sustaining gains or recouping losses. Most of these lessons and myths are fraught with gendered memories.

: Woman-as-traitor - or as potential traitor - is a common post| mobilization icon. Contemporary Iranian nationalist cosmology assigns an important place to women as vulnerable to foreign materialist allures. It is precisely because. women are relied upon to be the bearers of culture that they are so suspect in many nationalists’ eyes. If Iranian women succumbed to (were seduced by?) Western materialism, as they allegedly had been during the pre-revolutionary reign of the Shah, the entire national project would be jeopardized (Sanararian 1982). In a more self-critical

spirit, male Brazilian cultural nationalists are beginning to reassess their earlier attitudes toward singer, dancer and film star Carmen Miranda. Caetano Veloso has recently admitted that perhaps they were wrong when he and his fellow Brazilian

nationalist intellectuals charged Miranda with selling out to North American money, cheapening authentic Brazilian song and dance in the process. Carmen Miranda might have been more a source of nationalist pride for her popularization of, and creative development of national traditional forms (Veloso 1991). Similarly, “La Malinche,” the Indian woman who was given by her tribe to the Spanish conquistador Cortes and who later acted

as his translator and his mistress, was used by 19th century Mexican male intellectuals as a brick in their new Mexican edifice of identity. “La Malinche,” was popularized as not only a traitor to her nation but asa source of humiliation because of her sexual subjugation (Franco 1991).

, Mary Robinson, the Irish feminist lawyer who won election to the post of President of Ireland in 1991, is an example of a woman talking the very fine, often treacherously fine line. As president, a largely ceremonial post, she has attempted both to meet popular expectations that she will symbolically represent the “nation” as it exists in Irish citizens’ minds, while at the same

time to subtly redefine the very meaning of the Irish nation. In

22 | ENLOE trying to accomplish this, Mary Robinson has risked becoming an Irish “Malinche.” For she has made gestures - visiting AIDS patients in the hospital, offering solace to a gay male partner at his lover’s funeral, asking feminists to tea - that announce that this President imagines the boundaries of the Irish nation include within it people whom many Irish nationalist politicians and the State’s current legal system presume are not only outside the nation but present a real threat to it.° Thus far, Robinson appears to be winning the symbolic contest because so many Irish women and men, even those who oppose her positions on divorce and

abortion, seeing each as undermining Irish nationhood,

nonetheless believe she brings to the presidency a kind of

visibility and modern style that is winning Ireland new international respect. She is clearly a post-colonial representative

of the Irish nation. Secondly, Robinson has reached out to :

precisely those women who have embraced the Catholic Church’s

and major parties’ patriarchal policies, explaining that, “If feminists don’t value the work of women who stay at home, how is society going to value it?” (Phillips 1992). But in the 1990s, with the debates over European integration, Irish women’s rights

in Europe, resolution of the war in Northern Ireland, domestic laws prohibiting homosexuality, divorce, contraception and

abortion all now merging in a potent nationalist brew, encouraging a feminist presidential reinterpretation of Irish identity is not becoming any less of a political high wire act.

| When they are represented as sexual partners and as bearers of national traditions, women either can acquire nationalist prestige or lose it. Itis precisely because sexuality, reproduction and child rearing acquire such strategic importance with the rise of nationalism that many nationalist men become newly aware of their need to exert control over their community’s women. Controlling girls and women becomes a man’s way of protecting or reviving the nation. Nota few nationalist women have assisted in those efforts by policing other women. Thus, as is usually the

out. ,

case, national relations between women and men can be understood in part by investigating relations between women themselves. Other women, however, have denounced those myths of woman-as-traitor and, its obverse, woman-as-patriotic-mother as false and oppressive. They have had a hard time being heard

inside many nationalist movements and have risked their nationalist credentials - which many of them prize - in speaking

Wanriness WiTHouT PARALYsIs? 23 Rape and prostitution have been central to many men’s construction of the nationalist cause. Each has permitted men to

hear the feminized nation beckoning them to act as “her” protectors. The external enemy is imagined to be other men, men

who would defile or denigrate the nation. Too often missing in this gendered nationalist scenario are the voices of the women themselves who have suffered rape or been compelled to seek an income from prostitution. Thus during the Bangladeshi war of secession from Pakistan, raped Bangladeshi women rarely were asked to help build the identity of the new nation, though news

” of their rapes had the effect of mobilizing the anger of many Bangladeshi men. Raped women likewise today are used more as symbols than as active participants in Sri Lanka and Kashmir. From 1990s Bosnia, reports began to filter out during its civil

war of rape there too being wielded as an instrument of

, militarized masculinized nationalism. “We have orders to rape the girls,” a young Bosnian Muslim woman named Mirsada recounted being told by a Serbian soldier who abducted her from her village of Brezovo Polje in June; 1992. Telling her story

to an American newspaper reporter two months later, a story | later confirmed by other sources, Mirsada told of 40 village women being abducted and raped by Serbian male soldiers. A gynecologist who treated the survivors said that she believed that the rapes were intended to humiliate the Muslim women: “They were raped because it was the goal of the war” (Ms.

, Magazine 1992). ] Rape has been part of many wars, not all of them nationalist.

No war can be completely understood, its causes, its paths, its consequences, unless male soldiers’ sexual abuse of women - on

all sides - is taken seriously, described accurately, explained fully, traced forward as well as backward. Thus what has to be considered in Bosnia is exactly what actual rapes and reports of rapes reveal about the masculinization and the militarization of Serbia nationalism, Bosnian Croatian nationalism, and Bosnian Muslim nationalism. Neither masculinization or militarization } of any ethnic group’s development of nationalist consciousness is automatic. We need to be more curious, therefore. We need to figure out what this experience of rape did to each one of the _ Serbian male soldiers who took part in the assault on Brezovo Polje in June, 1991. We need to understand what Mirsada and the

other 39 women did with this horrific experience as they

24 ENLOE continued to define and redefine their senses of identity. We need to be more curious about what hearing of this report has

done to Muslim and Croatian Bosnian men’s separate

developments of their own imaginings of their nation. Another Bosnian woman, a non-Muslim, Marianna, became pregnant as a result of being raped by male soldiers for 24 hours in a Serbian controlled camp. “Never. I will never give birth.” She was by then seeking refuge and an abortion over the border in Croatia. What she did not yet realize was that Croatia’s dominant, male-

led regime had outlawed abortion in the name of Croatian

nationalism (Ms. Magazine 1992). ,

In the Philippines, until it was closed in November, 1992, the

U.S. navy base at Subic Bay had inspired a wave of Filipino nationalism. And, here again, women’s sexuality was the object ,

of intense nationalist discussion. The thousands of women

working in the discos and massage parlors to sexually service _ American sailors had stood at the center of anationalist mural of

humiliation. But non-feminist nationalist organizers in the Filipino anti-bases movement differed markedly from their feminist nationalist compatriots. The former relied on the women in prostitution as symbols but didn’t ask the women themselves

how they analyzed their poverty, their parenting choices, their often rocky relationships with Filipino men. Meanwhile Filipino feminists in the movement envisioned a nationalism that required

that they organize with the prostitutes and listen to them in

- order to make sense of the bases and thus of the costs and attractions of neo-colonization in the 1990s.’

Popular culture, a topic treated with growing seriousness, is playing a gendered role we scarcely yet can define in the making - and unmaking - of national consciousness. Raphael Samuels’ ambitious three-volume archeological dig into popular culture’s historic part in constructing “English” patriotism, for instance,

is all the more valuable for its feminist contributions on mythical | heroines, popular health discourse and children’s fairy tales (Samuels 1989). Today there is anecdotalevidence, forinstance, . that the American film “Rambo” has been used to build morale

by insurgent men in the Philippines and Chile, but we know little about how the masculinist meanings insurgents derived

from their clandestine video viewings have shaped their relationships with women inside and outside of the national communities. Close on the heels of (perhaps out in front of) the

Wariness WitHouT PARALYSIS? 25 “global film”, pornography has become internationalized and

industrialized. Yet we are virtually uninformed about -pornography’s contribution to dreams of nations. What consequences do the portrayals of Asian women wrestling have for Latin American or Middle Eastern men’s constructions of

femininity within the frameworks of their own national identities? During the Persian Gulf war when white American men and African American men pinned up the same calendar specially produced for the war (and sold in the Pentagon’s own bookstore) featuring white women draped in nothing more than

‘cartridge belts, did it have identical implications for their __ respective senses of their masculine selves in this post-Cold War world? We have been learning in recent years to assign more weight to oral and literary genres as we trace the evolutions of distinctive collective identities.

We shouldn’t imagine, however, that it is only publishers’ candidates for the British Booker Prize that help to shape men’s and women’s politicized sense of belonging - or of alienation. It can be videos, advertisements, sports, comics, toys and calendars.

+

Conquerors’ mistresses, wartime rapes, military prostitution, cinematic soldier heroes, patriotic pin-up calendars - these are only some of the indications not only that nationalism is often constructed in militarized settings, but that militarization, like

‘nationalist identity itself, is gendered. Put more simply, no person, no community, no national movement can be militarized without changing the ways in which femininity and masculinity are brought to bear on daily life.

, _ Civil wars - some we labeled revolutionary, others we thought of as mere insurgencies - were the sites of much of our research in the 1960s and ’70s. They seemed to offer opportunities to explore changing consciousness, national versus class versus ethnic loyalties, the processes of social mobilization and party building, state fragility and interventions. But I don’t recall that _ they prompted us then to think about - or even conceptualize militarism. States had militaries. That’s how you could tell they were states. And certain levels of alienated mobilization seemed naturally to take the form of armed insurgency. But militarism a distinctive set of beliefs and structures - and militarization - a

particular societal process entrenching these beliefs and _

26 ENLOE structures? We looked to neither concept to generate questions,

to make us stop in our intellectual tracks. So we made it all appear easier than in fact it was. I think back now to the 1960s and wonder why I didn’t pause,

why I found it so easy to accept armed nationalist conflicts as, if , not inevitable, at least not very surprising. At some level I did not problematize nationalist warfare. True, I did puzzle over when state elites used their militaries - and police forces - to respond to ethnic or anti-imperialist challenges. I did wonder about how civilian nationalists came to their decisions to take up

armed resistance and about, if they succeeded, how they controlled the military forces they had created. And I did try to understand how relatively unpoliticized people caught in the crossfire pieced together their own strategies for coping with an

escalating conflict. All this hard questioning notwithstanding, I | stillassumed that militarization of any nationalist conflict wasn’t that difficult to accomplish. It only required, Inaively presumed,

the state’s deployment of military units and the insurgents’ acquisition of weapons and recruits and policies, in order to bring the two sides into an encounter.

In those days I didn’t give much thought to what sort of mental transformations had to occur in order for national identities to become militarized. Now I am more and more convinced that the militarization of any nationalist movement

: occurs through the gendered workings of power. It is neither natural nor automatic. Militarization occurs because some people’s fears are allowed to be heard, are allowed to inform agendas, while other people’s fears are trivialized or silenced. Slovak nationalism, reemerging today, Quebecois nationalism, now inits third decade of development, Lithuaniannationalism, .successful in its achievement of statehood - none have (as yet)

been militarized. .

Within other nationalist movements, by contrast, there have , been explicit contests and ambivalence over militarization. Thus

within contemporary Russian nationalism, U.S. Black

nationalism, Canadian Indian nationalism, South African Black nationalism, German nationalism, Serb, Croatian and Bosnian nationalism there have been debates over those social changes that would legitimize particular militaristic tendencies. In each

of these processes of national formation the struggle today remains inconclusive. It is impossible to make sense of how

Wanriness WiTHOuT PARALYSIS? 27 nationalist ideologies and organizations emerge, grow, wither or disappear altogether if we do not chart these internal debates over militarization. Who supports militarizing strategies and who offers alternatives? Do the supporters and their critics look different in their genders, regions, generations, class, or political experiences? Principal among militarizing transformations are changes in ideas about manliness - manliness as it supports a state, and

manliness as it informs a nation. If I had given more (any!) thought to what changes in meaning assigned to being a man occurred as the state deployed its forces in the name of “national security,” in the name of creating anew, more authentic nation, and to how the nationalist movement mobilized its force, then I might have noticed that changes in ideas about masculinity do not occur without complementary transformations in ideas about what it means to be a woman. For instance, I might have paid attention to the state’s policies regarding rape: were soldiers given instructions to avoid sexual

assaults on women in the contested regions? Were reported assaults treated seriously by superior officers or glossed over? IJ

might have given more analytical weight too to evidence that insurgent male leaders deliberately excluded or included women,

that they tried to prevent sexual liaisons within their units, that they encouraged most women to serve the now-militarized cause in roles compatible with pre-existing community concepts of femininity. And by paying attention] might have caught sight of

the contradictions that thread their way through most

militarization processes.

For militarization is not a process greased with natural inclinations and easy choices. It usually involves confusion and mixed messages. On the one hand, it requires the participation

of women as well as men. On the other hand, it is a social

reconstruction that usually privileges masculinity. It is the first necessity that makes many women who have become nationalists

willing to support militarization: their participation as women becomes valuable; they often gain new space in which to develop political skills. During the intifada, Palestinian women began to run more of the West Bank community institutions as the Israeli

military closed down older institutions as security risks and as hundreds of Palestinian men were imprisoned. During the 8month Iraqi military occupation, Kuwaiti women, having lost

28 ENLOE their Asian maids, likewise gained a new sense of their political

value as obtaining food, carrying information and caring for torture victims took on nationalist connotations. Meanwhile, those Iraqi women identifying themselves as nationalists via participation in the ruling Baathist Party’s Women’s Federation spoke of the earlier Iran-Iraq war as a time when the state was

compelled to take women’s talents seriously, replacing conscripted men with women in hosts of official positions. Because it is a process riddled with gendered contradictions,

the militarization of any nationalist movement is usually a contested process. Itis often precisely where one can observe the

formal and informal political struggles between women and men. In these debates over militarization, women and men are not simply divided over priorities on the political agenda, but

over what constitutes this amorphous thing, “the nation.” 7 Peace movements that emerge inside of militarizing nationalist

movements typically are treated as though they are hopeless.

and/or analytically trivial. The militarization of our own

curiosity often takes the form of treating the most militarized tendencies - e.g., formations of mostly male militias - as the most

analytically interesting. There is aSerbian Women’s Party. Going by the acronym ZEST, it was founded by asmall group of women in November, 1990, on

the eve of the Serbian elections, elections suffused with nationalist rhetoric. Within two months it had 500 enrolled members. Its leaders explained in the party’s manifesto that they were moved to launch a Women’s Party at this crucial juncture in the decline

- of communism and emergence of Serbian nationalism within What then still remained a Yugoslav state “to facilitate the

unveiling and recognition of the forms of authoritarian consciousness and behavior that hardly care for the genuine democratization of society, but are overwhelmed with a lust for

power and dictatorship over human needs” (Cockburn 1991).° : They weren’t mincing their words. The Women’s Party called for a respect for cultural diversity

within Yugoslavia. It reached out to non-Serbian women. It

published reports to show women that they were discriminated 7 against in the Yugoslav work force more on the basis of their gender than on their ethnicity. The mobilization of ever more

intolerant nationalist organizations wouldn’t assure that

Wariness WitrHouT PARALYSIS? 29 women’s labor would be fairly valued. Thus the party’s activists

became increasingly skeptical of the violence justified in the name of communal progress. They joined other Serbian antimilitarist groups, men and women, to create the Belgrade Center for Anti-War Action. Serbian Women’s Party members swelled

the numbers in peace marches, decrying policies which were resulting in Serbians being “trapped ina meaningless war which most of the citizens do not want.”?

Thus Serbian militarization, like any nationalism’s -militarization, has not been a foregone conclusion. It has been , gendered in ways that have sometimes slowed, even halted its

progress. We need to understand when, where and how a community’s politicized sense of its own identity becomes threaded through with pressures for its men to take up arms, and for its women to loyally support brothers, husbands, sons, and lovers who become soldiers. How were the pressures mounted? What did it mean for women’s and men’s relationships to each

other? What happened when some women resisted those pressures? What if we took seriously the women-led peace efforts

inside Serbia and Croatia in 1991? What if we treated as intellectually significant the current “mothers” peace movement inside Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Sinhalese communities? What if we

paid more attention to the Russian women’s anti-conscription movement? What if we integrated into our analyses Black South African women’s concern about the impact of the return home from exile of many men who have spent years training as guerrilla

fighters? What if we listened, as students of nation-making, to the Quebecois women who spoke out against misogynist violence in the aftermath of the December, 1989 “Montreal massacre”?

