Working Paper
Recasting Culture to Undo Gender : A Sociological Analysis of Jeevika in Rural Bihar, India

Published
2015-09
Metadata
Abstract
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.Citation
“Sanyal, Paromita; Rao, Vijayendra; Majumdar, Shruti. 2015. Recasting Culture to Undo Gender : A Sociological Analysis of Jeevika in Rural Bihar, India. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7411. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22667 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Users also downloaded
-
-
-
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
-
-
Follow World Bank Publications on Facebook, Twitter or Linked-In