Gender, Ethnicity and Location: Putting Development in Perspective

As a wildlife biologist doing field work in India, Belize, China, Brazil, and Costa Rica, Kiran Asher tried to keep humans out of the picture. She strived for an objective, scientific perspective of the natural world. But people kept popping into the frame. “Extended work in the field made me realize that it is imperative to understand the links between social issues and the environment to develop effective nature conservation agendas, especially in the developing world,” she says.

Asher’s childhood in Bombay was marked by a love of animals passed down from her nomad ancestors. She followed that interest to earn a B.S. in life sciences at St. Xavier’s College, then pursued a master’s degree at Duke University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Field courses at the Organization of Tropical Studies brought Asher to Costa Rica, where she learned Spanish and worked with herpologist Dagmar Werner for her thesis on the economic and social feasibility of iguana conservation.

As a research ecologist, Asher next explored the Duke University Forest and the Rio Bravo Conservation Area of Belize, “ground truthing” or verifying vegetation for a NASA remote sensing study. It was her passion for wildlife, however, that compelled Asher to apply for a Ph.D. in wildlife biology at the University of Florida. She deferred doctoral studies to learn about current conservation practices in the field, beginning with a wildlife management course in China.

Eager to learn about rainforests, Asher joined a research team sponsored by Wildlife Conservation International in Brazil. She was the only one to report for duty, so Asher became project coordinator for the Mamiraua Ecological Station in Amazonas, Brazil. For seven months, she lived alone in a floating house at the confluence of two rivers and learned to handle a dugout canoe, the only transport. In the mornings she conducted the first avifaunal inventory of the region. The rest of day she spent observing the local Caboclo fishing practices and identifying the fish catch to understand their possible implications for the management of the reserve.

“By this time it was hard for me to put people out of the picture,” she admits. “As an Indian, I was always aware of distinctions, including gendered ones—I noticed that women here did a lot of fishing. I learned about the effect of gender, race and ethnicity on conservation by observing these communities.”

Asher became so adept at paddling through the watery habitat that visiting researchers often mistook this slight woman with flashing dark eyes and wide smile for one of the villagers. She accompanied scholars to their field sites and often was distressed at their ignorance and arrogance. An evolutionary biologist, for example, assumed that the villagers “were unaware of the rich biodiversity of their region—or that they didn’t understand the significance of their knowledge,” says Asher.

After her time on the Amazon in 1991, Asher decided to enter the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida but in political science. However, she discovered that assumptions in political science about the Third World did not coincide with her experiences in India and Latin America. In 1992, to gain a broader perspective, Asher worked with the World Bank’s Latin America Environment Division, where she outlined strategies for conserving biological diversity in Latin America and the Caribbean under the Global Environmental Facility.

“I discovered feminist and social theory when I was trying to make sense of what didn’t make sense through social sciences,” Asher notes. “I found feminist theory useful because it embraces the contradictions and complexities of postcolonialism, race, class, ethnicity—in political science the observer is supposedly objective, but actually what you see depends on who you are, on what you are shown and are told. Knowledge is framed and embedded in social, political, economic power relations.”

Asher’s dissertation research brought her to the Pacific lowlands of Colombia in 1993. She intended to study the environmental impact of collective land use by Black communities who had been recognized as a separate ethnic minority and had just been granted land rights. However, her central question became: who is defined as black? The result: Asher’s dissertation and book in progress, “Constructing Afro-Colombia: Ethnicity and Territory in the Pacific Lowlands.”

Asher joined the IDCE faculty in the Fall 2002, after teaching political science at Bates College from 1998 to 2001 and spending a year at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. She teaches “Development Theory,” “Tales from the Far Side: Development and Underdevelopment,” “Latin American Politics, and “Third World Women and Gender in Economic Development.”

“Viewing global political economy from the three perspectives—gender, ethnicity, and location—is central to my work,” Asher says. “Even the idea of ‘development’ came at a particular moment, in a particular place and has particular impacts. IDCE is a place where I can push myself—and my students—to face the contradictions they encounter in the field. Before they think about fixing a problem, they need to spend time reflecting on how the problems arose in the first place. To constantly question why and how they do international development—and to consider the implications of their work. That type of thinking brings about social change. I want to focus on the ‘social change’ part of our ID program.”