~My hunch is that we would be compelled to rethink nationalism. We would have to see the making of nations as a process of struggles between women and men. These struggles ~ cannot be portrayed simplemindedly as all women lined up on one side and all men on the other in a war-of-the-sexes stand-off.

Rather, we can bestow significance on those pushes and pulls

employing gender to fashion a national community in somebody’s, but not everybody’s image. If we took seriously

these intra-communal women-led efforts to forestall or roll back militarization, we also would have to ask more acute questions

about what it has actually taken to militarize any particular community’s national consciousness. We would discover power in its full array of forms.

30 ENLOE In the post-Cold War 1990s it may be less fashionable than it was in Berkeley in the mid-60s to celebrate nationalism - or its

product, the nation-state. But if one casts a wary eye towards nationalism today without a feminist understanding of its inner workings and its consequences, one will unwittingly permit a

post-modernized, militarized patriarchy. NOTES 1. For a feminist history of Quebec, see the Clio Collective (1987).

2. One of the best places to start is with Kumari Jayawardena (1986). ~

3. Women Against Fundamentalism has published two issues thus far of their journal, by the same name, the most recent being No. 2, July, 1991. Their

address is: BM Box 2706, London WCi, 3XX, U.K. See also Nira Yuval-Davis . (1991), Fundamentalism and Women in Britain, Marxism Today. Also see case

studies detailing women’s ambivalent relationships to nationalism collected by Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias (1989).

4.1 am grateful to Beverly Grier, of Clark University, an active participant in these conversations, for giving me a sense of how the meetings evolved. _ 5. The entire advertisement, together with the full list of signatories, is now available from Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 908, Latham, N.Y. 12110. An abridged version is reprinted in The Black Scholar (1992). Another collection of essays by Black writers, including several women who signed the New York Times advertisement, is Toni Morrison, ed. (1992). For more information on the group that created and published the advertisement, contact: African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, 317 S. Division

. Street, Suite 199, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48104. |

(1992). | (1991). : ,

6. Fora fuller Irish feminist analysis of Mary Robinson’s surprising electoral victory and her uses of the presidency, see Ailbhe Smyth (1992).

7. A wonderful new collection of oral histories by Filipino and Korean women working as prostitutes around U.S. bases in the Philippines, South Korea and Guam is soon to be published: S. Sturdevant and B. Stolzfus, eds. 8. The entire Women’s Party manifesto is published in Cynthia Cockburn

9. Quoted in “Anti-war Movement in Yugoslavia,” Overseas, Vilbeler Str. 36, 6000 Frankfurt, Germany, no. 18, 1992, p. 13.

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Wariness WiTHOUT PARALYSIS? 31 The Black Scholar, eds. ) 1992 Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks Out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Thomas vs. Hill. New York: Ballantine.

Clio Collective 1987 Quebec Women: A History. Toronto: Women’s Press.

Cockburn, Cynthia /

1991 A Women’s Political Party for Yugoslavia: Introduction to the Serbian Feminist Manifesto. Feminist Review (39) Winter: 155-160. Enloe, Cynthia 1973a Multi Ethnic Politics: the Case of Malaysia. Berkeley: Center for

: Southeast Asian Studies, University of California. 1973b Ethnic Conflict and Political Development. Boston: Little Brown and

Company. 1980a Ethnic Soldiers. London: Penguin; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. -

1980b Police, Military and Ethnicity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Franco, Jean 1991 Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York:

Columbia University Press. Jayawardena, Kumari 1986 Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Press. McDowall, David 1989 The Kurds. London: Minority Rights Group. Michele, J. L., M. L. Lavigne and J. Stoddart

1987 Nationalism and Feminism in Quebec: the “Yvettes” Phenomenon. In The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism. R.

Morrison, Toni, ed. , | Hamilton and M. Barrett, eds. Pp. 322-342. London: Verso.

1992 Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon. _ Ms. Magazine '

1992 Bosnia and Herzegovina: “Only Following Orders.” November, p. ‘AL

Phillips, Andrew 1992 A Woman of Substance. McLean's. October 19, pp. 46-47. Samuels, Raphael, ed. 1989 Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of National Identity. Volumes 1-3. London: Routledge. Sanararian, Eliz 1982 The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran. New York: Praeger.

smyth, Ailbhe 1992 Hail Mary - a President of Women. Trouble and Strife. No. 23, Spring, pp. 4-7.

32 | j _ ___ENLOE Sturdevant, Sandra and Brenda Stolzfus, eds. | |

1992 Let the Good Times Roll. New York: The New Press. .

Tamang, Seira 1992 Gurkha Wives. Honors Thesis, Department of Government, Clark University.

Vallieres, Pierre 7 1971 White Niggers of North America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Veloso, Caetano ,

October 20. Yuval-Davis, Nira, ed. 1991 Caricature and Conqueror, Pride and Shame. The New York Times.

1992 Unholy Orders: Women Against Fundamentalism. London: Virago. : Yuval-Davis, Nira and Flora Anthias, eds. 1989 Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan.

Anthropological Perspectives

Feminist Perspectives on Palestinian Political Culture

Under Occupation

i Davida Wood | Princeton University

I would like to preface my remarks with a clarification: in talking about feminist perspectives on Palestinian nationalism, I am going to be referring to two different political situations that Palestinians face. The first is that of Palestinians who live inside the state of Israel, who are citizens of that country, but who claim the contested status of anational Palestinian minority. I willrefer to them as “Israeli Palestinians.” The second situation is that of Palestinians living in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the site of theintifada--or uprising-

- which seeks to end Israeli occupation and to establish a Palestinian state. While Israeli Palestinians have identified with and supported the intifada in a variety of ways, they have not been direct participants in it. Accordingly, the degree and type of conflict is different in each case. But, as I will suggest, the

issue of women’s honor is intimately connected to Israeli domination of both situations.

% oF

On June 24, 1991, the Israeli Palestinian feminist organization

| Al-Fanr broke the silence about honor-killings. In a demonstration in the city of Nazareth, a small group of women protested the - murder of 19 year old Ibtisam Habashi who was killed after it became known that she was pregnant out of wedlock. To “protect

family honor,” her father and brothers bound her, put her ina car, and set her on fire. By organizing against such murders, AlFanr problematized an issue which political parties claiming to represent Palestinian rights had not included on their agendas. |

35 -

36 | | Woop Indeed, not one representative of The Progressive Movement, The Arab Democratic Party, The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, or the Communist Party attended the demonstration,

, although each party was sent an invitation. And, while criticizing these supposedly nationalist parties, the Palestinian feminists also levelled a critique against the Israeli government. They accused the authorities of a “forgiving attitude” towards those who murder women in order to “protect

: the family honor,” citing examples of prosecuting attorneys replacing the charge of murder with one of manslaughter, and instances of the murderers having their sentences commuted . through presidential pardon. “The establishment,” one of the founders of Al-Fanr stated, “wants us to remain a backward society.”? In other words, Al-Fanar rejects any justification of a

two-tiered judicial system in terms of a “cultural defense.” As they see it, the murder of women in order to control their sexuality is a political issue, both within Palestinian society and in its relation to the state of Israel. I would like to elaborate a little on some ways in which this politics of family honor works in the context of the two types of conflict.

Interestingly, the Israeli legal system makes no distinction between homicide for reasons of family honor and homicide in © other circumstances. On paper, there is no recognition of sucha motive requiring any special treatment and the Supreme Court

. has ruled to uphold this. But, as anthropologist Joseph Ginat (1987) has noted, the Israeli administration, as opposed to the state, does make such a distinction. I find it significant that the slippage emanates from government and local representatives of the state, and military and police officers--those who are most

directly responsible for controlling the “Arab sector.” Such a authorities claim that this “flexibility” implies a recognition of “customary ways” of handling such cases. Ginat agrees. In his

estimation, “the responsiveness shown limits the alienation of the | traditional communities within the modern state” (1987:27, my emphasis).

Ginat’s approach suggests a cozy relationship between the Israeli administration and the Palestinian minority. What he and the Israeli authorities do not discuss, however, are the brutal consequences for women as well as the inherently divisive consequences of honor killings within Arab society. The concept

PALESTINIAN POLITICAL CULTURE 37 of “honor” is one that links the authority of men to the sexual behavior of women under their charge. Challenges to the ability _ of men to control female sexuality thus threatens their positions in the socio-political hierarchy. While this is not the only forma

challenge can take, the cleavages that are constructed in the idiom of “family honor” are inextricably bound up with the political careers of men. By overlooking the murder of women,

the Israeli administration also perpetuates the fragmentation that is engendered between men.

- Nor do such politics reside safely in the realm of the

a. “traditional.” That is to say, the world of “clans,” and “family honor” is not insulated from that of “political parties” and “nationalism,” and vice versa. In village politics, a feud that is

constructed as an issue of illicit sexuality cannot but mean tensions within the party or intensified antagonism between members of opposing parties. In this way, the distinction between

ideological rivalries and challenges to family honor becomes blurred. This, I believe, is one of the meanings of Al-Fanar’s charge that the perpetuation of the concept of family honor as a basis for male authority is not only at the expense of women but is in the interests of the state.

But there is more. The Israeli Palestinians, although not involved in direct confrontation with the state since 1948, are

nevertheless regarded as a potential fifth column. Notwithstanding their status as citizens, they are under constant and close surveillance. The state intelligence agency, known as Shabak,’ does not take particular pains to conceal their thorough infiltration of Palestinian communities. On the contrary, their tactics work to create an atmosphere of distrust of the people

with whom one lives and a haunting sense of personal vulnerability. Stories of betrayal by family members or supposed

political allies abound, anda sort of folk diagnostic has been

developed by which people try to decode the tell-tale

characteristics of the spies in their midst. While some of this reasoning borders on the fantastic, there are some more or less consistent categories of people who are likely to have been recruited. For example, men who have been in prison and whose sentences have been commuted, might have been released early on condition that they agree to work with Shabak, passing on information and perhaps actively participating

38 | Woop in nationalist organizations. The key, however, is that while people may have their suspicions, there is seldom certainty, let alone consensus. Not surprisingly, the lines of dissent form around local political loyalties that may not have anything to do with “the truth.” Prisoners who have been involved in blood-feuds, including those having to do with “family honor,” are thus particularly

good candidates for recruitment as agents that infiltrate nationalist organizations. Especially in the event that a reconciliation has not been achieved between the feuding parties, such men benefit not only from a commutation of their sentences _

but from state protection. To protect their agents, Shabak often supplies them with arms. However, these serve not only to deter

those who would assassinate a suspected collaborator but also as weapons against personal antagonists. Indeed, his very ~~ relationship with the state allows him to denounce not only

members of nationalist organizations but also those who charge him with violating their honor. In effect, he has been recruited to. play the dual roles of blood enemy and national traitor. In the discourse of family honor, the metaphor for political divisions are accusations of the inability of men to control women. In the

discourse of nationalism, on the other hand, the idiom for

fragmentation within the community is “collaboration” with the enemy. Conversely, where the idiom for authority was “honor,”

here it is “patriotic loyalty.” When these apparently distinct ' concepts of authority co-exist in conflictive situations, the two idioms of loss of political control are collapsed.

Under such circumstances, it is perhaps easy to see how a protracted confrontation with the state, such as theintifada in the

occupied territories, would be accompanied by an escalation of _ internalized violence. In such a context of militarization, with late night army raids, administrative detentions, torture, house

demolitions, and the future of the uprising at stake, state

protection is no longer always effective in discouraging the , assassination of those suspected of collaboration. In 1989, alleged

informers began to be killed in increasing proportions. As the

rate of such killings intensified, western and Israeli media declared that the intifada had turned in upon itself, and there were reports that numerous victims who were denounced as collaborators were in fact targeted as a result of clan disputes, the settling of scores by underworld figures, etc. Such examples

PALESTINIAN POLITICAL CULTURE _ 39 are usually cited only to label the Palestinians as savages not capable of self-government. What is suppressed is the deliberate - recruitment of agents based on knowledge of the local social and political scene. These recruits are people perceived to be moral offenders within their community, including prostitutes, drugdealers as well as those involved in disputes over family honor.

These and similar tactics work to blur the identities of moral offenders, collaborators and nationalist activists.

But there is another issue here, one that is specific to the stress

of a prolonged confrontation. The sociologist Joost Hiltermann (1990) has documented the trajectory of the assassinations, which

he.argues, cannot be considered as a monolithic phenomenon. At first, he argues, most of those targeted were those who openly collaborated with the Shabak, usually heavily armed and the source of terror within the community. However, as the intifada wore on, many of the experienced activists were successively arrested or deported. This left the day-to-day organization of the uprising in the hands of a younger, less seasoned generation. It was at this point that the summary execution of those merely rumored to be collaborators began to spin out of control. In an attempt to control the violence being committed at the discretion of local forces, The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising and the PLO issued directives forbidding the killing of any agent in the absence of a central decision. Nevertheless, to the extent

that the internalized violence spilled over from nationalist assassinations to local retribution, the system of repression functioned to destabilize moral as well as political authority. - What Hiltermann does not sufficiently elaborate on, however, is the nature of the “rumors.” While he mentions that there were

some cases of local strike forces punishing drug dealers and prostitutes who were not also Israeli agents, he does not deal with the relation of “clan feuds” to political violence. Nor does he deal with reports of another type of violence that began to filter out. At about the time of the “moral crusade” against dealers and prostitutes, several incidents were reported in which women as well as men were stabbed by groups of masked men

who accused them of sexual immorality. The fact that these

attacks were not claimed by brothers or fathers but were

perpetrated by masked men links them to the rising internalized

violence of the intifada, situating them somewhere between

40 Woop attempts to “protect family honor” and the specific violence against collaborators.

What I would like to suggest is that the linkage of the recruitment of agents to the social dynamics of specific communities has ramifications that extend beyond the issue of national loyalty. By intensifying the significance of the actions of “moral offenders,” the enforcement of “morality” in general

can be extended to the population as a whole. That is, the boundary between national honor and social honor begins to dissolve. It is in the context of this conflation of politics with the

moral fibre of the community, and its co-occurrence with the | pressures of continuous conflict that we should understand how groups--usually of young men--take it upon themselves to define

and impose standards of morality. To the extent that sexual Se

morality is emblematic of authority, the loss of control over the national community is projected in this idiom, and violence is

perpetrated in its name. : | Iam aware that what I have said contrasts with most of what

we have heard about the role of Palestinian women in the intifada. It is true that in the process of militarization, more women have become involved as activists, organizing themselves into women’s committees that have played a crucial role in the

uprising and have even succeeded in getting women’s issues onto the agenda. This has been the source of some optimism, and.

' has led Cynthia Enloe to ask “[will] such militarizing pressures lead to an enduring reordering of femininity and masculinity within the Palestinian nation?” (1989:59). I think it is important to recognize, however, that the consequences of these pressures

are not homogenous. The participationofwomeninthe political process exists in tension witha concept of authority that depends , upon “family honor.” If the reordering of gender relations is something we cannot count on to endure, it is not only because

they might be re-ordered once again some time in the future, but because, at any given time, contradictory orders co-exist. Itis on the interaction of these gender orderings with political processes-between men, between men and women, and between occupier

and occupied--that we should focus attention. And it is at that intersection that the work of Palestinian feminists--such as the members of Al-Fanar--is critical.

PALESTINIAN POLITICAL CULTURE _ 41

NOTES | ; 1. These remarks are based on fieldwork in the Galilee region of Israel and secondary sources on the Occupied Territories. I would like to thank the MacArthur Foundation, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University and Fulbright-Israel for their support of this research and its writing. 7

2. The Other Front. July 1991. Jerusalem: Alternative Information Center. 3. Shabak is an acronym for Sherut HaBitachon HaKlali, or General Security Service.

- REFERENCES ) Enloe, Cynthia , 1989 Bananas, Beaches and Bases. London: Pandora. __. Ginat, Joseph 1987 Blood Disputes Among Bedouin and Rural Arabs in Israel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hiltermann, Joost 1990 The Enemy Inside the Intifada. The Nation (251)7: 229-394.

Postcolonial Nationalism: Women and Retraditionalization in the Islamic Imaginary, Malaysia © Aihwa Ong University of California, Berkeley

Postcolonial Nationalisms Our view of twentieth century nationalisms must be situated in the larger history of imperialism, and the long postcolonial half-century whereby successive waves of communal strife, ethnic separatism, religious upheaval, and feminism struggle to redefine the politics of belonging. I would argue that the starting point for an analysis of nationalism and gender is not the analysis

of male and female relations, but an understanding of what kinds of nationalisms we-are concerned with. When we talk about nationalism, we often mean many things. When our subject concerns ex-colonial countries, it is particularly useful to follow

Benedict Anderson’s (1983) distinction between “official nationalism” and communally-based ones. By the former, he means the nationalism that. is produced out of the merging of traditional dynastic power and nation in the face of popular

uprisings against the colonial ruler. In the period of decolonization, traditional elites preparing to take over the

instruments of rule articulate a nationalism that reflects their own dominant interests rather than those of the popularly imagined community (1983: 92-103). Thus, in the postcolonial world, more communally-based forms of imagined communities, or would-be nationalisms, continue to plague many independent countries, whether in the form of ethnic genocide, or religious

43 }

44 . ONG movements, or even resistance to female oppression, as diverse subjects come to grips with what citizenship can mean.

