This book is an ethnographic study of a group of Western women development workers living in Gilgit, northern Pakistan. It focuses on their efforts to construct comfortable lives and identities while temporarily working abroad in this Muslim community. It also analyses the political consequences of their actions, addressing the ways in which these women perpetuate and resist unequal global power relations in their everyday lives. The author traces the legacy of many of these relations from the colonial period into the present, and provides ideas about how they can be changed to realise a more just global social reality.
Author(s): Nancy Cook
Edition: 1st
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 244
Contents......Page 6
Series Editor’s Foreword......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 11
Gilgit District, Northern Areas......Page 13
Gilgit City......Page 14
Introduction: Points of Arrival and Departure......Page 16
Parameters of Study......Page 25
Tracking the Text......Page 38
One: Bazaar Situations......Page 40
Exploration Sites......Page 46
Postpartition Travel Sightings......Page 49
Tourist Sights......Page 51
Development Sites......Page 53
Home Sites......Page 55
Historic Citings......Page 57
Two: Vulnerable and Spatializing Subjects......Page 60
Constructing the Danger......Page 64
Vulnerable Subjects in Gilgit......Page 67
Spatializing Subjects......Page 80
A Vulnerable Imperial Logic?......Page 96
Why Do They Come to Gilgit?......Page 100
Free Selves/Subjugated Others......Page 108
What to Wear, What to Wear?......Page 119
Working Women......Page 130
Free or Not?......Page 139
Why Did They Come?......Page 144
The Cult of Domesticity......Page 146
The Power of the Cult of Domesticity......Page 150
Achieving Home and Self......Page 152
Managing Servants......Page 162
Managing Western Families......Page 173
Domestic Governance and Spatial (Re)Organization......Page 181
Epilogue......Page 184
Agency Speculations......Page 196
Notes......Page 200
References......Page 218
C......Page 238
E......Page 239
K......Page 240
P......Page 241
T......Page 242
Y......Page 243
