Educating Activists

What do people make of their own development? In Educating Activists, Rebecca M. Klenk illuminates a reality that is far more complex than either development planners or critics commonly assume. This gracefully written, accessible ethnography shows how rural women accept, refuse, reinterpret, and negotiate development's terms in a quest to improve their own communities. Klenk offers an account of Lakshmi Ashram, a remarkable Gandhian educational initiative for women and girls in Himalayan India. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Educating Activists blends memories and stories with historical research and richly detailed ethnographic analysis to craft a compelling portrait of how women across two generations have engaged with issues of sustainability, poverty, gender equity, autonomy, and progress.

Engaging, nuanced, and beautifully written, Educating Activists is an exemplary study that demonstrates the power of ethnographic writing and method. Tracing the gendered experience of development in a Gandhian Ashram in Kumaon Himalayas, India over two generations, Educating Activists offers a critical and sophisticated reading of the cultural politics of development, its gendered articulations, and multiple and unintended consequences. Written with verve and clarity, it is a must-read for undergraduate and advanced students interested in critical development studies, feminist anthropology, and South Asian studies., Rebecca Klenk's superb new book offers an inspiring and richly illustrated ethnography of education and development in contemporary India. Written with clarity and great purpose, Educating Activists opens up new perspectives on gender, agency and modernity. The book should be essential reading for South Asianists and deserves a much wider audience., Rebecca Klenk's thoughtful ethnography of a Gandhian ashram in the rural Himalaya is replete with stories that question, destabilize, and deepen familiar narratives of empowerment and disempowerment, subservience and independence, and development and its critiques. Here at the grassroots of Uttarakhand, women define development against the grain not only as education or entrepreneurial spirit, but, more crucially, as personal integrity, self-reflection, and social change. Klenk's portrait of the ashram is respectful, nuanced, and keenly perceptive; most of all it has profound implications for a politics of hope., In a study that pays close attention to the remarkable women in Lakshmi Ashram and is engaged in the most nuanced of theoretical debates in the anthropology of development, Rebecca Klenk draws on two decades of research with these rural Gandhians of the western Himalaya to show how they creatively reinterpret the Mahatma to find their own way to educate and inspire other women in their lives. This is transnational feminist anthropology at its finest.

Rebecca M. Klenk is a sociocultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Tennessee and has directed the University of Washington's Environment and Development Study Abroad Program in India.