Anita M. Weiss

Walls within walls : life histories of working women in the old city of Lahore

Walled City life women, families and households women and their work survival strategies and images of power social changes imagined and envisioned.

Women, civil society and politics in Pakistan

This article makes the argument that when women have organized themselves into groups with a political purpose, we have witnessed significant advancement in the construction of a civil society in Pakistan. It traces the role womens groups have played as intermediary groups, particularly as they play increasingly important political and social roles in countering the actions and inactions of the state. Importantly, it is in the ongoing effort to develop a National Plan of Action in Pakistan in response to the Beijing Platform for Action that womens groups are contributing in a significant way to a participatory, sensitized and increasingly decentralized national planning process which is encouraging regional and NGO inputs in unprecedented ways.

Power and Civil Society in Pakistan

Pakistani society finds itself in a morass because of the mad scramble for power in almost all sectors. This has resulted in extreme structural distortions. The attainment of power is both a means of domination and a recourse to survival. Unequal power relations are historically entrenched and their perpetuation is deepening the crisis. In this text, two experts conduct a dialogue between eminent scholars and social activists, from which emerges the issues underpinning the re-negotiation of power in Pakistan.

The gendered division of space and access in working class areas of Lahore

Abstract Lahore has undergone a profound transformation in the century since Rudyard Kipling popularized it to the West. During the British Raj, most inhabitants lived within the old Walled City, a quintessential Muslim working class enclave which formed the foundation of Lahores cultural ethos. Here, too, a gendered division of space was constructed which, while limiting womens physical mobility, allowed them meaningful personal interactions and the evolution of fictive kinship relationships between neighbors. In the last decade, developers have virtually swallowed up the Walled City, demolishing ancient neighborhoods and old havelis and bringing about an unprecedented plethora of new working class communities in physically distant locales. Waves of long‐term residents and migrants from rural areas have been settling in these areas, ultimately causing the very notion of a cultural ‘center’ in Lahore to break down. This paper seeks to understand the gendered division of space in the Walled City and look...

Tradition and modernity at the workplace: A field study of women in the pharmaceutical industry of Lahore

Abstract Women working in industry for the first time are trying to reconcile their old roles with the new economic context. This paper provides an inside view of the changes in some womens lives as a result of new work experiences.

Towards Understanding Difference but not ‘Sameness’: A Response to Grahame Thompson

Grahame Thompson’s article addresses an important yet rarely explored dimension in globalization studies, namely the similar ways in which ‘fundamentalists’ around the world seek out common ground in identifying with fellow believers and posture themselves in opposition to others. He argues that regardless if the basis of a fundamentalist group is secular or religious, members have ‘a deep desire for sameness’, which provides psychological sustenance in today’s world of rapid social change and ‘the loss of ideological certainties’. He notes that fundamentalist movements, as a collective endeavor, are a de-culturalized phenomenon demonstrating ‘a genuine radical universalism’ whose implications for social cohesion within the international system are ominous. He concludes by suggesting that re-territorializing the global system is a preferable outcome to alternative dangerous responses ‘to the present international predicament’. Thompson’s emphasis, however, on finding common ground in how ‘fundamentalist’ groups postulate sameness and difference, regardless of what it is they believe in, is misguided, at least pertaining to Muslims. His perception of what motivates a ‘fundamentalist’ is seen through the western optic of an individual’s relationship to belief and society. The term ‘fundamentalist’ is itself a western construct, with a fundamentalist being someone who literally interprets a tradition and rigorously follows that new interpretation. In Islam, instead, the literal interpretation is the tradition, the divine revelation written down, the Qur’an. Within that book is written what is considered to be the blueprint for humanity to follow; nothing else—not hadith, not fiqh, not jurists’ decisions—comes anywhere close to the authority of the written word in the Qur’an. Globalized views of an individual who makes no distinction between the religious aspects of life and secular ones are that this person is a fundamentalist though, for many Muslims, they see themselves as instead following a traditional path of piety. Indeed, what ‘fundamentalism’ has come to mean in the western canon is something quite different from what it means to a villager in Pakistan who understands the main goal in life as following the straight path of Islam, and the Qur’an provides all directions for doing so.

Akbar S. Ahmed (ed.), Pakistan: the Social Sciences' Perspective (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1990), xi, 298 pp. n.p

accumulated capital as it was in the pattern of state-business relationship, corporate structure, and business culture. Thus, McNamara makes the case that Korea’s post-1965 economic success and its political economy is inexplicable without understanding the colonial legacy. This argument is a corrective to the existing literature on colonialism in Korea, and his case studies have much to contribute to the study of colonial history. His choice of theory to explain the colonial political economy is less felicitous. He suggests that capitalism in colonial Korea might be thought of as dependent, and not comprador--an odd suggestion since the notion of comprador capitalism in Korea had never been widely circulated, and it is usually associated with a segmented, export market in the context of semi-colonialism. His preferred description-dependent capitalismis also fraught with problems. It carries a Latin American baggage, encompassing a wide range of theses on unequal exchange, underdevelopment, dependent develop-