_ Orientalist and Feminist Views on Nationalisms Scholars view the relation between nationalisms and women

in third world societies in at least two ways. There is the dominant , view that defines nationalism in terms of struggles against colonialism or a postcolonial forging of a unitary national identity, focusing in both cases on male action and ideas and ignoring the agency of women (Roff 1967; Anderson 1983; Guha

and Spivak 1986). Occasionally women are mentioned, in an apologetic bow, but treated as quite marginal to the struggle © over meanings and community in new nationalist imaginings (Kapferer 1988; Kahn and Loh 1992). It is quite startling that writers on Asian colonial history and the making of postcolonial oO communities can blithely exclude a discussion of women’s

participation or identification with a certain imagined community, even in Islamic movements where female symbolism

in the social imaginary is dominant and pervasive, or the “retraditionalization” (Brackette Williams’ term) of gender roles is central. Such (male) scholarly blindness betrays an orientalist imaginary geography whereby “oriental” women, fetishized as

sexual and degraded subjects, are disregarded as politically significant subjects in struggles over communal identity (for an

exception, see Chatterjee 1989). , , Gayatry Spivak (1988) notes that the elite and male perspective of so many scholars, who cannot conceive of female agency, makes it impossible for them to speak for “the subaltern woman.”

While Spivak’s assault on gender-blind analysis is timely and

necessary, she unintentionally creates an essentialized and homogenized “subaltern [Asian] woman.” Indeed, there is the ) presumption that in conditions of religious revivalism (often associated with Asian societies), “women are excluded, silenced

in discursive practices; they do not participate on par with men | in deliberation and decision making” (Fraser 1991). Feminists | thus sometimes fall prey to the identification of female agency only when women in these societies struggle for democratic and civil rights in opposition to religious movements or non-Western cultural formations (Jayawardena 1986; Kandiyoti 1991; Ong

1988). Indeed, when it comes to Islamic nationalisms, many |

Western feminists cannot understand why educated women

WoMEN IN THE ISLAMIC IMAGINARY, MALAYSIA 45

would embrace Islamic rules and practices that constrain their public rights (Mernissi 1987). This approach allows no place for a consideration that women, in accepting a vision of society in

which they play secondary roles, are very much more than simply victims. Representations of women in nationalist myths as both mothers and traitors are seen as mainly detrimental to women’s interests and desires. However, if we look at many third world nationalisms, they represent more than masculinist dreams of domination — the social imaginary of cultural and political autonomy also resonate with women’s desire for cultural

belonging and strengthening. Islamic Narrative of Community As a counterpoint to some of the work of Western feminist scholars, this paper will discuss how in Malaysia, many middle class Malay women share in the resurgent Islamic narrative of community (for more details, see Ong 1990). In recent years, feminists like Cynthia Enloe, working in non-Western societies, seek to recuperate women’s agency in the study of nationalisms. Malaysia is a booming would-be newly industrializing country

(NIC) run by a British-educated Malay technocratic elite presiding over a multi-racial population. This postcolonial prosperity has engendered a Malay middle class (most of whom are of peasant-origin) that, newly engaged with resurgent global Islam, has produced an alternative imagined community. This indigenous (as opposed to the official) nationalism is articulated

in an Islamic narrative of community that centers on the “retraditionalization” of women’s deportment, space, and public activities at an historical point when Malay women are flooding

urban centers as students, factory and office workers, and professionals. To paraphrase Chatterjee (1990), the growth of an

embryonic civil society through mass education and the

standardization of a national culture is continually

overshadowed and overtaken by the Islamic narrative of community. Local scholars argue that the Islamic missionary

(dakwa) movement counters the effects of ennui while

reengendering asense of belonging. The revivalists view Western

culture, especially the propagation of consumer and relativist .

values, as a direct assault on the essence of Islam, its communalism, and belief in the oneness of God (tauhid, Chandra

Muzaffar 1986:72). This latest wave of Islamic nationalism, in contrast to state policy, envisions a moral community (umma)

ONG that resists the appropriations of capital, while struggling to

preserve the cultural and racial resources of the Malay community

in a developing but racially-divided society.

Retraditionalization and Female Agency Claiming to be more authentically Muslim than the aristocratic , Malay ruling elite, the Islamic revivalists seek to build an

alternative community that is founded upon the

retraditionalization of women’s roles, and the redivision of private and public spheres. The Islamic narrative focuses on a series of sites of struggle (body, family, university, labor market, | urban milieu), not in order to develop democratic consensus, but to construct an alternative moral community in everyday life. Women are the key symbols of the imagined community, bothas

representation of the domestic realm, and as boundary-markers oo. between communities (or races) in the wider society.

These religious nationalists use Saudi Arabian practices as

invented traditions to redefine Malay women and their comportment in public places. Arabic robes and veils are pressed

upon women, thus enclosing them in a privatized space, while Muslim men wear Western shirts and pants associated with

modern public culture. Other ritual forms include practices

governing dietary and culinary behavior, worship and

intercourse with non-Muslims. Although other scholars view

the intensified symbolism of traditional Malay culture as a , turning away from excessive consumerism and development (Kahn 1992), I argue that these rituals and practices represent a retraditionalization of community that identifies middle class Malays as first and foremost Muslims, rather than Malay. Their construction of difference — of a cultural, social, and spiritual -

nature — is conditioned by the power balance achieved vis-a-vis non-Muslim Chinese and Indians in Malaysia. Indeed, Malay women’s intensified religiosity, and their encumberment by _

robes and social restrictions drastically foreclose relations with ,

men in the other racial groups. Thus, as retraditionalized symbols of authentic Islam, they embody not only an alternative imagined

community to the multiracial Malaysian nation-state, but also

Maiays’ spiritual affinity with a global resurgent Islamic civilization.

Many of the most zealous adherents to Islamic revivalism in Malaysia are middle class women (Zainah Anwar 1987). They

WoMEN IN THE ISLAMIC IMAGINARY, MALAYSIA 47

have scaled back their public activities, participation in the job market and, formally at least, identify with the revivalist vision of them as primarily mothers and wives. In the Islamic narrative,

women, as child-bearers, represent the Malay nation/race (bangsa), that is not coterminous with the Malaysian nation (which includes other races). As mothers, they possess and transmit Malay cultural resources, and ensure the growth of the Malay population to maintain its lead (52 percent of 14 million people) in the racial demography of the nation-state. The future of the Malay community thus depends on women realizing in their roles as wives and mothers the Islamic moral community. As mothers and wives, women are ritually marked as replenishers of the population, while sealing community boundaries against ethnic engulfment by the numerically strong and economically powerful Chinese, and to a lesser degree by Indians.

Thus female subjectivity in resurgent Islam is shaped by an active accommodation and partnership with men in defending their children, culture and race against non-Muslims and Western capitalist culture. Their sense of subjective rights is embedded in the survival and strength of the moral community, represented

in an alternative view of nationhood that defends against deracination in the context of the wider industrializing nationstate. Inthe imagined community, defense of Malay society requires pushing women out of the public sector and back into the homes.

However, this retraditionalization of their roles as mothers should not be simply viewed as a reassertion of male control, or

as evidence of female passivity and silencing in Islamic nationalism. Women’s active participation in reinscribing themselves intoa “traditional” space must be seen as amaneuver to renegotiate the terms of male control whereby women gain moral authority (Malay women chant “Power lies at a mother’s feet”). Their increased power at home and in female-networks for propagating Islam strengthen their commitment to being good Muslims and protectors of the race. Indeed, as defenders of the sanctity of Islam, Malay women have begun to limit male power in the name of religion. A group of professional women

calling themselves “Sisters in Islam” have begun to counter gender inequality in middle class Malay society. Ina letter to a local paper, the “Sisters” maintain: It is reprehensible for Muslims to say that polygamy is Islam’s

48 ONG solution for men’s alleged unbridled lust.....The solution, as

found in the Koran and the hadith [book of the Prophet’s

sayings], is a change of attitude from one indulging in promiscuity to one of self-discipline and respect for the

opposite sex (Asiaweek August 9, 1991). .

The “Sisters” have also spoken out against wife beating, arguing that violence is against the Prophet’s teachings. Some have criticized excessive female dress codes as mechanisms of

control, pointing out that human failings, not Islam, are oppressive to women (ibid.). Thus, in their role as paragons of virtue, the authentic defenders of the faith, Malay women are renegotiating power relations with men in the family and in the society. What is not clear, however, is how or whether the , Islamic “sisters” would organize to oppose amore militarized | Malaysian state, or whether women’s positions or perceptions of

their roles within Islamic fundamentalism would be altered in

Conclusion |

the context of militarization.

My goal is to caution feminists against the assumption that

nationalisms usually represent only male interests, or that women

hold a separate vision of the imagined nation-state. In postcolonial societies, nativist imaginings of an alternative community (to the nation-state) often depend upon women to mark its difference and defend its boundaries. Both as symbols :

and as agents, women are central to “the political culture of

' symbolic inclusion (and exclusion)” (Kapferer 1988). Second, feminists and orientalists alike are too ready to view women as passive victims of Islamic nationalist movements. Muslim women

are viewed as active agents only as an oppositional force to religious nationalism, not as members within it. I suggest that women, as the symbols of cultural authenticity ina communally- : based nationalism, often capitalize on that moral power to renegotiate relations with men by holding them up to a higher

moral standard. Although an alternative imagined community often has among its goals the undermining of women’s newly achieved power in civil society, paradoxically, by joining forces and sharing in the new imagined community, women gain new power, enjoy cultural solidarity, and acquire a deeper sense of belonging in a world of their own making.

WoMEN IN THE ISLAMIC IMAGINARY, MALAYSIA | 49

References Anderson, Benedict , 1987 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso. Chandra Muzaffar 1986 Malaysia: Islamic Resurgence and the Question of Development.

Sojourn 1(1):57-76. |

Chatterjee, Partha ,

1989 The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question. In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Kumkum Sangari and Sedesh Vaid,

- eds. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

| 1990 A Response to Taylor’s “Modes of Civil Society.” Public Culture Fall

| 1990, 3(1):119-132.

Fraser, Nancy 1991 What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender. In Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory. M.L. Shanley & C.

Pateman, eds. Pp. 253-276. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Guha, Ranagit & Gayatry Spivak, eds. 1986 Selected Subaltern Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Preés.

Jayawardena, Kumari | 1986 Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Kahn, Joel 1992 Class, Ethnicity, Diversity: Some Remarks on Malay Culture in Malaysia. In Fragmented Vision. J.S. Kahn & F.L.K. Loh, eds. Pp. 158-178.

| Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kahn, Joel S., Francis K. Loh, eds.

| 1992 Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia.

| Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz, ed. 1991 Women, Islam and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Kapferer, Bruce

1988 Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political

Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian

Mernissi, Fatima a | Institute Press.

1987 Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society.

Revised ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ong, Aihwa

, 1988 Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies. Inscriptions 3/4:79-93. 1990 State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in West Malaysia. American Ethnologist 17(2):258-276.

50 : ONG Roff, William R. 1967 The Origins of Malay Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Spivak, Gayatry 1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Zainah Anwar 1987 Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia. Petaling Jaya Malaysia: Pelanduk Press.

Inclusive Boundaries, Exclusive Ideologies: Hindu Fundamentalism and Gender in India Today Eva Friedlander United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)

The post independence era in India has been a time of apparent paradoxes. It has at once seen the emergence of a strong woman

Prime Minister and also a women’s movement that has made significant gains over the past twenty years. At the same time violence against women has become more pronounced. Dowry deaths have been on the rise, sati has made a reappearance, and new technology, such as amniocentesis, has been pressed into service in order to ensure the birth of male offspring. Then too, India was born in the cradle of Gandhian non-violence, but consolidation of the new nation state entailed two wars with Pakistan over Kashmir, military assistance to the Bangladesh freedom movement and innumerable smaller military efforts (Manipur, Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, Punjab, etc.) inan attempt to secure its borders and contain insurgent movements that today continue to threaten the peripheries. Indeed, over 22% of the national budget goes to defense. And, finally, forged on the idea of a secular and inclusive state, a territory that could be home to.all - Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis, Jews, etc. - today, not even fifty years after its birth, India

is wrent by communal violence and a rapid spread of fundamentalism that threatens to pull it apart and transform the nature of the state.

| o1

The contradictory elements found in the birth and emergence of anation state, its militarization and changing gender roles are

22 FRIEDLANDER by no means unique to this part of the world. The mode in which

these strands are interwoven is, however, indeed culturally distinct. The symbols by which power is harnessed, identities moulded and their meaning constructed is a contested domain. Gender roles and identities are expressed in symbols, aspects of which are purposefully accentuated and meanings transformed in relation to structural changes. Only by understanding the symbolic elements that constitute the cultural landscape can we begin to discern what Cynthia Enloe in her article in this volume

so rightly identifies as central problems: the “mental

transformations that had to occur in order for national identities to become militarized” and the “gendered workings of power.”

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to ferret out all the strands of the symbolic web from which the Indian situation today is woven, my very brief comments will focus specifically on some observations regarding the relation of rapidly growing Hindu fundamentalism to recent changes in the domestic arena. It is in exploring the complexities of the relationship between the

national and domestic, the macro and the micro levels, that anthropologists can best play a role in filling in the details of the

picture Cynthia Enloe has so powerfully drawn. The communal upheavals in South Asia today are battles of exclusion and inclusion. They are struggles over boundaries,

territorial and ideological, to which ideas about femininity,

virility, purity and danger are linked to those of nationhood, : power and the military. The right wing alliance of militant fundamentalist organizations and nationalist parties (Bharatiya Janata Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, et al) are united in their effort to turn India into a Hindu nation and to “reclaim” Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. To this end Muslims are constituted astheenemy,tobeconverted ~~

or expelled from an India that will be “Hindustan.” While Hinduism has always encompassed a wide range of beliefs and

practices, Hindu fundamentalists have attempted to construct and lay claim toasingle “legitimate” religion. Drawingonarich _ and gendered mythology, a martial genealogy is wrought and claims to a greater territorial Hindu state are justified. This martial heritage is said to have been gradually usurped by such national leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, whose teachings of nonviolence are considered evidence of weakness and shameful deferral to the treacherous Muslim enemy.

Hindu FUNDAMENTALISM AND GENDER IN INDIA TODAY 93

Claims to righteousness are legitimized through reference to the mythological golden age of the Ramayana. The Ramayana, an epic myth, was first penned in the 6th century B.C., but dates back to a far more ancient past, usually associated with a martial tradition. Based on a myriad of oral traditions and accretions over the centuries, it has been created and recreated to suit the

circumstances of time and place, permitting selective interpretation as evidenced in its numerous versions. Ignoring varying regional and more universalistic versions, the one chosen, |

Valmiki’s, is used to portray Rama, deity now turned national hero, with the martial characteristics usually associated with the

_. warrior caste (Kshatriyas) as the embodiment of true Hindu manhood and virility. In turn, Sita, his wife, is relatively docile and obedient to his demands and desires (Kishwar 1990:7-9). The recent destruction of the 6th century north Indian mosque in Ayodha, which the BJP claims was built by Muslim invaders on the birthplace of Rama, is only the first step in an agenda to dismantle all Muslim mosques and replace them with temples. It is Valmiki’s version on which Ramanand Sagar, producer of

the television series on the Ramayana, has based his highly popular television series, and it receives similar widespread publicity through comic books read by children in India today. Central to Hindu fundamentalism is the call to arms in defense

of the motherland and the purity of its women. Women are vested with the role of boundary keepers; they are the bearers of

tradition and represent the purity of the group. As such they must be kept under careful surveillance lest their transgressions

endanger group cohesion and purity. They are the potential enemy within. The stage for the contemporary scene may have been at least in part set by the use of Hindu symbols by the pre-independence Indian nationalist movement to mobilize the population. For example, India was often referred to as the Mother Goddess, Durga or Kali, etc., and Gandhi spoke of independence as Ram Rajya (the Rule of Rama). Even earlier, in what Partha Chatterjee

has suggested was the 19th century nationalist response to colonialism, nationalism was associated with spiritualism and spiritualism with the feminine in the construction of an Eastern identity apart from and in opposition to the rationalist ideology

of the West. The domain of culture was separated into the spiritual and the material, the home and the world, the feminine

54 FRIEDLANDER and the masculine, such that the inner spiritual world came to define the essential core of eastern cultural tradition and national identity was expressed in “feminine” qualities (Chatterjee 1989). Today, in the post colonial period, as separatist movements threaten to pull apart the fragile union, Hindu fundamentalism

stands ready to provide a unifying, if exclusive, ideology. , It is the complex interplay of exclusion and inclusion which frames the communal battles being fought today, and these are expressed in, and shaped by, the politics of gender at the domestic level where similar tensions are played out.

