Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women. (Reviews).

Routledge international encyclopedia of women.

Edited by Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender. 5 volume set. Routledge, 2000.

I find encyclopedias fascinating. When I was little, I used to read our family encyclopedia for both information and recreation. It was a pipeline to the wider world and other times. As far as I was concerned the encyclopedia, volumes A-Z, along with the eagerly awaited arrival of the annual "Yearbook" contained all that was known: alphabetized, summarized and complete. Never crossing my mind in those years when I read so hungrily, and absorbed so uncritically, were the ways that encyclopedias position and contain knowledge in various ways. The encompassing claim of encyclopedias reveal as much about the compilers, and their culture of knowledge, as about the events, topics and people they "cover." It is not just what is written and who writes it, but the assumptions that lurk behind its organization and are embedded in its narrative structure: the implicit and unexplained exclusions and inclusions, the categories and sub-categories, the willingness to deflect and deflate controversy.

These understandings make the decision to produce an "encyclopedia" especially bold and potentially hazardous (and the act of a single review of such practically brazen). The Rout/edge International Encyclopedia of Women, subtitled Global Women's Issues and Know/edge is no exception. If anything, it is an especially daring endeavor due to the scope of its ambition. This five volume effort can be seen as part and parcel of various supplements to the traditional encyclopedia that made universal claims on knowledge. Older encyclopedias devoted to particular fields--history, geography, economy, arts, literature, science, etc.--sought to achieve greater depth through specialization. Over the last two decades, encyclopedias based on the experiences of groups that emerged in the excavations of newer social history--women, African-Americans, immigrants, Irish, lesbians and gay men--and who were excluded from or stereotyped by earlier reference works have proliferated. Notably, this type of supplement has almost exclu sively been nation-based. It is this latter group to which the Routledge volumes are heir, but the explicit attempt at global reach is new.

The Routledge compendium is a serious attempt led by general editors Chris Kramarae and Dale Spender with well respected, if primarily western university-based, topic editors, and a range of academic contributors. There are some interesting successes and a few failures, probably unavoidable given the nature of the enterprise. Its range is extraordinarily broad, from Apartheid to Zines, from Epistemology to NGOs. The encyclopedia assumes that all issues are relevant to women, and that gender plays a central role in shaping life on this planet. Wisely, there are no biographical entries. Happily, unlike many encyclopedias, there is plenty of room for controversy over the meaning and representation of "knowledge." At its best, it is provocative and informative. The compilation seems most useful as a starting point, a quick and dirty account of how thinking about various topics and issues have changed as result of women coming to think of themselves as a class of people.

I used two approaches for the review. First, I looked up topics I knew something about (e.g. Citizenship) and topics I didn't know much about, or wanted more information on (e.g. women's participation in the transnational anti-dam movement). Second, I used my quick reads to consider the (epistemological) questions raised by the encyclopedic format.

The Citizenship entry, by topic editor Nira Yuval-Davis and co-author Jo Sanson, is one example of the encyclopedia's successes. It is fairly comprehensive for a brief review, acknowledging the western roots of the traditional citizenship debates and surfacing a number of controversies both within and outside of the liberal tradition, including the exclusion of the family domain in consideration of citizenship rights. The entry also criticizes static notions of "culture" ("stereotyped, reified, and homogenized") that too often operate on citizenship rights for women in "specific ethnic communities." While placing questions of gender at the center of citizenship debates, Yuval-Davis and Sanson remind readers that women's access to citizenship rights is not symmetrical... (but) mediated by the relative power of their citizenship states in the international pecking order, as well as by membership in particular ethnic, racial, and other groupings within their states" (181).

The Citizenship entry also illustrates one of the most useful features of the project providing readers with extended bibliographies. All entries include such references, both in the text and in the appended notes. The textual inclusions are especially useful because they frequently position the cited book or essay in relation to controversies within the field. Most, like Davis and Sanson's, offer solid references, albeit somewhat structured by disciplinarity.

I was interested in locating more information on women's extensive involvement in the burgeoning global anti-dam movement, and I thought searching a less familiar and potentially more international topic would enable me to test out the encyclopedia's internal referral systems. There are three finding aides: an alphabetical list of articles, a list of topics and an index. As a topic neither "dams" nor the anti-dam movement was readily available through any of these. I also perused the entries Environment, Development, Social Movements, Ecofeminism, and Water.

