AN INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA

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This is a transcript of a video interview made for the Centre for Women's Research at the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway in connection with a workshop on women and technology they were going to run after Vandana Shiva had left.

HH: We have here with us today, Dr.Vandana Shiva from India. She holds a master's degree in particle physics, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science, and she is the author of 13 books. Presently she is the Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun, India. I would like to ask you, would the West have been different if women had decided the technological or financial development of the world?

VS: I think it is not just the West that would have been different if the technologies that ran the affairs of humanity were woman centered and women based, rather than the patriarchcal technologies that took root during the scientific and industrial revolution. The West was reshaped of course, but the rest of the world has also been reshaped by the aggression for which the technologies were designed, and which they achieved.

Many of the technologies that are called western technologies, actually came from China or India, but they have been put to different purposes and they have been exercised within limits. Gunpowder came to the West and then got used into colonize, shoot, kill. Paper making came from the East, but was converted into making a division between those who know through the written word, and those who know through a limited experience. Everyone of these divisions has pushed to the margins the life protecting, life enhancing technologies in which women have been pioneers whether it is agriculture, domestication of crops, domestication of animals, medical knowledge, medical technologies, or it is issues of how you run your economic affairs; that you put the economy of need at the centre and put the economy of greed in the periphery. Men have put the economy of greed at the heart of economics and they have put the economy of need increasingly in the margins. This is not just the case for India, or the third world, it is also the case for Europe.

I know a famous study that shows that 70 % of the economy in industrialized countries is still taken care of by women's energy, and that is the economy of childcare, looking after the ill, looking after the aged, doing the things that need to be done if we as a species have to survive.

HH: You are saying that women make quite a difference in development. What is it in the nature of men or women that makes this difference?

VS: I don't think the difference between the way women have worked, have thought and acted is in the nature of women, and I don't think the way men have become in the last few centuries is in the nature of men. It is in the culture of men and in the culture of women, and since the cultures of course varied during the various cultures of domination, what we have seen in recent times, is a very strange convergence between the most ancient religious patriarchies, and the most high-tech modern patriarchies converging to push to the margins the kind of capacities that women have held on to in cultures that have created a division of labour and a division of rights and responsibilities, where the rights were with men, and the responsibilities lay with women. And without rights the women still continued to ensure that children were fed, they were clothed, they were taken care of. That culture has expressed itself in different ways, but the division has been common in every society that is patriarchal.

I would insist that not all societies have been patriarchal. In India, I know there are enough tribal societies even today, that recognize that women and men have different domains, which are worked out through consensus, but there is nothing essential about these areas. The men could equally well be doing the sowing of seeds and the women equally well be doing the plowing of the field, but it just worked out. There is not a hierarchy, it is just a complementarity and there is not the kind of domination that we see in patriarchal societies, but you get an interaction of those more gender equitable societies based on diversity. You get an interaction between that and hierarchical societies and those differences and diversities start to become division of labour in a hierarchical perspective.

HH: Do you feel that western culture is in conflict with what you call "the female principle" in your book Staying Alive which is translated into Norwegian?

VS: Well, part of the reason the idea of the female principle has been narrowed down to an understanding of an association only with women, I think, has to do with a dichotomy, a polarization that has become the norm in the West after Decartes. I don't believe this norm is a western norm. I believe it is a patriarchal norm, because it has been shaped by men in domination in shaping western society and interpreting the rest through those categories.

When I was talking about the female principle in Staying Alive, I am referring to another cosmology. I am referring to the fact that in our philosophies in all its pluralism (there is no one philosophy, there is a very wide diversity of philosophies) one thing has been central and that is the recognition that creation creates herself, and it is a she.That nature is constantly evolving, constantly active. The word for nature for us is prakrirty. Prakrirty is also an expression of Shakti (cosmos), which is pa in female form and pa in female form is basically pa that is self-generative. that pa is in every human being, in the smallest of microbes, it is in the cosmic whole, hanging together in an amazing balance. So the notion of the female principle in our world order, in our cosmology, is much, much wider than the way it has come to be interpreted here.

This is of course very different from the European understanding that dominates today. I do, however, believe there is another Europe, that is a Europe of women in their plurality also interpreting Europe's history in a different way. But in the dominant Europe, in the Europe that has pushed the other perspectives aside, nature and creation is the creation of God in man's image. The creator is outside and is not part of the process, and that would really be a patriarchal understanding of how things happen. Till you have something in a father image, you don't get economic growth; till you have something in the father image, you don't get technological progress; till you have something in a father image, you don't get social order.

When I talk about the female principle, I'm talking about that capacity of self-generative order, self-generative growth, self-generative creativity that recognizes creativity and intelligence from the tiniest microbe all the way to the interaction of the planets. All the way to the interaction between different life forms, and it is that very fine balance that's worked out literally in the interaction at every moment that is the expression of the female energy in the world that we call prakrirty.

HH: OK. Do you think that technological development is gender neutral in itself?

VS: Technology has increasingly come to be associatd only with the technological achievements of men working to dominate others at the society, women and nature. When you have technology defined on that logic, when the technology of pest-controls begins with the creation of poisons rather than with the balance between pest and predators in the field, when the technology of medical care begins with the warfare against the microbes which over time become smarter than us so we get antibiotic resistance, when violence, domination and infallability are the definition of technology, quite clearly, that is neither gender neutral, nor is it culture neutral.

It has destroyed the capacities of the third world, it has tried to undermine the capacities of women, it has definitely made an assault on nature, and I do not believe that this technology can continue to last. It is totally non- sustainable, We see that each technological option given us has a shorter life time. In the long run it will be technologies that women and ordinary people and third world peasants give rise to, give shape to, that will be the option for a sustainable humanity.

HH: What advice would you give to us in the western world to make a sustainable world for all of us?

VS: I think that the first suggestion, and just a gentle suggestion, is to transcend patriarchies, polarities. I think very often western feminism gets locked into and inherits the dualism, conflicts and polarization through which western patriarchs have defined the world. Within it there is no way out. Within it there's only a deepening of conflict and in fact a deepening of the power hierarchy.

The way out requires a transcending of those pluralities replacing monocultures by diversity, dualisms by complementarity, and recognizing that in a world full of difference and diversity we are not at war with each other, we just need to understand each other and through that understanding enrich each other's lives, because it is only with the respect of how much the other gains, that we gain ourselves.

HH: Thank you very much!

Links toVandana Shiva :
Address to Vandana Shiva's Research Foundation in India + links to interviews with her
Vandana Shiva on bioethics, a third world issue