Rapid economic change entailed by capitalist industrialization, the green revolution and changes in patterns of landholding, agricultural labor and male migration, have all

brought about a profound restructuring of genderrolesinIndia. The role of women in the labor force has changed dramatically . since Independence, altering patterns of women’s work. Some women are being pulled out of their formerly agricultural roles and into the home in accordance with hegemonic middle and

upper class concepts of morality and attempts at upward mobility. Other women, formerly at home, are breaking new ground, drawn/forced into the labor market by demand for cheap labor on the part of employers, and, on the part of women, the need for income in the wake of increasing economic pressures.

In this context, relations between men and women are in the

process of being renegotiated. As the demands of the capitalist , labour market threaten older patriarchal structures, attempts are made to reassert control and reimpose forms of domination (Chhachhi 1989: 572). The threat to past relations of power and authority has led to the attempt to maintain control over women legally, economically and domestically. ; As economic considerations take growing priority in marriage arrangements, the economic vulnerability of women throughout

much of northern and eastern India is expressed in what has _ been a rapid spread of dowry. This, in turn, played a part in the dissolution of highly localized caste boundaries in the wake of which more broadly constituted and inclusive caste, class and ethnic identities have come to the fore, with women and control

over women as important markers of relative and exclusive Status.

Hindu FUNDAMENTALISM AND GENDER IN INDIA TODAY 55

In this region of India, strongly patrilineal and patrilocal, the demand for dowry has been accompanied by women’s increasing

vulnerability. Subject to the constraints first of their father’s house and later that of their in-laws, they are considered as a

disruptive force. While necessary for reproduction of the husband’s patriline, they are also, by virtue of their outside origin, potential usurpers of it. Holding an ambiguous position between patrilines, they are viewed with ambivalence. Tensions within the domestic arena frequently focus on relations between

in-laws and treatment of women. ,

_ Ttisnot surprising, then, to find that women are spoken of as both goddesses and witches, creators and destroyers, and are both loved and feared. In West Bengal, this ambivalence is expressed in the popularization and increasingly widespread festivities dedicated to Durga and Kali, two aspects of the goddess

Shakti (the force of the universe, its ultimate power). Durga represents the much loved daughter and mother, creator and protector, portrayed as surrounded by her children, coming to the aid of Rama who slays the demon, Ravanna, abductor of his wife Sita. The fearful, destructive aspect is portrayed by Kali

: who, in grief over the loss of her son, creates havoc through wanton massacre. She is brought to her senses only when Shiva, her husband, throws himself under her feet to stop the carnage.

Portrayed standing astride Shiva at the cremation ground, garlanded in skulls, her tongue hangs out in embarrassment as she surveys the destruction she has wrought. In this scene she has literally turned the world, and rightful gender relations,

upside down. ,

Shakti as mother, then, is acreative force assuring purity and

preservation of the group through reproduction; but as wife (and hence as outsider), she is the potential source of disruption and pollution to be guarded against. The widespread worship of Durga and Kaliin recent years is an expression of the ambivalence with which women are held. Ina related fashion, on film posters that decorate Indian cities women are graphically linked with

. the sex and violence, but are also are portrayed as vulnerable victims of violence in need of male protection. In either case, the need for vigilance and control is asserted.

Attempts to reassert control over women are found at all levels and places, in the workplace, in the home, in marriage, over issues of fertility and, most dangerously, in legislation that

56 ; , FRIEDLANDER is eroding some of the gains made by women in the earlier post colonial period. The attempts are fuelled by confrontation with the growing Indian women’s movement, which since the 1970s has become highly visible as a result of their demonstrations, and vocal through publishing on such issues as dowry deaths, police rapes, and abortion of female fetuses, often relating these forms of violence against women to the structure of the family. By linking national identity with symbols that evoke a highly particularistic military and gendered interpretation of the past,

and by playing on fears borne of tensions within the domestic arena, fundamentalists have been able to mobilize large sectors of the population. Their skilled manipulation of ideology find © fertile ground among a population struggling to maintain middle class gains in the face of growing economic pressures that threaten |

what is often newly acquired status. The struggle entails legitimization of status through claim to a martial past said to ; justify exclusive rights to territory and other scarce resources. Today they constitute the greatest threat to India as a secular

democratic state. , REFERENCES

Chhachhi, Amrita 1989 The State, Religious Fundamentalism and Women: Trends in South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly March 18: 567-578.

Chatterjee, Partha

| 1989 Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Context in

India. American Ethnologist 16(4): 622-633. -

Kishwar, Madhu 1990 In Defense of Our Dharma. Manushi Number 60 (September-October): 2-15.

Women and the War Show: T.V.’s Gendered Construction

of the Homefront

a Nina Browne New York University , Cynthia Enloe has helped make clear to us that constructs of manly militarism and nationalism depend upon feminine counterparts in the domestic and private sphere. Following her

lead, I would like to examine this aspect of the Gulf War. Though U.S. women’s place on the battlefront was new and unique, I limit myself here to observations on the warfront’s homefront. Both during the Gulf War, and in the several months

since the bombing stopped, people watching popular network television in the United States have been bombarded with a gendered patriotism and “invented traditions;” media messages that invent a nation and are dependent upon a construction of

American womanhood. | Our imaginations, prevented by Pentagon censors from seeing the realities of war, were sanitized and feminized by commercial

television’s soothing pictures of American motherhood, love, hope, support, community, endurance, and industriousness. Particularly, I’m interested in understanding how the recent construction of this war’s homefront meant a re-construction in the country’s collective memory of World War II’s homefront. At war, Sadaam Hussein was equated with Hitler, this war was equated with the one against fascism; at home, women too were — castin familiar roles. Women as symbols, workers, and nurturers

had many parts to play in the American psyche to help a new world order and anew kind of war, fitold, comfortable formulas.

| 57

Memories of Viet Nam were suppressed, avoided, or aggressively countered on our television sets. Instead, World

58 BROWNE War II, our last just and victorious war was evoked and made to

represent the desired historical connection. Factories were pictured churning out flags and yellow ribbons: simultaneous symbols of our enduring industrial dominance, and motherly morality. I would like to discuss some examples of how television programs, like The Home Show, and Homefront, and the ubiquitous

symbol of the yellow ribbon, revised history and reimagined a

nation.

A truly invented tradition, the yellow ribbon has been traced

to ancient pagan offerings, to the Civil War south, to Tony Orlando and Dawn’s hit song of the 1970s, and to families affected by the Iranian hostage crisis. The New York Times in. February of 1991 called the ribbons “pleas, prayers and hopes, made visible.” But like most invented traditions, their meaning

was vague; clearly a motherly, feminine frill, it remained a symbol that was benign, non-sectarian, ambiguous, even —s_—> ambivalent, and thus all the more easily worn. Mothers, wives, __. lovers, and also men with children or friends in Desert Storm wore yellow ribbons, inventing a nation through love. A pretty little ribbon tied on the pole of the august and intimidating flag

became a symbol of U.S. military dominance and moral righteousness. The full significance of these sentiments can be

better appreciated when it is realized that the country was facing a recessed, de-industrializing economy and slipping out of its rank as a “number one” world power.

. Importantly, ribbons weren’t just worn, they were made: manufactured by women in small-scale ribbon factories in

northern New Jersey, for instance. Several local New York news stories showed us these women at looms and sewing machines, some with sons in the war. They were modern day Betsy Rosses,

their ribbons and sons “made in the USA.” Thus, while -.

telecommunications and masculine, high-tech war technology were certainly celebrated, more down to earth, female-powered

light industries -- women and cloth -- were celebrated too. Ribbons, like patriot missiles, were projected as symbols of our enduring industry. During the war, The Home Show trafficked in images of the ribbon and American women’s industriousness. The Home Show on ABC is a high-rated midday daily talk show for women that

first appeared in 1988 and is currently in its fourth season.

WOMEN AND THE WAR SHOW 59 Specializing in contemporary issue experts and do-it-yourself gurus, The Home Show (also known simply as Home) even has a weekly newsletter. From January until June of 1991, the show’s computer generated logo was altered, the Oin Home tied witha

yellow ribbon. The hosts, all but one of whom were female, prominently displayed tiny ribbons and/or flags on their lapels, many homemade and sent in by viewers identified by name and warmly thanked during the show. Its cooking and crafts segments featured flag and yellow ribbon motifs on everything from pins, to shirts, to cake icing. Women who had written to soldiers in the

Gulf to find their pen-pal efforts had paid off in a wedding engagement were interviewed more than once. One day in _ March the show presented (with much hurried excitement and romance) the work of a woman fashion designer: a line of

wedding gowns for patriotic brides which “tastefully” incorporated yellow, red, white, and blue ribbons ~ hawked as perfect for brides whose grooms might be shipped off at any moment.

When the fighting formally stopped, t.v. images of the homefront did not. In fact, the Gulf War has spawned a new weekly evening hour-long drama series, also on ABC, which

premiered in the fall of 1991 and which is actually titled

| Homefront. It is set in a small town in Ohio just after World War

JI. It follows the stories of several families of differing races and classes whose paths intersect and sometimes clash. The.program’s slogan declares: “where innocence ends, the story begins.” The end of World War II thus is meant to mark a bittersweet transition period when, as the program’s other slogan tells us, “The world would never beso simple again.” The self-consciously historical plot lines revolving around a black housekeeper-white mistress conflict, premarital sex, birth control, and women organizing in the workplace convey the message that women would never be

so simple again. One female character, cast as intelligent and courageous, angrily faces the humiliation of being fired off the

assembly line at the close of the war. Yet with sense and ambition she gets herself a respectable office job upstairs. _ Another character, who goes to meet her returning soldier fiance

at the train station only to find his British war bride there instead, also conquers her humiliation by soon finding herself another good man.

60 BROWNE What is striking about this new t.v. series, as well as other war-related programming, is that the Viet Nam War’s tarnished homefront is bypassed in reconstructing women’s history. Today’s women are asked instead to relate to and heroicize prefeminist-movement women who grappled with rapid social change but who, or so we are told, did not threaten hegemonic

notions of femininity. What we find is that World War II nostalgia served as context and subtext for much of the Gulf War’s images. The t.v. image industry appears to be grasping for an era of so-called innocence

and happiness, that was somehow suddenly changed by the

arrival of World War II.? _ What can this war of images teach us? First, we must take commercialized television culture seriously. Though t.v. is not always easy to stomach, it is by watching it that we may grasp.

and contest the language that communicates an understanding of this changing world to millions of people. Then we may counter these images by promoting therealities of women’s work

in the U.S., as they increasingly work in non-union shops, are threatened with job loss by capital flight, and face downward mobility. Itis also critical that we come to understand the nature of women’s reproductive work ina militarized state. In this way we can better decipher the range of women’s feelings toward war, from proud support, to demoralized ambivalence, to angry resistance. Lastly, the Gulf War has also shown us that we must | organize to never again tolerate the degree of censorship imposed on the vocal and visual images of this war, and insist that we be

shown the ravages of what war is really about: death, not life.

NOTES , , Let us remember Homefront’s slogan: work to end this feigned “innocence,” and let the true story begin.

1. The 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came at an

opportune moment for the simultaneous imaging of both World War I and the Gulf War. Network television treatment of the anniversary is illustrative. One “documentary special” on Pearl Harbor tellingly grafted the old war on the

new by having heroic Gulf War General Norman Schwartzkopf as host. Throughout much of the programming on the anniversary, “Pearl Harbor Day” was uncritically hyped as a catastrophic turning point in United States history - an autonomous moment of betrayal and surprise - not a chapter ina continuous U.S. foreign policy.

— Of Arms, Men, and Ethnic War in (Former) Yugoslavia Bette Denich Boston University

Prologue During 1991 and 1992, the war in what had been Yugoslavia became a daily part of the televised imagery that now spans the globe. The bombardment of Dubrovnik during the fall of 1991 replaced the bombardment of Baghdad that had occurred during the preceding winter. The following spring, it was Sarajevo that became the target of televised attacks. In the Persian Gulf war, the attackers were portrayed as heroes, while the attackers of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo were taken to be brutal aggressors. Yet, the visual phenomena were strikingly similar, as cities that were historical centers of civilization came under attack, while their residents hid from bombs and artillery shells. The other side of

. these stories was portrayed in the form of war’s victims, as masses of refugees fled: the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq were followed by the Muslims of Bosnia as the image of suffering

humanity. | |

The attacks on Dubrovnik and Sarajevo were all the more _ shocking because armies were attacking what had been their own cities, when their country was Yugoslavia. But declarations

of secession, first by the republic of Croatia, and later by the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, turned the same armies against

fellow countrymen, whose identities had been redefined by a political reformulation of the state. Perhaps the Persian Gulf _ warseemed more acceptable because it launched attacks against

61 !

foreign cities, by armies thousands of miles from their homes, constructed an Enemy of strangers, and created victims of distant peoples. But the same structural logic of opposition in former Yugoslavia separated a Self and an Other who had been neighbors

62 DENIC and who were often intermarried, dividing families and even

individuals within themselves. To understand such a war requires a different set of questions than the conventional ones about which side is right and which is wrong.

A feminist model, proposed by Cynthia Enloe in this volume, posits a gendered relationship between nationalism

and militarism as a ground from which to analyze the warring ,

nationalisms that destroyed Yugoslavia. Questioning from a feminist perspective enables us to look at the underlying patterns

shared by all ex-Yugoslav contenders: why did they resort so swiftly to fighting each other, rather than pursuing efforts to find non-violent means for resolving conflicts about the postCommunist state? Whatever the differences among the political | leaders and parties involved in each former Yugoslav republic, this interpretation reveals fundamental respects in which they have acted from the same premises and pursued equivalent,

opposing courses of action. Invoking the same assumptions oe

about the nation and the state, they acted as mirror-images for each other, giving reality to the satiric formulation “we have ©

met the enemy and they are us.”’ ,

Constructing Nationhood and the State in Yugoslavia : The classical allusion in the title of this essay, to the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid “I sing of arms and the man,” is especially appropriate, considering that the man in question was both a

hero and a refugee of the Trojan war. The reference here illustrates relationships that have pertained since antiquity , } between men, militarism, and the state as a patriarchal institution.

The ancient state was an outgrowth of tribal society, and citizenship in the patria (fatherland) was a privilege allocated by

descent, through males. In Eastern Europe, 19th century ideologies defined the “nation” as an ethnic community, to. which people belong through birth. Thereby, contrary to the | universalistic definition of citizenship exemplified in the United States constitution, a “nation-state” is considered the birthright

of a particular ethnic population. Nationalist theories set up ,

conflict over which nation-state will gain control over a particular territory, in terms of whose descent will be privileged. Therefore, unless a population is homogeneous, to define the state in terms of any single “nation” is to create different and unequal categories

of citizens within its boundaries.

Or ARMS, MEN AND ETHNIC WAR IN (FORMER) YUGOSLAVIA. 63

Yugoslavia was conceived as a multi-ethnic state,’ a formulation that extended equivalent citizenship statuses to members of all its various ethnic populations. But to break Yugoslavia into component nation-states was to defy the realities

of a geography in which multiple ethnic populations live intermixed on the same territory. This dilemma was clear within

Yugoslavia whenever nationalist voices were raised within particular republics to call for self-determination on the basis of ethnic nationhood, and for secession of such nation-states from Yugoslavia. To privilege one nation is obviously to de-privilege others and to provoke resistance on the part of those who are threatened with inferior status as citizens.