The overview on Development noted the western origins of development discourse and the feminist challenges. While mentioning the UN Rio conference of 1992 that sought to institute a linkage between development and environmental issues, no specific mention was made of challenges to development discourse other than feminist. After the overview, the subcategories were derived from nations or regions, such as Japan or South Asia. The entry on Environment was similarly structured, malting it difficult to achieve a global or transnational perspective, except through literal and rather general comparisons.

Each section did make an effort to display a human (and local) face by including a specific case study. For Development, the case study was Rural Women in China; for Environment, it was a South Asian case--Forests in India. The case studies introduce more specific issues, without the burden of broader representation. Both the case study and entry on China reflected extremely recent reference material, a characteristic not widely shared in the encyclopedia. Most entries offered bibliographic sources that ranged from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, with the preponderance falling in the late seventies and eighties. This probably represents the time lag in preparing material for such a huge collection, but occasionally produces the effect of a project frozen in time. One glaring example comes with the demographics in the section on North American Development that listed the racial composition of the US as 80 percent "white", with minority groups of "blacks" 12%, Hispanics 1% and Asians 3% (355). (1)

Knowing of women's extensive involvement in the anti-dam movement in India, I gravitated toward the regional entry, Environment: South Asia, written by Bina Agarwal. There I found acknowledgment in the introductory paragraph that "(m)any major environmental movements have been initiated and largely constituted by women, and some of the most outspoken campaigners against large environmentally destructive project, such as dams, have been women" (592). The attached case study, written by well-known global activist Vandana Shiva, focuses on an early i 970s movement led by women from the Garwhal region of Uttar Pradesh to protect forests from commercial interests.

Some of the same strategies, mentioned by Shiva, have been used in the struggle against the 300 dams of India's Sardar Sarovar-Narmada River Projects, approved for construction in 1978. Grassroots groups in the Narmada River Valley, largely under women s leadership, have built a transnational coalition to oppose the darns that threatened to submerge thousands of villages, and displace more than 10 million people. They have fought off construction of some of the largest dams for almost 20 years. But the scope of that movement is not readily apparent in the encyclopedia. (2)

The context for this activism is also lacking. The entry on Social Movements notes the development of some transnational women's networks, and the entry on Ecofeminism notes the challenges that Shiva and others have posed to western conceptions of feminist ecology. The entry on Water notes the connections between women and water both concretely (women as water carriers in many regions) and symbolically. But this information has to be culled rather painstakingly, and synthesized by the reader, who still may not have any better understanding of the role of women in emerging local/transnational movements such as those against big dams, which have enormous regional/global impact. Moreover, in sections such as that on Water there is no mention of the coming global water shortage, and its rapid and potentially devastating transformation from a recognized necessity of life into a market commodity. By contrast, the entry on Soap Operas (next to Social Movements) contains a very specific discussion about "soaps" in th e US, Britain and Australia, and includes a cross-cultural if brief mention of telenovelas.

I am certainly not implying that soap operas are a trivial or unimportant component of an international encyclopedia on women. (3) But I do want to suggest that this early attempt at creating a global intellectual resource is, not-surprisingly, dogged by certain biases and omissions. I would further argue that much of the difficulty of contextualizing woman-led movements outside the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, or even women's experiences outside "the west" or "the north" is exacerbated by the choices and dilemmas of organization, structure and representation that are necessarily embedded in the structures and forms of an encyclopedia.

For instance, I also looked to see which topics were broken down by subtopic, either by nation or region, historical moment or group identity, and which were presumed to stand alone. The choices overall reflected the perspective of academics based in the US, Australia and England, but there were some surprises. Predictably, feminism was one of the most diverse entries, breaking out by region (e.g. Caribbean or Eastern Europe), nation (Japan but not India or the US), time (e.g. 18th century) and type (Black British, Third-wave, Socialist, etc.). Other topics with multiple headings were Family, Health Care, Politics and the State, but also Traditional Healing, and Music.

Among topics limited to one entry were Popular Culture, Poetry, Sexual Orientation and Rape. It is in these categories (like soap operas) that the aspiration to global reach was most severely tested. Most of the single entry topics did try to grapple with differences of meaning and experience across cultural and geographical differences, did allude to alternative economic, social and political contexts, and did try to include in the bibliography at least one "international" source. Despite these efforts, the typical result was a creeping normative sensibility, or oddly fragmented accounts that simply couldn't achieve the effective cosmopolitanism necessary to provide an analytically global perspective.

