Recasting Culture to Undo Gender

This paper brings together sociological
theories of culture and gender to answer the question – how
do large-scale development interventions induce cultural
change? Through three years of ethnographic work in rural
Bihar, the authors examine this question in the context of
Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project
targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view
of culture. The paper argues that Jeevika created new
“cultural configurations” by giving economically and
socially disadvantaged women access to a well-defined
network of people and new systems of knowledge, which
changed women’s habitus and broke down normative
restrictions constitutive of the symbolic boundary of gender.