- During the late 1980s, amidst the economic crisis of the Titoist system, the intellectual and political leaders of Yugoslavia’s republics turned increasingly to nationalist theories of the state as an alternative formula for power. From 1988-1990,° I watched first-hand a political process that was conducted in considerable part through mass media, permitting open observation of power

conflicts as they emerged among the Communist leaders of different republics, and were then extended by post-Communist

nationalist political parties and leaders. It was possible to observe leaders of the republics speaking more and more openly

in the name of nationalist interests. As chief protagonists, the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia (listed here from west to east) consistently provoked each other to more and more extreme

positions. In a brief period of time, each was constructing the Other as an Enemy, meaning not only the leadership but the _people in whose name they spoke. Thus, competition defined the terms in which national identities were revitalized, as each ethnic nation experienced an outburst of solidarity and arenewed sense of common purpose. But it was opposition that fueled these revivals. Citizens of Yugoslavia were turned into patriots of ethnic nations, each against the other.*

Gender and the Military Foundations of Titoism To show how Yugoslav Communist politicians turned so readily into nationalist warriors, a starting point is to deconstruct the gender/power system that underlay Yugoslav Communism. I shall begin with an observation taken for granted throughout Yugoslavia by those who watched the newly televised political conflicts: with but a few conspicuous exceptions, the participants

64 _ DENICH in public debate were men. Women had played a prominent role

in the World War II Partisan revolution that brought the Communist Party to power and held leadership positions during the earlier years of the Titoist regime. However, the trend was for politics to be re-asserted as a male domain, within both the governing Socialist institutions and the intellectual oppositions. In terms of the politics of gender, the transition from Titoism to

nationalism involved a nearly seamless continuity. Dissent

from the presumptions of patriarchal tradition was confined to the small circles of feminist intellectuals, centered in the capitals of the republics. These feminists were closely linked with each other, transcending ethnic lines, but everywhere separated from

the mainstreams of opinion.° |

Least questioned of all attributes of the Titoist state was its —

military foundation. Balkan historical experience has been

inextricably defined by warring empires, by conquest, and by | armed rebellion. World War II was but the most recent reiteration .

of the principle that the state is won by force. The Titoist ; revolution followed tradition by erecting itsownsymbolicorder | of legitimacy upon its victory in war. The Partisan guerrilla war provided a rich source for a new heroic tradition, with battles and warriors of epic proportions. It was as the leader of the “People’s Liberation War” that Tito gained the charismatic status

that placed his portraits ubiquitously throughout the country, had cities and main streets named after him, and was sincerely revered by a large part of the population. But the war created

thousands of lesser heroes and martyrs. The dead were commemorated with monuments and memorials; the living were

rewarded with positions in the political and managerial bureaucracies that ran every aspect of public life. , The Cold War then set up a boundary of armaments, with Titoist Yugoslavia between east and west, guarding itself from feared Soviet invasion with a constantly high level of military | preparation. Universal military training provided a shared background for all males and a rite of passage that identified manhood with the ability to fight. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Soviet bloc armies in 1968, Yugoslavia mobilized its reserve units. After 1968, to improve preparation in the event

of unexpected attack, adult men were organized into local territorial defense units, and armaments cached for ready access

about the countryside. Beneath its peaceful, increasingly

Or Arms, MEN AND ETHNIC WAR IN (FORMER) YUGOSLAVIA 65

prosperous surface, Yugoslavia was acountry ina constant state of military preparation. |

Yugoslav militarism was designed to defend the “people” against foreign aggressors. But nationalism redefined the people to mean one’s own ethnic “nation,” and redefined Yugoslavia’s republics as nation-states for dominant ethnic populations. The issue of secession was raised first by the republic of Slovenia, in

the form of an amendment to its constitution adopted in

September, 1989 (see Hayden 1991). Secession by Yugoslavia’s constituent republics would mean conflicts between dominant

and minority populations within the existing boundaries. To pose the question was to raise the issue of how such conflicts could be resolved. The leaders of Yugoslavia’s republics were cast in the same mold by a shared political culture, in which the state is a prize, to be won by force, creating a legitimating legend

of bloodshed and victory. To the survivors then go portions of the prize, in the form of those rewards that the state can dispense. While the Partisan legend glorified guerrilla warfare on behalf

of a Communist revolution, a new generation of young men could carry on the same fighting tradition while replacing the red stars on their caps with the emblems of-their ethnic nations.

Military Premises of Nationalist Revival As the Communist Party disbanded in early 1990, new national

flags were being sewn together in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia (reading this time from east to west). Crowds rallied around

these flags to cheer for the leaders of new non-Communist political parties. In Slovenia, with its near ethnic homogeneity,

there was only one nation in question. But in Croatia, the Serbian ethnic population rallied behind its own flags to oppose secession. And in Bosnia-Herzegovina, both Croatian and Serbian parties organized with links to their co-ethnics elsewhere, while

Muslims, for the first time, organized political parties that emulated the other nationalisms in claiming their own right to statehood. In Slovenia and Croatia, nationalist parties favoring secession won the first post-Communist elections in the spring of 1990. At

_ that point, there was still an intact federal government, attempting to manage a peaceful transition to political and economic reform. But the forces favoring and opposing secessions

66 DENICH were rallying on the basis of rival nationalisms. The considerable.

: Serbian populations living outside of the republic of Serbia resisted secessions that would turn them into minorities in

foreign countries, and found support from the Yugoslav Army, which was invested in defending the federal government and its existing boundaries. As all sides perceived the escalating conflict

in military terms, new armies and paramilitary units were organized on all sides, rapidly arming themselves from numerous

available sources. Among the first actions of the new governments in Slovenia and Croatia was the establishment of ministries of defense, which then began massive arms imports, illegal under the Yugoslav constitution which still pertained. As secession was perceived in terms of military confrontation against

the Yugoslav Army, organizing their own armed forces was the strategic key.

Only a year passed between the election of nationalist governments and the secessions of Slovenia and CroatiainJune, _

1991, which signalled the end of efforts at negotiating post- ,

Communist transition in Yugoslavia and the turn toward open military contests that began in Slovenia, moved into Croatia, and then to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The rush toward force also established military criteria for victory. Invoking the “ageless” traditions, the future of Yugoslavia’s ethnic nations was to be decided in battles among warriors, and in cities under siege.

The secession strategy involved the least cost in Slovenia, with its ethnic homogeneity, where territorial defense units formed to defend Yugoslavia instead fought against the Yugoslav

| Army for Slovenian independence. The Yugoslav Army quickly withdrew, to concentrate on Croatia, where it joined a civil war on the side of the Serbian communities which opposed Croatia’s secession. Six months of war resulted in a provisional success for Croatia’s nationalist goals, when its independence was

granted international recognition. However, a third of its —

territory, where Serbian forces had claimed military victory, remained under UN supervision.’ Extending the formula of national sovereignty and secession

resulted in a predictable disaster when extended to BosniaHerzegovina, where the largest population consisted of Slavic Muslims. As in Croatia, succession was resisted by the Serbs, comprising one-third of the population. But the Serbs were also

Or ARMs, MEN AND ETHNIC WAR IN (FORMER) YUGOSLAVIA 67

well-armed and supported by the Yugoslav Army, against whom

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s hastily-organized army and Muslim militias were vastly overmatched. At the same time, ethnic Croats staked out their own territorial claims, with the assistance of the military forces of newly-recognized Croatia. The Muslims had been the last ethnic group to identify themselves as a nation (cf. Djilas 1992). The newly-minted Muslim nationalism lacked

the militaristic orientation of both Serbian and Croatian

nationalisms, tempered and toughened by revived cultural memories of prior historic defeats. Perhaps the Muslim leaders failed to realize that military solutions entail the risk of defeat. The result was that the militarily superior Serbian and Croatian

armies and paramilitary fighters won control over separate regions that together encompassed most of Bosnia-Herzegovina. _ The ethnic wars within Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina brought to arms a variety of fighting forces. Almost overnight, young men trained together in the Yugoslav Army now attacked each other, and each others’ villages, towns, and civilians. In

addition to organized armies and police forces, bands of

paramilitary volunteers appeared, fighting on behalf of extremist views: Serbian Chetniks and Croatian Ustasha were resurrected from World War II, while the Muslim Green Berets represented anew wave of Islamic fundamentalism. But under their opposing

symbols and flags, these fighters were akin in their goals and , methods. Young men turned into warriors, and in this particular kind of ethnic war, they attacked not only the opposing warriors of the other side, but entire populations of the “other” ethnicity who inhabited contested territory.

| The methodology of terrorist atrocity was deliberate and reciprocal, designed to expel inhabitants from their homes in such a traumatizing manner as to discourage eventual return. As the term “ethnic cleansing” gained notoriety, it was most often associated with Serbian attacks on Muslims, uprooting refugees in the hundreds of thousands. However, both Croats and Muslims used the same terrorist methods against Serbs, and Croats also “cleansed” Muslims (cf. Amnesty International 1991

and 1992). The roles of perpetrator and victim were

interchangeable, according to prowess at warfare. Men became

killers and perpetrators of atrocities, while women tried to escape from being victims.

68 DENICH Mass Rape as Archetypal Gendered War In the post-Yugoslav ethnic wars, the emphasis upon bodily violations, inflicted personally by the perpetrator upon victims,

contrasts with the impersonal, “surgical” attacks that are supposed to characterize advanced, modern war. Tortures and mutilations have been inflicted upon males and females of all

ages. Among these personalized forms of atrocity, there is

particular significance in the employment of rape as an instrument of war and “ethnic cleansing.” Beyond the incidence

of rape as a “usual” accompaniment of war, women refugees from Bosnia told of captivity over extended time periods by groups of soldiers, who used them as literal sexual slaves. International organizations reported that, while rapes were

committed on all sides, the most massive numbers were © committed by Serbian men against Muslim women (cf. Amnesty

International 1993). As such, Muslim women represented the archetypal victimization of the war. However, it is striking that

the narratives of Serbian women raped by either Croatian or oo Muslim men reveal virtually identical patterns.® Male perpetrators appropriated women simultaneously as objects of | sexual violence and as symbols ina contest with rival males that . replicated the traditional forms of Balkan patriarchy, in which

men’s inability to protect “their” women and to control their sexuality and procreative powers is perceived as a critical symptom of weakness (cf. Denich 1974).

The additional element of forced impregnation of captive women revealed an attempted ideological component for sexual

violence, as soldiers justified rape as a method for procreating | | their own ethnic group. Released pregnant women who joined the masses of refugees fleeing Bosnia were left to deal with their

own pregnancies. In the absence of any provision for the upbringing of resulting children, the claims to paternity were purely symbolic. Yet, itis significant that the newly resurrected

nationalism of the contending Bosnian factions should includea patriarchal claim that equated biological paternity with social fatherhood, and presumed that children of mixed parentage

would belong to the father’s ethnicity. The expressions of presumptive fatherhood on the part of perpetrators displays the gendering of nationalist ideology at the basest of levels.

Or Arms, MEN AND ETHNIC WAR IN (FORMER) YUGOSLAVIA 69

Motherhood and the Gender Contradictions of War Given the replication of atavistic patterns in this war, it is important to note a significant source of dissent from patriarchal

presumptions. Following the outbreak of war in Slovenia and Croatia, while the federal government of Yugoslavia still existed, there was widespread resistance led by women whose sons were serving in the Yugoslav Army. Mothers from each of Yugoslavia’s republics independently mobilized delegations to army bases to

demand that their “children” be returned to them. Although fathers also participated in these actions, it was the mothers who

were most prominent. Their protest represented, in effect, a challenge to the military premises of both ancient and modern states with regard to control over the fighting power of young men. The war in Yugoslavia required soldiers, the same male adolescents who also were still their mothers’ children.’ The triumph of nationalism can also be gauged by the decline

of the mothers’ anti-war actions. As the escalating civil war pitted soldiers of each ethnicity against each others’ entire populations, it was increasingly difficult for civilians to oppose a war in which they and their co-ethnics had become targets. Victimization became the ultimate grounds for the birth of nations demanding their own states, despite the costs and consequences to themselves and to others. Lines were drawn with blood to divide Yugoslavs into separate nation-states. Memorials to the

warriors who fought for Yugoslavia are being replaced by monuments to nationalist heroes in whose name it was destroyed.

Of Structure and Destiny Given the previous history of ethnic conflict in the Balkans,

the violent demise of Yugoslavia has a ring of inevitability. Unlike classical tragedy, this course of events was not predestined

by higher powers. Well into 1990, the federal government enjoyed widespread support throughout Yugoslavia for its economic and political reforms that promised to initiate a rational

-~ post-Communist transition. During the spring of 1991, the

presidents of Yugoslavia’s six republics held a series of conferences ostensibly to negotiate their differences. Instead of conflict resolution, nationalist forces on all sides opted for a

course of mutual confrontation that invoked the deeply

embedded patterns which led to war. To seek an explanation for why this happened, it is necessary to decipher the ancient linkages

70 DENICH NOTES

between gender, nationhood, and war that persist in the cultural

structures of modern states. | ,

1. This familiar quotation originated in the comic strip “Pogo.”

2. Yugoslavia was first constituted in 1918, and reconstituted during World War II by the Communist-led Partisans, and relationships among its nationalities

Shoup 1968. |

have been its most persistent source of conflict. For analyses focusing on different time periods, from different perspectives, cf. Banac 1984; Dyilas 1991;

3. My field research during this period was funded by grants from the

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board), whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

4. I have elsewhere analyzed these dynamics in some detail. See Denich 1992.

5. For analyses of gender in Titoist Yugoslavia, Denich 1977; Woodward 1985. The emergence of feminism is discussed by Jancar 1985.

and analyzed by Zametica 1992. | 6. The international politics of recognition are reported by Newhouse 1992 a

7. The scope of the present essay permits only brief characterizations of the warfare in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. For fuller descriptive accounts, see Glenny 1992a and 1992b. For an analytical overview, see Zametica 1992.

8. Testimonials of Serbian rape victims from Croatia and BosniaHerzegovina were included in documents submitted to the United Nations by the federal government of Yugoslavia, under the premiership of anti-nationalist Milan Panic, and were published by the opposition Belgrade newspaper Borba (see Drazic 1992).

) in Milic 1991. .

9. The mothers’ protest is briefly described by Drakulic 1992. An analysis of the contradictory relationship between women and nationalism is presented

REFERENCES Amnesty International 1991 Torture and Deliberate and Arbitrary Killings in War Zones.. New York:

Amnesty International, USA.

1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina: Gross Abuses of Basic Human Rights. New York:

Amnesty International, USA. 1993 Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces. New York:

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Warriors or Soldiers?:

Masculinity and Ritual Transvestism in the Liberian Civil War Mary H. Moran | Colgate University , Cynthia Enloe’s paper in this volume urges us to look closely

at the process by which nationalist and ethnic movements are militarized and the relationship between this process and changes

in gender ideology. “Put simply, no person, no community, no national movement can be militarized without changing the ways in which femininity and masculinity are brought to bear on daily life” (1993:20). Enloe reminds us that militarization is

neither an inevitable nor a “natural” step for nationalist movements; that it involves, more than anything else, a mental transformation in the way people think about men, women, and their respective duties as citizens. By defining militarism as a set of beliefs, Enloe opens the way fora truly anthropological analysis

of the “uses of masculinity in the mobilization of national consciousness” (Ibid:11). Her feminist analysis cautions us to see that the deployment of new masculinities are not without

| consequences for corresponding changes in what it means to be a woman. She makes clear that lack of attention to women’s experience in nationalizing and militarizing movements leaves

maleness itself unproblematized. In her 1991 paper at the American Anthropological Association meetings, Enloe stated simply: “It takes a lot of power to turn a man into a soldier and a woman into the wife or mother of a martyr.”

| Militarization in the nationalist context, therefore, is a contested process with gender used as an instrument by all 73

74 Moran sides. Some struggles may take place between women and men, as when women, in their identity as mothers, begin to challenge,

resist, or protest such processes as conscription or violence against civilians. But the struggle may just as likely take place among men (or women) over competing, often ethnically linked,

notions of maleness or femaleness. Violent state-making, therefore, always includes a struggle over the meaning of masculinity and femininity and in this contest commodified markers of gender identity are frequently called into play. Recent events in the West African country of Liberia provide a graphic

illustration of these processes, as well as of the West’s , consumption of a bizarre and horrifying representation of Africa.! Since early 1990, Liberia has been gripped by civil war, chaos,

and genocide on an appalling scale. With half the population of two and a half million displaced, approximately 20,000 dead and an international West African military force occupying the ©

capital of Monrovia, armed bands loyal only to their own commanders roam the countryside (U.S. Committee for Refugees

1992). Coinciding with the Iragi invasion of Kuwait and ensuing |

U.S. involvement in the Gulf War, the Liberian tragedy was all | but ignored by the international press. More recently, as the stalemate has dragged on, Liberia has been eclipsed by Somalia as the new source of press images and reports on political and

economic chaos in Africa. Few remember that, only two years | ago, experts on the Horn were warning that, without intervention,

Mogadishu could become “another Monrovia.” |

At the height of the crisis, what reporting there was seemed designed for Western consumption within a discourse of savage “tribal” warfare. References to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness were ubiquitous and seemingly obligatory in publications ranging from Esquire and Soldier of Fortune magazines on oneextremeto _ The New York Times and the National Review on the other. The “tribal” nature of the violence and sensational accounts of torture, Witchcraft, cannibalism, and the macabre seem to have been

deliberately emphasized in implicit contrast with the “clean” | and honorable war waged by the Western powers during the same period. Of all the unfathomable aspects of the Liberian war, however,

what seems to have most intrigued Western journalists was the

widespread use by rebel soldiers of looted women’s clothing,

bras, and wigs. Labeled “inexplicable” (Jameson 1991:36),

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 75 “without explanation” (Johnson 1990:46), and simply “bizarre” (Daniels 1991:18), this wartime transvestism seemed to contradict every taken for granted notion of the unambiguous masculinity

of war; a soldier wearing a wedding dress or negligee and a blond wig is hardly a soldier in the Western sense of the term. Although fascinated with these transvestite soldiers, foreign journalists abandoned explanation or understanding in favor of simple voyeurism. Against the backdrop of indigenous Liberian gender constructions and the recent history of military rule, this paper seeks to explain the transvestite soldier not as soldier but

as warrior, an altogether more complex and multi-layered identity. At the same time, I will argue that, while at the beginning

of the conflict the indigenously defined warrior represented an explicit critique and rejection of the state-identified soldier, the warrior’s ludic attributes have been recuperated and perverted

in the attempted state-making of competing military leaders. Following many others, this may be only the latest betrayal of the Liberian people.