For example, the contributor to the topic entry on "Rape" wrote, "Rape and incest are serious hazards to the integrity of women and girls all over the world," (1732) but proceeded to define the effects experienced by "one-third of rape victims" as PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), a distinctively western diagnosis. In a paragraph largely informed by the work of U.S. feminists on PTSD, we find the sentence, "Some cultures indirectly punish the woman by forcing her to marry her assailant" (1734). The lack of specific context too often invoked, in my reading, a sense of normative vs. other.

Alternatively, contributors sought to escape the constraints of difference through a transcendent womanist identity. The author of the entry on "Poetry" rejects the "essentialist" questions, "Who is defined as a poet? What constitutes female identity?" to locate a more "useful" starting point: "because human beings have become culturally dimorphic, a woman's culture and experience are understood to be altogether different from those of a man." This enables any poetry to be identified as "women's poetry" if "it fulfills two or more of the following criteria: it was written by a woman...its ideal reader is a woman...it is concerned with women, and...its center of consciousness is a woman's" (1554). This seems to lead precisely back to the question dismissed as essentialist: what/who is a woman?

To the editors' credit, they did not steer away from controversy, and this was particularly important for the single entry topics. For instance, the contributor on popular culture defined it as "largely concerned with the ways in which gender relations are constructed within the media of mass communication," but added, "In some nonwestern contexts, of course, popular culture may have quite other meanings" (1629). In the text of the article the author points readers to a collection of essays that addresses multiple possibilities of reading popular culture in the context of development controversy. She also describes "popular culture" as a site of challenge. Unfortunately the terms of this debate have become limited to those countries that have access to mass media, implying a unitary identity to the anti-development "people's culture" that exists in "other places."

These instances embody both the strengths and weaknesses of a "global" approach. The encyclopedia makes a huge effort to reach beyond the unitary notion of "woman" that has been the target of so much criticism within and beyond various feminist and women's movements. In doing so, the project makes a monumental effort at inclusiveness but founders on the very plane of its ambition. In trying to achieve a global reach, from the perspective of the western academy, it too often reinscribes the very terms of unequal power that have made "global" contexts and communications, from financial transactions to social movements, so fraught.

These criticisms are necessary to make, but I do nor intend them to dismiss or denigrate the intent or achievements of the project. Indeed, by fore grounding the problems of global thinking, the encyclopedia raises and even provokes important and difficult dilemmas that face feminism, or any kind of politically inspired critique or social movement, that seeks to go global. Rather, I hope to highlight the immense need to pursue these challenges, while critically revising our approaches, rather than retreating from the broader kinds of questioning and learning that these venues could open.

The secondary problem really comes from the encyclopedic tradition, a site that promises to order and contain knowledge. Naming an international project on women "an encyclopedia" could be mistakenly interpreted as a claiming a compendium of all that is known about women, and worse, the forms in which that knowledge should be arranged. The strength of these volumes is in the editors' willingness to allow these tensions and controversies to permeate the entries. The failure would be to see the controversies raised as a summation rather than a starting point.

(1.) The relation of this to the most recent census data seems problematic for a newly published volume. In 2000, the census bureau reported on a responding population of roughly 281.5 million, Of these 75.1 percent identified as "white," 12.3 percent as black, .9 percent as American Indian, 3.6 as Asian, .1 percent Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 5.5 percent some "other race." In addition, 2.4 percent identified as belonging to two or more races and 12.5 percent as Hispanic or Latino (can be of any race). Nine out of 10 Hispanics identified as belonging to one race, nearly half (48 percent) identified as white, while 42 percent identified as some other race. Besides the differences in the actual percentages, the 2000 census only heightened decades of debate over racial definitions, and reflected the high degree of contemporary racial uncertainty, as do many other cultural signs. In this moment, publishing such flat demographic numbers is perplexing.

(2.) Just to clarify, this seems less the responsibility of Agarwal and Shiva than a function of editorial choices and forms, as I will discuss below.

(3.) See for example Lila Abu-Lughod "Asserting the Local National in the Face of the Global: The Case of Egyptian Soap Opera," presented at the Five College Faculty Symposium, "Global/Local: Revisioning the Area Studies Debate," October 16, 1998.

Ann Holder lives in Cambridge, MA and teaches history and American Studies at University of Massachusetts--Boston and Harvard University. She has been politically active in a variety of contexts, and writes on the intersection of history, politics and culture.