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Women in a Changing Environment
Sinith Sittirak
This is a powerful feminist critique of the Western concept of development, which has brought profound changes to the lives of women in the South over the last thirty years. It is also an attempt to rediscover and rehabilitate traditional Indigenous knowledge as an important basis for empowering women and re-establishing the foundation of reciprocity in North-South dialogue.
The author looks at the wreckage 'progress' has wreaked on the lives of Thai sex workers and of Indigenous peoples globally and contasts this with a portrait – in words and pictures – of her own 'underdeveloped mother, 'gardener, agriculturalist, cook entertainer, tool and toy inventor and maker, traditional doctor, resources manager, energy conservationist, food scientist, home economist, sustainable developer, ecologist and environmentalist'.
In exploring the possibilities for an appropriate development path, Sinith Sittirak applies the framework of a political economy of development which acknowledges the politics of identity and difference.