The Conflict ,

Liberia’s history as a nineteenth century benevolent project

to repatriate “Free People of Color” from the United States “pack” to Africa is generally well known (for an extended | discussion, see Boley 1983; Liebenow 1987; Sawyer 1992). From independence in 1847 until the military coup of 1980, the state apparatus was controlled by a small elite defined in both class and ethnic terms. Recent scholarship, much of it by Liberians, is beginning to challenge the standard “morality play” version of Liberian history (see especially Burrowes 1989). This account featured arrogant, culturally alienated Americo-Liberians who reproduced the slave society they had known in the antebellum south by oppressing and victimizing the nobly savage natives. It is now clear that the national elite, despite obsessive concern

with endogamy and genealogy, was closely allied both

biologically and politically with their counterparts among the indigenous people (Burrowes 1989; Dunn and Tarr 1988). During

the 133 years of the First Republic, the repatriate state slowly expanded from a few settler enclaves along the coast to exert at least nominal control over the peoples of the interior. As was the case elsewhere in Africa, these peoples were not organized into

- neatly circumscribed “tribes” but held overlapping and sometimes competing identities and loyalties toa range of named

76 MorAN units, including towns, town clusters and their temporary confederacies, and cross-cutting clans and lineages (see d’ Azevedo 1969-70; McEvoy 1977). Although there were attempts

to set up administrative divisions along language and “tribal” lines, there was little interest on the part of the state in codifying ethnic units. Indigenous people stood in relation to those tracing

descent from the American settlers as a relatively

undifferentiated (and, until the 1960’s, unenfranchised) whole. — While groups like the Vai and Mandingo were recognized as

distinctive and somewhat superior due to their literacy and practice of Islam, no rigid hierarchy of indigenous ethnic groups was produced during this period. Assimilation to the repatriate

lifestyle and upward mobility within the national bureaucracy were achieved on an individual rather than group basis, and indigenous warfare through the mid-twentieth century was characterized by conflict within so-called “tribal” units rather | than between them.

In 1980, a small group of non-commissioned soldiers — successfully challenged the long tenure of the repatriate state. Initially viewed in class terms as the triumph of the poor and oppressed over the rich and corrupt, the military regime and subsequent Second Republic soon began to take on a decidedly | ethnic caste. Samuel K. Doe, who emerged from the group of

coup plotters first as a spokesman and only later as the “chairman,” belonged to the Krahn linguistic group, one of the

smallest, most geographically isolated and least nationally assimilated units in Liberia. Doe, who weathered several attempted counter-coups in the early days, swiftly moved to

surround himself with friends and relatives from his home area. Identification with the new power-brokers was quickly extended

to anyone speaking one of the many dialects ofthe Krahn language. As early as 1983, Liberians were saying witha mixture of resignation and impatience, “First Congo’ man’s turn to eat, now Krahn man’s turn to eat. When my own turn to eat?”

Through the mid-1980s, a period of rigged elections and more . attempted coups, Doe, with the help of U.S. and Israeli funding and “advisors,” transformed the elite military corps into a solidly

Krahn division. Furthermore, he began retaliating not only against his enemies and competitors as individuals, but against

their home regions as well. In 1985-86, following a nearly successful coup attempt by a former comrade, Doe ordered

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 77 bloody attacks on the Gio and Mano peoples of the north, resulting in an estimated 4,000 civilian deaths (U.S. Committee for Refugees 1992:5). In late 1989, rebel leader Charles Taylor brought about

200 Libyan trained mercenaries through this region, triggering another assault on the Gio and Mano by Doe’s army. This time, the people had enough; new recruits swelled Taylor’s little band to over 10,000 in a few months and full-scale ethnic massacres, perpetrated by both sides, were underway. The Western press, when they have reported on the situation at all, have presented an almost perversely decontextualized account of “ancient tribal

hatreds,” simmering for generations, suddenly unleashed. , Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) never achieved the complete military victory he craved, due to both breakaway factions from his own forces and the intervention of a peace keeping force from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The stalemate dragged on even after Doe’s death at the hands of the breakaway Independent National Patriotic Front (INPFL), and continues with a new rebel group formed from the remnants of Doe’s army now challenging Taylor for control of the hinterland. Out of the chaos, a distinct enactment of indigenous concepts of gender and violence seemed to briefly

emerge, then was quickly subsumed into a new discourse of militarization. Three possible masculine identities: the soldier, . the warrior, and the commando, briefly competed for dominance.

triumphed. !

From what I can deduce, the commando appears to have The Soldier Liberia’s national military originated with a nineteenth century Frontier Force dependent upon conscripts from the indigenous population. The twentieth century Armed Forces of , Liberia (AFL) was stratified to reflect the society at large, with

the officer corps made up of repatriates and the bulk of the troops drawn from young, minimally educated rural men and the urban unemployed. Rank and file soldiers were frequently abused, underpaid, and forced to perform unremunerated labor for officers and government officials. In the rice riots of 1979, the

troops demonstrated their solidarity with urban protesters by refusing orders to fire on the crowds, assisting in looting and defending protestors from the Monrovia police. Soldiers were celebrated as heroes and saviors following the 1980 coup. A

78 MorAN praise song of the time mocked the former elites; “Congo woman born rogue, Market woman born soldier,” explicitly contrasting the powerful effectiveness of the new heroes with the corruption of the old guard. Doe and his military government were the self-

styled People’s Redemption Council and a statue of a simple, rank and file soldier clutching an M-16 rifle’ was erected in the center of Monrovia, an image that was also stamped on newly minted coins. Even when harassing civilians or setting up petty extortion schemes with expatriate merchants, soldiers clung to

eat.”

the belief that they had “saved” the country; that the people owed them a debt of gratitude and it was indeed their “turn to

As an image of ideal masculinity, the soldier was presented as disciplined, progressive, and committed to the betterment of the nation and the protection of its people. This imagery was part of an ongoing reconstruction of Liberian nationalism which

sought to distance itself from the Congo-dominated past, emphasizing the liberation and “redemption” of the indigenous

people by their own young men. The soldier was, at the same time, a generic category, not recognizably Liberian or even

African, but part of a universal, world-wide militarized masculinity. This identity was paradoxically located both in the

ideal of self-sacrifice to protect home and family and in

commitment to values beyond the local and particularistic. All enlisted men (and women) were comrades in arms; distinctions of language and ethnicity were to be subsumed and covered over by the same camouflage uniform. It did not take long for this ideal masculine type to become eroded by the increasing ethnic tension within the military and the resentment of the civilian population. By the election of 1985,

it was clear that only soldiers were keeping an increasingly | unpopular administration in power. The soldier was now

synonymous with Doe himself and “soldier time,” as this

historical period became known, was atime of fear and economic

hardship. By the summer of 1990, as rebel groups closed in on Monrovia, AFL soldiers were throwing away their uniforms,

deserting in droves, hoping to blend in with the civilian population. The soldier had become completely discredited, a figure of derision, corrupt, cowardly, and ineffectual in the face ofareal adversary. That adversary, in casting itself in opposition, required some other model of militarized masculinity, one that

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 79 evoked a power greater than the M-16. The rebels, drawn from the rural population and staging their attacks from the forest, turned to an older and more potent, although less clearly Western, masculine ideal, that of the indigenous warrior.

The Warrior _ The warrior as a construction of ideal masculinity takes a diversity of forms among indigenous Liberian cultures. In this section, I draw on my 1982-83 fieldwork with one of these groups, the Glebo of Cape Palmas, in the southeastern part of the

country. There is clear evidence, however, of regional commonalties in the ritualization of warfare and of the association of warrior status with the elemental forces of nature, in particular, with the forest. Among the Glebo, the adult men’s age group, the -sidibo, or warriors, were formerly responsible for the defense of

each town. Led by their officers or “war priests,” the sidibo danced before going into battle to “bury themselves” in case they were killed in action. Since the last intergroup wars among southeastern peoples ended in the 1930s, such dances occur as

part of the funeral ceremonies for elder men. They provide a visual enactment of the warrior ethic in Glebo society. Significantly, women also perform “war dances” in honor of the death of an elder woman. This is consistent with a cultural

: construction of gender as enacted rather than essentialist (see Moran 1990). Women are frequently said to be “warriors” in contexts where they must face pain and even death with courage, such as childbirth. Their war dances, however, display little that

is warlike, with an emphasis on the performance of intricate steps and the waving of white handkerchiefs.4Men’s war dances,

on the other hand, clearly demonstrate the techniques of traditional warfare, including ambush and sneak attacks, and | incorporate the brandishing of cutlasses and firing of ancient rifles and shotguns. Yet, what appears as aggressive masculinity is subtlety undermined by elements of the warriors’ costume. In

every one of the twenty or more war dance performances | observed in the field, at least one or two men added bras or negligees to the standard warrior dress of raffia skirt and shredded wild animal skins. The juxtaposition of these feminine articles with other warrior elements was striking, unmistakable, and consistent from one performance to the next. When asked to explain their inclusion, informants replied simply “for play.”

80 Moran If we take “play” as indicating an ability to recombine elements at will, a creative freedom, then the informant statement may be

taken as signifying the power of playing with cultural symbols. Only the strong, the brave, the hard of heart can claim to bea warrior, a neither masculine nor feminine status. Warriors are

free to play with gender identity, to draw power from the deliberate conflation of categories, to demonstrate that qualities of courage, strength, and supernatural prowess are not limited by biological endowment. This is why the women’s dance, while overtly containing none of the violent imagery, is also a war

dance. In enacting their status as warriors, men incorporate items of feminine clothing to signify their transcendence of gender as an arbitrary and culturally located identity; power is inherent in combination, not separation, in mixing rather than purifying an essential maleness. Interestingly, it is items of western manufacture, wigs, bras, and so on, that represent the mixing of gender elements in these | performances. This contrasts with another indigenous form of transvestism, in which men dress as and impersonate the women oo of their own communities. Among the Glebo, this takes placein _ the context of a dance performed for a woman who has died young, still in her childbearing years (the women’s war dance, © like that of the men, is performed for an elder). Young men dress as women in long-sleeved shirts, cloth wrappers, and head-ties

in order to participate in a dance honoring one of their age mates. Robert Leopold, working among the Loma to the north and west, has analyzed similar cases of ritual transvestism, also associated with funerals, as enacting the relationship between lineages as wife-givers and wife-receivers. In this case, men impersonate women by wearing head-ties and carrying items associated with women’s economic roles, such as fishing baskets and cooking sticks (Leopold 1991:212-215). In the Glebo men’s war dance, female associated items are not the only Western

products appropriated by the dancers. Commodities from Halloween masks to inflatable beach balls are incorporated, mo again signalling the warriors’ transcendence of the West’s control over these products. Exotic Western items are bent to serve other

purposes than those for which they were created. The power of

the warrior is manifest in the ability to meld Western and

indigenous, masculine and feminine, constructing the authentic not in opposition to the imported, but as an intrinsic part of it.

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 81 The appropriation of women’s wigs and dresses by rebel troops in the first two years of the civil war, I would argue, can be read as an attempt to retrieve the power of the indigenous watrior as well as an implicit protest against the soldier as the agent of an oppressive state. It also represents the rejection of a

static, externally defined masculinity stripped of its local

referents. Responding to the brutal, mechanized violence of the AFL, NPFL and INPFL fighters turned to a no less bloody but different tradition of ritualized violence, one which was not intelligible to Western observers with their single standard of

militarized masculinity. After an initial attempt to explain transvestite elements as disguise, reporters simply wrote off what they were seeing as bizarre and unfathomable, further evidence of the ultimate “darkness” and unknowability of Africa.

~The Commando | ,

There is some evidence that rebel leaders have attempted to manipulate the warrior imagery for their own purposes, although the amount of control exercised by commanders over troopsin —

the field has been questionable from the start. An April 1992 article in The New York Times reports on the numerous posters and paintings of Charles Taylor decorating his interior “capital” of Gbarnga. “Recently, Mr. Taylor’s face has begun to appear with the word ‘ghankay’ written in bold letters underneath. Ghankay means warrior in Gola, one of Liberia’s main languages”

(Nobel 1992:A3).° Rather than nationalist leaders creating new versions of masculinity for consumption by their followers, this seems to be a case of the leader attempting to cloth his personal ambitions with the legitimacy of “tradition.” But it may already

be too late. ,

The transformation of soldiers into warriors is no simple , reinterpretation of imported or imposed gender constructions into amore “authentic” idiom. As quickly as the warrior emerged

in the context of orchestrated ethnic antagonism, it was just as quickly transmuted into something else. There is evidence that the “fashion” among young rebels has already shifted. “In 1990, reporters watched a bizarre crew of rebels take over the [Firestone Rubber] plantation. These fighters dressed in drag and women’s

wigs, careening around in looted vehicles in search of people from rival tribes to slaughter. Two years later, the commandos are wearing jeans and t-shirts” (Associated Press July, 1992).

82 Moora Cynthia Enloe urges us to be sensitive to the uses of Western popular culture in the construction of militarized masculinities

worldwide; “Today there is anecdotal evidence, for instance, that the American film ‘Rambo’ has been used to build morale by

insurgent men in the Philippines and Chile, but we know little about how the masculinist meanings insurgents derived from their clandestine video viewings have shaped their relationships with women inside and outside of the national communities” (1993:18). In Liberia, the “commando,” clearly based on American

film imagery, appears to provide the newest model of militarized , masculinity. One reporter has commented that the camp of Prince Johnson, leader of the breakaway INPFL, “resembled a Hollywood B-type horror film written by a scriptwriter on acid” (Jameson 1991:33). Taylor’s bodyguard, made up of non-Liberian mercenaries trained in Libya, have the title or rank of “Special Commando” (Ibid:37) and interviews with both leaders indicate — that they are consciously trying to live up to a hyper-masculine adventure film ideal. The password for getting past checkpoints

at one rebel camp was: “Commando!” “Brave, Strong, Intelligent!” (Ibid:33). | Unlike the warrior, the commando fights not in the service of the local community but for competing leaders with national aspirations. The young men donot necessarily share these goals, and appear to join the cause either for revenge, the hope of immediate personal gain, or only fleeting loyalty to the “field marshall” of the moment (Tokpa 1992:10-12). Allthe dangerous ~ elemental force of the warrior has been unleashed without the social context and ritual hierarchy that once controlled and directed it. The result is true chaos, not the playful, inventive

visual chaos of the indigenous warriors’ costume, but Schwarzenegger and Stallone in wigs and wedding dresses, a

disrupted gender discourse that serves no purpose but destruction and death. Like the soldier, the warrior in the service of violently ethnicized state making is a warrior no longer, but

a commando who bears only the traceofanemergent,alternative -~ masculinity, a possibility lost.

