The next section of the document focuses on expanding the basis of human identity:
Individual and collective identity—our sense of who we are and how we fit into the world—is an important aspect of our socialization as human beings. It is closely tied to our sense of purpose and how we perceive our relationships with others. In the process of building civilizations, a significant factor has been the demonstrated capacity of human beings to compose identities which go beyond real or imagined difference Yet those who have sought advantage at the expense of others have often invoked real or imagined differences as a means of dividing people—in order to advance their own interests and ambitions. Over time, these distinctions born of self-interest have solidified into stereotyped constructs related to race, gender, nationality and ethnicity. These stereotyped constructs have often been used to define human beings and to divide them into groups. Narrowly identifying with particular physical or social characteristics and placing them at the center of our understanding of self and other has had ruinous consequences, whether that identity has been used as a basis for seeking preference over others or has congealed in response to the experience of prejudice and oppression. The deeply fragmented social reality that we find around us today is, in part, a consequence of these narrow identity constructs and attachments.
Beyond these fragmented ways that individuals and groups have come to define themselves, men and women of insight, often inspired by the sacred scriptures of the world, have throughout history sought to broaden human consciousness by drawing attention to that which is most essential about human nature: the inner reality with which every human being is born, the reflection of the Divine in each of us, that which we all share in common, that which is whole within us, as opposed to the fragmented labels with which society tags us in the course of our life. This primary, over-arching human identity, rooted in the reality of the human soul which has no sex, race, nationality or other physical or social distinction, can be understood and developed in a manner that simultaneously values the many secondary aspects of human diversity. Through the unshakeable sense of security that comes from being consciously aware of one’s underlying spiritual nature, shared by all humanity, it becomes possible for an individual to derive joy from, and to value, all the other aspects of one’s identity. This can be done in a spirit of openness—a willingness to share with and to learn from others. This broadened sense of our common humanity is expressed in the following passage from the Bahá’í Writings: “Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul…..”[i]
Click here for Part I. Here for Part II.
[i] Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic no. 68, (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985), p. 20
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I hope it is not too late to post something related to gender roles even though the discussion has since moved on to other topics. I have been visiting a number of different communities in different parts of India recently as part of work in the area of youth empowerment and, while one can in no wise generalize about India as a whole (it seems to be a whole different set of issues for the elite), it has been a challenge in many communities to encourage more women to be active in assisting other youth in their communities as ‘coordinators’. Coordinators need to be able to visit the homes of other youth as well as other villages in their area and sometimes it is really difficult for them to come out of the house — many times, even if they want to, social pressure from their families and neighbors keeps them in the home. Recently, for example I visited a village in rural Uttar Pradesh to help some of the youth there in their efforts to train more of their peers to work with groups of young adolescents in their own community. We spoke to a group of young men and women who were very eager to come to a weeklong training, but at the end when they asked their parents, the males were permitted to come whereas the females were told by their families that they would need to stay at home. After seeing the glow of enthusiasm in the eyes of these young women it broke my heart to find that my friends and I could not seem to do anything to convince the families to let them participate. I understood that there is a lot of fear of what will happen to the young women if they go out of the home, to a relatively unknown place, even if it is not very far away. Is it that they will not be safe? Or that their purity or their reputation will be compromised? And I wondered, was the culture always this way? How did it reach this state of affairs? And how can it change? I remembered some of the ideas Partha Chatterjee has written about in terms of the influence of colonialism and nationalism on gender roles and found a nice summary online (http://sc6214.wetpaint.com/page/3.1.+Partha+Chatterjee:+Material/Spiritual+and+Outer/Inner):
“According to Chatterjee, a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres, the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’, made it possible for the colonized people to learn ‘superior’ Western techniques of organizing material life and incorporate them into their own cultures without threatening the self-identity of their national culture. Science, technology, rational forms of economic organization and modern methods of state-craft, which had given the European countries the strength to subjugate non-European people and to impose their dominance over the whole world, simply belonged to the material domain. Learning from the West, therefore, should not mean the imitation of the West in every aspect of life. Chatterjee goes on to show that the discourse of nationalist writers connects the material/spiritual distinction to the distinction between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, which is ideologically a far more powerful dichotomy.
Applying the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar andbahir, the home and the world. The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests, where practical considerations reign supreme. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world – and woman is its representation. And so one gets an identification of social roles by gender to correspond with the separation of the social space into ghar and bahir. (Chatterjee 1989: 624)
Thus the home became the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility for protecting and nurturing this quality. Indian nationalist discourse asserted that the world was where the European powers had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue of their superior material culture, had subjugated them. But they had failed to colonize the inner, essential identity of the East, which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. ”
This seems to ring true in even simple ways – the home seems to be considered the place of the woman, and to the first-time visitor visiting any town in North India the question that usually arises as they catch a glimpse of the streets is “Where are all the women?” One sees that the men mainly wear Western clothing whereas middle class women generally wear traditional Indian dress. And although I don’t really face pressures from my family to stay in the home, I cannot say that I’m unaffected by the gender roles that society expects. As one of the women who does go out of the home — not only out of it, but very far from it, and alone — I am sometimes shocked by the behavior of males towards me and other women in public places. Sometimes I even wish I could just stay inside! Because it seems the world of the streets is really considered to be ‘profane’ in some sense and therefore any kind of behavior is acceptable, whereas one would not behave in the same way at home. It is like the ‘pure’ women stay at home and any woman who goes out is impure and therefore it is acceptable to treat her in any manner of ways. Furthermore, it seems that standards of chastity are taken to only apply to women – the symbols of culture and purity – and not to men. I feel, therefore, what is needed is a new definition of chastity/purity which is based primarily on an inner condition and commitment that is upheld by all souls; a new kind of modernity in which the material and spiritual go hand in hand and the dichotomy between East and West, science and religion — in fact, dichotomies of all kinds — are overcome; where the world is one’s home.
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