The Reconstruction of Femininity It is difficult to tell, at a distance and through the selective reports of male journalists, how Liberian women have reacted to this shiftin masculine identities. Have they resisted or supported

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 83_ the transformation and how have their own understandings of

manhood, womanhood, and nationality been altered? Militarization as a process privileges masculinity, but at the same time reconstructs the feminine as its complementary opposite (Enloe 1993:22). Several sources report the presence of armed women among the rebels, particularly in the entourages of leaders and commanding officers. Prince Johnson apparently refers to his group of over two hundred female body guards as his “wives” (Jameson 1991:37), a usage which clearly implies that their services are sexual as well as protective. Henrique F. Tokpa, who interviewed a number of young rebels at a training camp on the campus of Cuttington University College, reports

that about four and a half percent (or 250 out of 6000) of the trainees were female (1992:14-15). The women made what seem to be subtle complaints about sexual exploitation but gave few

other clues as to their feelings about militarization (1992:15). Other reports indicate that not all female recruits were willing volunteers; some appear to have been commandeered sexually and then “joined” for their own protection (Jameson 1991:35). Published photographs of female rebels depict them wearing military uniforms and clutching weapons that appear too large for them. The figures are difficult to identify as women, especially given the knowledge that both Taylor and Johnson have been known to arm boys as young as nine. As Western observers, we

take it for granted that women will take on the clothing and accoutrements of men in times of war. This form of transvestism,

deemed acceptable and unremarkable in the West, is rarely commented upon. We assume that women entering formerly allmale domains like the military, police, or even the upper echelons

of capitalist business will dress “like men” in order to both

disguise their sexuality and to try and capture some semblance

of men’s authority (Young 1992:273). Recall, however, that Glebo women performing their war dance donot dress as male warriors; they are able to take on the authoritative, highly valued status of

warriors without also taking on men’s regalia. While some female rebels are depicted as indistinguishable

from men, however, something quite different seems to be happening with those most associated with the male leadership. Jameson writes:

, Like his mentor, Khadaffi, Taylor has also established an Amazonian personal bodyguard. His wife and sister dress in

84 Moran tight-fitting cammies [camouflage uniforms] with matching handbags, high heels, and pistol holsters. Reeking of perfume

and bristling with sidearms and assault rifles, they hover

around Taylor in a comic parody of the “commando” bodyguard (1991:37).

What is the meaning of this feminization of military dress? To

Western observers, transvestism practiced by men with their wigs and negligees is intriguing; bizarre, yes, but worthy of repeated comment. When practiced by women, it is only a “comic

parody.” To the participants, however, it may be the women’s , transvestism that is the most disruptive of expected gender norms. As we have seen, there are models in several indigenous Liberian cultures for men to wear clothing clearly belonging to women. On the contrary, although commonplace in Monrovia,

women in trousers were quite rare and somewhat shocking in rural Liberia well into the early 1980s. What is incongruous ©

about Taylor’s bodyguard, to Liberian eyes, may be the

camouflage and the guns, not the handbags and perfume.

The more important question, following Enloe’s analysis, is how might participation in armed struggle alter the status of women within the fractured nation state? Is it the sexual role of those women closely associated with the leaders which is manifest in the adding of feminine accessories to the standard uniform, or

is this a new kind of transvestite “play”? Does this mark a difference between the privileges of the women who surround Taylor and Johnson and those on the front line of battle? It is clear that the vast majority of Liberian women have experienced the war as victims and refugees, rather than as direct participants. What place in the nation will they claim for themselves, when and if peace comes? Will they attempt to construct anew kind of nationalism, in opposition to the militarism that has brought so much suffering and destruction?

Again, the evidence is sketchy and any analysis would be somewhat premature, since anew reunited Liberia has yet to be achieved. We can only ask, at this point, whether the experience of civil war has allowed some women to break the “confines of domesticity and carve[d] outa space in the public arena through nationalist activism” (Enloe 1993:3)? Given that “domesticity” and “the public arena” are constructed quite differently in Africa

than in the West (Hansen 1992; Sudarkasa 1986), perhaps the question should be, how much or how little have a few women

WARRIORS OR SOLDIERS? 85 been incorporated into the “commando” ethic and what are the implications of this for future Liberian nationalisms? In Enloe’s

words, how can we understand “those pushes and pulls employing gender to fashion a national community in somebody’s, but not everybody’s image”? (Ibid:26)

Conclusion Enloe notes that militarization is a process “riddled with

gendered contradictions” (1993:23). Sometimes these contradictions may be made visually manifest, as in the striking

case of Liberia’s transvestite warriors, both male and female. But visually enacting these contradictions provides no guarantee that they will be easily or non-violently resolved, as Liberia’s long national nightmare sadly shows. In the indigenous military

tradition, the status of warrior was tied neither to gender nor nation; it was a state of being to which individuals , situated by kinship and other highly localized identities, might gain access by transcending their social selves. The colonial and postcolonial periods saw the professionalization of organized violence and its integration into the state apparatus. The soldier which emerged from this process was constructed not only in national but in class terms; thus the military coup of 1980 could be presented as a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed, led by an unusually disciplined, nationalist yet ethnically authentic proletariat. The fragility of this construction was evident in the contradiction

between the soldier as modern, progressive patriot and as representative of those autochthonous people who predated the modern state. It was this unstable image which dissolved into ethnic hostility as Doe abandoned nationalism for simple selfpreservation.

The most recent model of militarism, based on exported Western images, is the most lethal and terrifying. Unlike the incorporation of Western objects as a demonstration of power, as in the indigenous warrior’s costume, the leaders of Liberia’s warring factions seem to be desperately trying to achieve power

by emulating and reproducing Western images. Rebel women are drawn into this mode of representation in a process that may

“liberate” them from feminine convention yet ironically emphasizes and commandeers their sexuality. The relationship of this contested reinterpretation of gender to the nationalism which will define post-war Liberia is still unknown.

86 MorAN NOTES 1. This paper was originally written for and presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago. At those same meetings, I heard the original version of Enloe’s paper and recognized its significance for the Liberian material. A revised version was presented in 1992 at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society in Memphis; I would like to thank the organizer of that session, Colleen Ballerino Cohen, and the discussant, Linda Layne, for their insightful comments (not all of which, unfortunately, can be dealt with here). Iam also grateful to Constance Sutton for her invitation to include the paper in this volume. 2.“Congo” in Liberian English is an often derogatory term for a person of settler or “Americo-Liberian” descent. “Eating” is a widely used metaphor for any pleasurable activity, including sex. 3. The M-16 rifle is the basic American-made, Vietnam-era weapon marketed to U.S. client states.

4. Informer times, Glebo women, through their parallel politicalinstitutions and tradition of collective action, could choose either to support or veto men’s decisions to go to war with neighboring towns (see Moran 1989, 1990).

5. Gola is not a “main language” in Liberia, as it is spoken by less than 5% of the population (Liebenow 1986:35). The Gola are, however, the indigenous . group from which Charles Taylor, usually considered a Congo, claims maternal

descent and they have, as a group, the reputation of fierce warriors.

Union. |

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From City-States to Post-Colontal Nation-State:

id e

Yoruba Women’s Changing

Military Roles Constance R. Sutton

a New York University _ The work of Cynthia Enloe has been critical in providing the impetus to look at the tangled web of nationalism and militarism from the perspective of “the gendered workings of power.” She urges us to engage in a comparative analysis that problematizes

the masculinities and femininities invoked to support a

militarized nationalism, to examine the reshaping of symbols used to “normalize” it, and to pay close attention to the gendered contestations entailed in these processes. As Enloe writes in this volume (p. 25): ..not only [is] nationalism often constructed in militarized settings, but ...militarization, like nationalist identity itself, is

gendered. Put more simply, no person, no community, no national movement can be militarized without changing the

on daily life . |

ways in which femininity and masculinity are brought to bear

It is the implications for shifting gender roles and ideology of

this particular tangle of militarism and the nation-state that I

| wish to explore here in the context of post-colonial Nigeria. Since the time of its independence in 1960, Nigeria has been, with the exception of a few brief periods of civilian government, continuously under military rule. Enloe points us towards an analysis which confronts the fact that militarization is always

accompanied by struggles over changing relations of gender power. However, the trajectories and outcomes of such struggles 89

90 SUTTON depend on the specificities of given historical and cultural

contexts.

This seems particularly pertinent to the case of Nigeria. When looked at from a perspective that takes in only the postindependence period, women’s power to effect the politics and policies of the wider society appear rather circumscribed. As Mba (1989) documents, both the Nigerian militarygovernments and the different political parties that have contended for election during the brief periods of civilian rule, have virtually excluded women from those top political offices where policy is made and resources controlled. Indeed, in the Hausa Muslim north of the country, women were not enfranchised until 1976. Furthermore, Nigeria’s recent military government in its “War” against the “Indiscipline” which it claimed is responsible for the country’s myriad crises, targeted women as the main scapegoats. This has led to occasional violence against women by the military, suchas the beatings of market women in 1984 that were part of an effort

to force the women to sell staple goods at lower prices (Dennis

1987:20). The military government has also held women ,

responsible for men’s “indiscipline,” claiming it to be caused by single women, petty traders, and working mothers abandoning

their “traditional” roles as devoted wives, homemakers, and raisers of children. While it is a widespread practice for male national and ethnic leaders to evoke “tradition” with respect to women’s roles, the particular economic and political issues at stake in these attempts to control women need to be historically

and culturally contextualized. And in the case of Nigeria a longer view of women’s roles reveals a different picture of what

in fact constituted women’s “traditional” roles, of the power that was encoded in these roles and the ways they were valorized.

It is a history that shows not only changing family structures in

a changing political economy, but also women’s changing political and military roles.

Nowadays, evoking the past falls on contentious terrain. The .

question is whose traditions are being evoked and

recontextualized. Nigeria’s male leaders, operating ina fissiparous multi-ethnic post-independence nation-state, have been busily appropriating and interpreting selected aspects of the past that support their present political projects and positions

of power. However, Nigerian women have been busily

challenging many of the male-authored versions with their own readings of the past. Over the past two decades women scholars

YoruBA WoMEN's CHANGING MILITARY ROLES 91 and activists have begun the task of excavating and documenting Nigerian women’s “hidden history,” including the oral histories of women who still embody and enact the past in the present (see

Barber 1991). What they have found provides them withempowering resources for resisting the military-national complex and its projects. What specifically has been uncovered varies, of course, according to the distinct ethnic group under consideration. Nigerian women belong to more than 300 distinct societies which had become subjected to British colonial rule by the late 19th century. In this paper I will focus on the Yoruba among whom I carried out fieldwork in the late 1970s.’ The Yoruba, along with the Igbo and Hausa, represent the major political players in post-colonial Nigeria, constituting over 20 per cent of Nigeria’s approximately 100 million people. I choose to study the problematic of gender and power among the Yoruba for anumber of reasons, among which are the noted economic entrepreneurship of their women. Here women have had long-time relationship to market trade (local, long-distance and now international), and a presence as powerful figures in Yoruba pre-colonial religious and political systems. A brief review of the scattered findings concerning the past military roles of Yoruba women highlights the changing position of women in relation to Yoruba state power as it becomes more centralized and masculinized, first through trade and warfare,

and then through being incorporated into militarized state

colonialism and nationalism. What then were the kinds of wars

that Yoruba fought in the past? What roles did women play during the 19th century as warfare intensified? How did the transformations of the colonial and present periods affect women’s public and war-related powers?

Pre-Colonial Political Structures The long history of politically autonomous, kin-based Yoruba city-states began over a thousand years ago with the founding of

Ile Ife, the ancestral city. Over time an estimated 40 urban centers and satellite towns of varying size and complexity have been known to exist. They were, as Yoruba towns are today, headed by acentral ruler called an oba who is chosen (“elected”

is the term used today) by the heads of the major kinship lineages residing in the town. The lineage heads in turn constitute,together with appointed chiefs, a “council of chiefs,” that constrains and counterbalances the governing power of the

92 SUTTON oba, a governing power that is known to have varied greatly over time and place. Co-existing alongside this palace/kinship-based

political hierarchy is a female political hierarchy that at some point in time became part and parcel of this form of polity (see Afonja 1986; Awe 1977; Mba 1982). In recent years this has come

to be referred to as a “dual-sex political hierarchy” (Okonjo 1981). In the more politically centralized states the female political hierarchy was incorporated into the structuring of palace

roles. Operating from this base, women held important public

positions within the town’s governing structure. They represented the oba and palace interests in the exercise of town rule and policy-making and played important roles in religious rituals legitimating town power. They also engaged in long-

distance trading under the protection of the palace. Matory (1993:64) writes that “royal authority magnified and amended the structure of husband/wife relations, making palace ‘wives’ into the public icons and agents of their husband’s insuperable authority. Palace “wives” occupied a kin role that valorized women’s procreative powers as “mothers.” As “mothers,” women , possessed the power that inhered in making human continuity happen. This continuity was regarded as essential to the social reproduction of kin-based lineages and larger Yoruba political | units alike, and was clearly expressed in ideology and ritual. Matory (1993) provides an insightful elaboration of this Yoruba form of structuring and imaging female power. This situation, however, contrasts with the more independent female political hierarchies found in those city-states where power was more diffuse (Awe 1977). Here the women’s political positions were gained through recognition of their personal achievements, most often as successful entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs, women’s economic achievements enhanced the power and position of their town in relation to other towns. For this they were awarded

titles by the palace. As titled chiefs they formed a political hierarchy, with authority over other women, as well as men, and

had the power to affect their town’s politics and policy-making. _ This alternative structuring of the female political hierarchy © centered on women’s market roles. It was based on the wealth and related power women acquired through commerce, which developed in part because the kinshipsystem gave women control over the products of their own labor. It is believed that this form of female wealth and political power became prominent in the

19th century as both trade and internecine warfare rapidly

YoruBA WoMEN’s CHANGING MiLiTARY ROLES 23 expanded (Afonja 1986; Belasco 1980) Because this route to power was acquired and controlled independent of women’s kin-based roles as wives and mothers, it generated considerable

ambivalence and fear about women’s dual powers. As

“mothers,” women are valorized and deified for “making life.” As “market women,” they are feared for their ability to become witches with the power to “take life.”* The Yoruba phrase “our mothers the witches” captures in compressed form this dualist view of women (Belasco 1980, Matory 1993). A full analysis is

yet to been undertaken of how these beliefs and practices developed over time and were expressed differently in Yoruba rituals and religious beliefs, as well as in political actions that sought to control women (see Apter 1993). What we have now are a few gleanings of how the shifting balance between the

} power of the mother/marketwomen roles unfolded. Both legendary and remembered oral and written histories trace the rise of Yoruba city-states to waves of migrations, initially from Ile Ife. Each successive immigrant group, some led

by women and some by men, is alleged to have encountered some resistance from the population among whom it settled and established effective rule, suggesting that warfare has been an intrinsic part of the rise and fall of Yoruba polities. In fact, the earliest account of Yoruba women’s relation to warfare concerns

the legend of Moremi who is annually celebrated in Ile Ife as “mother” of the town. She is portrayed as a heroine who is alleged to have saved the city from the terrifying attacks of another group sometime in the 9th century . She did this not by becoming a warrior who fought the enemy, but by allowing herself to be captured by the enemy and discovering “through trickery” their strategy of making war. The Moremi legend

represents “women” not only as “saviors of their communities” but as “master spy” -- based on her skills in “trickery,” i.e. her ability to “disarm” men so that they will reveal their “secrets” -- a”’disarming” power Yoruba men continue to fear. The legend is paradigmatic of the ways given women in later centuries were

also known to intervene in warfare. It is significant that todaycommemoration of Moremi is not confined to the city of Ife.

Women’s halls of residence at the University of Ife have been named after her, a temple in her name has been erected in the city of Ibadan, and a famous male Yoruba playwright, the late Duro Ladipo, has written a play that has immortalized her (Awe 1992a:7). She signifies the high public regard given to women

94 SUTTON who in their generic role as “mothers” act on behalf of and in defense of their towns. Important to note is that oral traditions relating to this early period indicate that female obas also reigned, but only up to the 17th century (Mba 1982:3). During the century, Yoruba longdistance commerce, which had till then been mainly with the Sudanic kingdoms to the north, began to shift to the European transatlantic slave trade which introduced guns and gunpowder along with other new trade goods. Both commerce and warfare

changed in character and intensified as slave-raiding and competition over trade routes developed. This suggests that the end of female obas was not unrelated to the growth of a more militarized and aggressive political leadership. A legend from the city of Ilesha supports this view. It tells of what happened when a female oba named Aderemi, reputed to have governed . well, faced for the first time the need to fight for the city’s life When she called together her council of chiefs, the men chiefs argued that the warriors should carry spears and shields into battle, and also war clubs, bows and arrows. But the women counselors argued otherwise, saying that the proper weapons for defense were wooden staves like the long pestles with which people pounded their grain into meal. They also contended that eggs contained

the power to neutralize the jujus of the enemy, and that, therefore, eggs also should be used (Courlander 1973:106).

The women prevailed over the men’s protests and went out with their pestles and eggs to attack the enemy who laughingly defeated them. The Ilesha men then took up their male weapons to fight the enemy and saved the city from defeat. Afterwards, they installed a warrior chief asoba and declared that henceforth only men would be rulers!°

Trade and warfare constituted an interacting pattern that , shaped the growth of Yoruba political economy and state _ formation after the 17th century. On the one hand, warfare -

provided the significant items of trade, such as slaves, , ammunition and later the goods sold in European trading

factories. It gave political control over trade routes to areas of commercial importance, and also provided male and female slaves who were incorporated into local palace bureaucracies as loyal retainers during the 18th and 19th centuries, or worked as laborers on the growing commercial farms of the 19th century.

YoruBA WOMEN'S CHANGING MILITARY ROLES 95 On the other hand, trade provided the wealth which allowed the

ruling obas and the chiefs to prosecute the wars. The trade/ warfare pattern significantly shifted the political hierarchies of Yoruba states and women’s relation to both activities.

Men and Women as Traders and Warriors According to Belasco (1980), from the 16th through the 18th centuries the farmer-trader-warrior roles coexisted for the same individual in most Yoruba towns. Male lineage heads recruited their male kin and followers to fight and were responsible for providing them with the necessary weapons and food. Women did not constitute part of the fighting forces engaged in combat. There were no all-female regiments like that of the Dahomean Amazons, nor are there any Joan-of-Arc legends. Nonetheless,

women played a key role in the decision-making processes concerning warfare, a role which allowed them to decide whether

or not they considered the war good for their own and their town’s concerns. I was told by a man who-held the title of Balogun (warrior) in the town of Iwo that women held this role

because of their “food power” -- i.e. their control over food provisioning for the warriors. It was this that gave them the leverage to play a decisive role. “Food power” in turn rested on women’s pre-eminent position in the town’s local markets, their collective organization in marketing associations, their political positioning in the town’s dual-sex political hierarchy, and finally,

their traditions of preparing cooked food for sale in the town markets. The provisioning of warriors was a collective project engagedin by women who operated at the back of the war camps. The decision to do so ornot to do so was said to have been

Wives of warriors. |

| arrived at collectively by market women, not by the individual The 19th century began with the collapse of the Oyo empire and ended with the imposition of British colonial rule. It spanned a century of struggle for leadership among successor states to old Oyo, an increase in trade and production for export, and the

rise of new military-based city-states, notably Ibadan and Abeokuta. The chronic, internecine warfare among Yoruba produced city-states in which an increased stratification based on differences in wealth gained importance over the prevailing distinctions based on royal and commoner status. Individual men and women emerged who as full-time wealthy traders and professional warriors became titled chiefs occupying roles akin

96 SUTTON to kin-based lineage chiefs in running their town governments.

With the wealth they acquired through trade they supported large households of slaves, retainers, and kin, and financed and

provisioned their own war expeditions. They of course also fought and made alliances among themselves. Among these chiefs were women like Madam Tinubu who maintained large trading networks, had large numbers of slaves to work the farmlands they acquired, and who supplied their towns with their own armed forces, and supplied lesser chiefs with guns and ammunition. A city square in Lagos named after Madam Tinubu commemorates her active role in opposing the British _intervention in Lagos politics in the mid-19th century. Her strategic role in providing the Abeokuta warriors with guns and ammunition to fight and win the 1864 Abeokuta-Dahomey war, won her the title of Iyalode of Abeokuta. Mba in her history of women’s political activism in south western Nigeria notes that | “Madam Tinubu was the first woman to play a part in resistance

to British rule” (1982:11).

Tinubu was not the only one. There was also the well-known

Efunsetan, Iyalode of Ibadan, who was preceded by Madam Iyaola and followed by Madam Omosa. Madam _ Jojolala of Abeokuta followed Tinubu. All were awarded the title of Iyalode |

in recognition of their economic and military prowess and all were powerful players in the governing of their towns.* Their

ways of life and roles were similar to those of the male professional warrior-traders and the military chiefs, and so were theirstakes and interests in the politics of warfare, although there are hints here and there that the women would more often

become leaders for peace against the desires of more warlike

chiefs with whom they were allied. .

Efunsetan is particularly interesting in this regard and for the way she is remembered today. She is significant to the uncovering of women’s past roles not only for the wealth she acquired and

her power as Iyalode, but because she was one of thefewwomen ~~ before 1900 to have engaged in an opposition politics against a leading war chief of Ibadan. Awe (1992b) and Mba (1982) tell us

that as a member of the town council and creditor to other

important Ibadan chiefs, Efunsetan became a powerful political spokeswoman for a group of chiefs who opposed, after the Ado war of 1872, the continuous warfare being pursued by Ibadan’s war chief Latosa. With warfare not only disrupting Efunsetan’s trading but also stretching her credit facilities because some of

YoruBA WoMEN ‘Ss CHANGING MILITARY ROLES : 97

the chiefs had failed to pay their debts to her, she refused to support Latosa in 1874 when he launched yet another expedition. She would not field any soldiers, give ammunition on credit, or declare solidarity with Latosa by meeting him at the gates of Ibadan along with the other chiefs. Afraid that her action exposed the weakness of his own position, Latosa arranged to have her assassinated. It shocked the city of Ibadan.

The way Efunsetan is remembered today exemplifies the differing political uses of the past and the tensions in how women’s dual roles as mother and market woman are being valorized. Unlike Moremi, remembered as a savior of her town, or Madam Tinubu, remembered for her opposition to the British

and her critical support in the war Abeokuta fought against Dahomey, Efunsetan, who opposed a military leader of her own town, is portrayed in the popular imagination as a powerful but very cruel woman who deserved being killed (allegedly by one of her slaves). She may have acquired wealth and power, but unable to become pregnant after the loss of her first child, she

became consumed with jealousy. forbade her slaves to get married, and supposedly killed one who got pregnant. This . view, put forth, in a Yoruba play of the 1970s and picked up in .the Yoruba photo-novel magazine Atoka, becomes a cautionary

tale for women today. The thematic is that for a women to acquire wealth andpower is dangerous because it can oppose rather than extend the life-giving, supportive roles of mother and wife. However, women in Nigeria contest this interpretation of Efunsetan and the “facts” it purports to depict. In a reading

that empowers them to resist today’s military leaders, they celebrate Efunsetan as one of the “ancestors of the modern

market women, whose business acumen has given them undisputed influence not only in the world of commerce but also , in the political and social life of the country” (Awe 1992b:71).

From City-States to Colonial and Postcolonial Nation-State The particular pattern of trade, warfare, and politics described above came to an end with the incorporation of the Yoruba into the British colonial state of Nigeria. It dramatically changed the

precolonial balance of power between women and men within city-states and in the wider encompassing political arena. Ina process well-documented in many African societies, as well as for the Yoruba in particular, colonialism brought about an erosion

of women’s former political and economic powers, sometimes

98 SUTTON suddenly, more often gradually. Itopened up many new avenues

of commerce and sources of wealth that placed women at an economic disadvantage vis-a-vis men, such as producing cash crops for export, and later acquiring direct benefits from the oil boom of the 1970s, Moreover, as Mann shows in her study of early colonial Lagos, new forms of land tenure and property rights introduced with the penetration of European merchant capital also put women at a disadvantage relative to men. Less able than men to obtain individually owned land and houses at a time when land was becoming an increasingly scarce and valuable resource, women had more limited access than men to the credit and capital needed to trade. This in turn restricted their ability to control their own labor and resources or mobilize

those of dependents. Their increased dependence on men for housing and assistance that resulted gave men a means of controlling and disciplining women. Mann’s examination of court cases at the time shows that men actively struggled to block women’s control of landed property in an effort to maintain

control of women’s labor. These processes, occurring inLagos a from 1850 on, mark, according to Mann, the beginning of Yoruba

women’s economic subordination and a “feminization of | poverty” -- the twin phenomena associated with the late 20th _ century “modernity” (Mann 1991:705-706).

But it was in the political arena that Yoruba women experienced the most dramatic loss of their traditionalroles.The | colonial administration either ignored or downplayed their roles in the governing of Yoruba city-states, giving all official power to the men. In the widened political field of the colonial state, Yoruba women were excluded from even the lower levels of the colonial governing apparatus to which men were recruited and played no role in the colonial army. The legal system made marriage laws that were favorable to men, freezing the dynamics

of tradition into notions of customary law. The educational | system, which became a major new resource for acquiring status, __ wealth and power, was disproportionately available to men. Finally, with the spread of Christianity and Islam, women were further marginalized, deprived of important politico-religious statuses which they had held in their traditional religions.

However, colonialism did not succeed in destroying all of women’s past. It did not bring to an end Yoruba women’s search

for wealth or participation in local and long-distance trade.

YoruBA WOMEN'S CHANGING MILITARY ROLES 99 Yoruba women regained some of their former religious influence in the indigenous churches which developed in the 20th century and they retain today inherent, mystified spiritual powers which

, Yoruba regard as potent and sometimes politically significant. And if colonialism undercut much of women’s political authority,

it did not destroy their ability to engage in collective action in

defense of their economic and political interests when they perceived these interests as threatened and downplayed. Drawing on their traditional associations, Yoruba women, like the Igbo and Ibibio women of eastern Nigeria, resorted to a series of mass protest actions against the policies the colonial authorities imposed. Adopting an “oppositional politics,” they directly confronted the colonial military, the men appointed as warrant chiefs, and in some cases their traditional town rulers. Their direct actions were organized as all-female massive protests that inspired awe, fear, and respect. They made an impact and had an effect, drawingattention to their grievances and sometimes producing desired results. Mba, writing of the 1929 “women’s

war” that united women from a number of different ethnic

communities, states that it was

/ very much a feminist movement in the sense that the women

were very conscious of the special role of women, the

importance of women to society, and the assertion of their

rights as women vis-a-vis men. They consistently drew attention to their sexual identity through their dress, body

gestures, and songs. They carried or adorned themselves with palm leaves and branches, which in some areas meant peace and in others war or mourning, but which also expressed the affinity between the fruitful land and women..(1982:91).

Both the scale, range, and persistence of women’s grass-roots

anticolonial political activity is now well documented (see Byfield 1993; Johnson 1982; Mba 1982). Whether as mass protest , actions or as organized political associations in Nigeria’s nationalist movement of the 1930s through 50s, women’s collective protests evidenced a strength of purpose arid an enduring character. They were fueled by a consciousness of female rights and entitlements. Nigerian women have sometiines

referred this pattern of women’s grass-roots protests as representing “nine decades of female militancy.” It is a tradition that women continue to draw upon as they organize to oppose or

make claims upon Nigeria’s postcolonial militarized nationState.

100 SUTTON Parallels between the colonial regime and the post-colonial

military regimes are striking. If anything, the post-colonial military regimes have expanded and intensified the kind of bureaucratic/military rule that colonialism established. They have continued the same policies of downplaying women’s involvement in “the game of politics” and of ignorning or blocking

their formerly important roles in policy-making. The Biafran civil war that broke out 5 years after Nigeria independence, the

many coups Nigeria has experienced since 1960, and the extraordinary levels of corruption associated with the 1970s oil

boom have served to further strengthen and masculinize the power of the center which British colonialism established. With this process of masculinizing political power in Nigeria, those Yoruba traditions examined in this paper have been eliminated. These were traditions that gave women somecontrol over whether or not wars were to be fought, or how long could last, as well as

giving women a stake in the results of warfare along with political recognition for their involvement and support.

Nigeria’s officer corps has appropriated to itself many traditions which formerly were part of Yoruba women’s cultural and proprietory rights, such as acting as guardians of their town

community, as promoters of its welfare, and keepers and transmitters of its traditions. Today Nigeria’s officer corps has

appointed itself as the exclusive custodian of the nation’s constitution and an exclusive repository of its modernizing values. However, Nigerian women activists question whether itsmilitary rulers are indeed a modernizing force, and whether, as implied by their actions, they regard modernizing as a project only for men. The current modernizing project is seen as leaving women nested in the informal sectors of the economy and charged

with maintaining traditions imagined to have existed in the past but which support present male desires for power. Women ask, rhetorically, whether gender equity and justice is to be part of

the modernizing project. And they question whether as “custodians of the constitution” the the military rulers will |

protect the legal rights of women. A number of recent studies

emphasize the extent to which Nigerian women’s political activism today challenges these current “gendered workings of power” (Abdullah 1995; Awe & Mba 1991; Mba 1989).

Dennis points out that in a situation of acute economic and political crises the stress placed on modernization as the goal of

YoruBA WoMEN'S CHANGING MILITARY ROLES 101 Nigerian society is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on women conforming to “traditional” expectations. But, when examined closely, Nigerian traditions actually contradict the assumptions of a purified Islam, an evangelical Christianity, and the post-colonial nation-state (Dennis 1987: 23). As this paper has sought to show, there are many traditions to imagine

-and draw upon. One overlooked by the male leadership of Nigeria is the tradition of women’s economic and political activism, at the grass-roots level and at the top of the political hierarchies. This tradition continues to empowered women in

their roles as “mother” -- always working-mother -- and independent entrepreneur. And it is these traditions that today lend viability and vitality to the diverse forms of political activism

in which women engage in today, both as reformers acting , within the currentpolitical structures, as did the wives of the

complex. ' NOTES

obas in yesteryear, and as mobilizers of other visions opposed to

those of today’s masculinized Nigerian military/civilian

_ 1- The author wishes to thank the awards given by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS 76-83386) in support of this research. 2- Hoch-Smith writes of the Yoruba of today that: “In the male-dominated

world of the Yoruba, the position of women as socially and economically independent trader, in addition to their being powerful witches, throws a wedge into the patrilineal [kinship] structure. As an independent trader who bears most of the financial support of her children, a woman often can exist without the aid of her husband and his patrilineage” (1978:266). 3- The legend states that the men are alleged to have said: “Obatala made all humans and he loves them equally. Yet each person excels in a particular

thing. Women are authorities on pestles and eggs. That is their nature. Men . excel in the defense of their homes. Let us respect the differences with which we are endowed” (Courlander 1973: 107).

; 4- It is of interest to note that the female title of Iyalode which became more politically prominent during the 19th century of chronic warfare and increased wealth from commerce was considered symbolically and politically equivalent to the male title of Bashorun or Ologun or Balogun which means “warrior.” While

in reality women and men played similar roles in the trade/ warfare pattern of the 19th century, symbolically the titles took on gendered renderings of where the sources of power lay.

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Contributors LINDA BASCH is Dean of Arts of Sciences and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Manhattan College. Her research, conducted in Africa, Iran, and the Caribbean, has

focused on issues of migration, race, class, ethnicity, and transnationalism, all topics on which she has written. She is coauthor of the forthcoming Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. She

is an officer of IWAC and co-organized the panel on which this -book is based. NINA BROWNE holds an M.A. in Anthropology from New York University. Along with the politics of television and mass popular culture, her research interests include local political/cultural

movements and their responses to “deindustrialization.” She has recently completed research onher hometown, Paterson, N.J., and

the ways in which its industrial and social history is officially

“packaged and sold” within the context of the U.S.’s

deindustrializing economy. -

BETTE DENICH is a Research Associate in Anthropology at

Boston University and a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. Her research in Yugoslavia began in the mid-1960s,

and she has published extensively on gender and on rapid politicaland economic change. During her most recent fieldwork,

she observed firsthand the nationalist revivals that led toward Yugoslavia’s descent into ethnic warfare. CYNTHIA ENLOE is Professor of Government at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Among her books are Does Khaki Become You? (1988) and Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1990). Her forthcoming book is The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993).

EVA FRIEDLANDER is Senior Consultant with the Asia/ Pacific Section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. She has conducted over five years of field work in India

dealing with industrialization, urbanization, gender, and disabilities.

105

106 _ __Asour THE AUTHORS MARY MORAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. In 1982-83 she conducted fieldwork with the Glebo people of Liberia and received the Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University in 1985. She is the author of Civilized Women: Gender and Prestige in Southeastern Liberia (Cornell University Press, 1990) and articles in Feminist Studies, Canadian Journal of African Studies, and elsewhere. AIHWA ONG is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987). Her current research deals with new

Asian immigrants and cultural citizenship in California. CONSTANCE R. SUTTON is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University and an Associate of its Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Drawing on field research in the West Indies, West African and in New York

City, she has written on West Indian sugar workers, women’s

powers and forms of political action, and on Caribbean , transnationalized identities and cultural forms. Together with

Eleanor Leacock, she was co-founder of the International Women’s Anthropology Conference (IWAC), served as its first ©

president, and has been active in promoting an interfacing between academic feminist anthropology and the International

Women’s Movement. |

DAVIDA WOOD is completing her dissertation, Identity and

press). |

Indeterminacy in Palestinian Political Culture, at Princeton

University. She has contributed “Politics of Identity in a Palestinian Village in Israel” to The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations, edited by Kay Warren (in