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| August 04, 2008 | Monday | Sha’aban 1, 1429 |
CII’s justifiable concern
PMDC needs to wake up
OTHER VOICES – North American Press
Research trends in language
China lifts ban on websites
RESEARCH on language and gender is not very old. Linguists perhaps recognised the importance of this field relatively late when in the 1970s we saw a number of research papers and books published on this subject.
China has lifted blocks on several long-barred websites after criticism of their censorship. The move, which followed overnight talks with the International Olympic Committee, means that sites including those of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the BBC Chinese language service are accessible in Beijing, Shanghai and possibly further afield.
THE landmark Indo-US nuclear deal has edged yet another step closer to fruition. On Friday, governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved a key nuclear safeguards agreement that will open 14 of India’s 22 declared nuclear reactors to non-proliferation inspections. The next step is to secure a waiver from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) which bans exports of nuclear fuel and technology to nuclear weapons states that have not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). After that the US Congress is expected to ratify the deal later this year which will allow the US to export nuclear fuel and technology to India, reversing three decades of Indian isolation. The deal is controversial in Pakistan because it is India-specific. Speaking to an audience in Washington, Prime Minister Gilani demanded a similar nuclear status for Pakistan. However, no such equal status is forthcoming from the US. When President Bush visited Pakistan in 2006, he made it clear that the US found Pakistan and India to be different countries with different needs and histories that are kept in view by American strategy.
What are those differences? Bluntly put, suspicions of nuclear proliferation. Nicholas Burns, the US diplomat who is one of the architects of the Indo-US deal, has recently spoken about “India’s trust” and “credibility” because it has not proliferated nuclear technology as Pakistan is believed to have. The Indo-US deal has alarmed Pakistan because it draws together countries that have long been mutually suspicious of each other in a bid to offset China’s growing regional power. Also, in a world where energy woes are set to grow, the deal will greatly improve India’s energy security. Currently nuclear power supplies about three per cent of India’s electricity. By 2050, nuclear power is expected to provide 25 per cent of the country’s electricity, reducing its dependence on imported hydrocarbon fuels.
India-centric hawks in Pakistan’s establishment are concerned by the government’s apparent caving in to US pressure to not resist the deal, arguing that the deal jeopardises Pakistan’s long-term security. The pragmatists recognise that the deal is a seismic shift in the power equation in South Asia. Pakistanis long used to seeing a binary, zero-sum game between India and Pakistan have to adjust to the reality of US realignments in the neighbourhood as India and China hurtle towards the status of economic powers. Changes in the status quo always worry states, especially those whose policies are reflexive, reactionary and eschew creative strategic thinking. One only hopes that our strategists will not succumb to grandiose notions of great power status for Pakistan and use the deal to trigger off a nuclear arms race in South Asia. What should be more worrying are the negative implications the agreement may have for global nuclear disarmament.
THE concern voiced by the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) over the enforcement of Sharia in parts of the NWFP and over growing religious extremism in society deserves to be taken note of by academia, intellectuals and civil society. The ‘enforcement’ of Sharia has become a farce. In the past it was ‘enforced’ several times through presidential ordinances in parts of the NWFP. When an ordinance lapsed, a new one was promulgated. Now, out of sheer political compulsions, the NWFP government is reportedly planning to reach an agreement with the militants to establish Qazi courts in the Malakand division. During the Zia days, when Qazi courts were proposed to be established throughout the country, this paper had taken a firm stand, pointing out the absurdity of establishing a parallel judicial system in which ‘justice’ would be doled out by men with no knowledge of modern jurisprudence and the corpus of Pakistani laws. Now again the obscurantist forces expect the elected government to bow to their will and establish the kind of judicial system they want. Surrender to them will not only embolden the Taliban, it will send a wrong signal to the entire country.
Sharia is not something to be ‘enforced’ by private parties. People may articulate their views on religion and seek the people’s votes to make parliament the vehicle for change. However, to resort to violence, to kill and maim civilians, to blow up girls’ schools and to oppose polio drops to children — all in the name of Islam — is to make a mockery of religion. It is against this background that one should appreciate the CII’s keenness for a fresh interpretation of the Islamic injunctions for nihi anil munkir (‘eliminating vice’) and such concepts as apostasy and jihad. The havoc wrought by the jihadist parties and militias on the Muslim world in general and on Pakistan in particular is beyond belief as jihad has turned into a fitna (public mischief).
The Taliban and their ilk are in a minority but because they are well armed, kill without mercy and enjoy the support of some powerful elements in the establishment and the media they are threatening to take over Pakistan. Unfortunately, academia and intellectuals have not made their contribution to the fight against extremism. This has been left to the government. This is where they have erred. Ideas should be challenged by ideas, not by force.
THEY may not be there in numbers but owners of medical institutions are apparently ruling the roost at the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), which has remained in the news for some time for one reason or the other. Their presence would not have been an issue had it not been to the detriment of the cause of medical education in the country which is on a decline in the absence of professional monitoring. With private medical institutions enjoying influence in the regulatory body itself, the conflict of interest is too obvious to be missed. No wonder then that the fee structure keeps going up without matching improvement in infrastructure or quality of teaching. All this has been going on for long but now, with at least one of the owners publicly enjoying close links with the government, the influence has only grown that much more. This is evident in the manner in which the PMDC secretary, who had a reputation of being his own man, was sidelined. Thereafter provisional NOCs to private enterprises were converted into full-scale permits without any let or hindrance. All rules and regulations were set aside. To ensure smooth sailing in their not-above-board undertaking PMDC members have strongly resisted the election of a senior member of the Pakistan Medical Association from Sindh who is known to have questioned the credibility of many private medical colleges. Held after 13 long years, the election result notification was put off for several weeks before someone arranged a stay order from a court. A year after the elections, the medical practitioner has yet to take his seat on the council.
Political and commercial reasons have together brought things to such a pass that the PMDC is seriously struggling to function as a regulatory body. What is urgently required is an autonomous representative of the various stakeholders in the equation who may ensure compliance with the standing criteria for both public and private medical institutions in terms of infrastructure, faculty and facilities. Medical education is not an area that can be left to the whim and fancy of certain individuals.
The next step for world trade
The New York Times
THE battle lines of the new world order were exposed at the World Trade Organisation this week. The breakdown of the Doha round of trade negotiations over a clash between the United States and China and India about farm protections underscored how these new economic giants are changing the balance of power.
The collapse of the seven-year effort to further reduce trade barriers is regrettable, not least because it aimed to increase the access of the poorest countries to rich-country markets. But it lays the groundwork to develop a better way to discuss global trade.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the Doha round, as the talks are known, would fail. With a narrow agenda centred on giving market access to poor countries, little incentive was offered to the leading trading nations to compromise. The talks were left behind by the real world, as many developing countries unilaterally reduced trade barriers below their legal commitments and farm subsidies in rich countries fell automatically as food prices rose.
While the failure does not mean disaster for world trade, there is a risk that it could undermine faith in the rule-based multilateral trading system. Already, the enormous subsidies that are allowed in this year’s farm bill suggest that the United States is backsliding from its goal of freer farm trade. As the Doha round of talks limped along for seven years, the United States and other countries rushed to sign preferential trade agreements on the sly, potentially snagging world trade in a spaghetti bowl of competing deals….
The Doha talks did not do much for anybody, not even for the least-developed countries. Granting them concessions like duty-free access on 97 per cent of their products sounded great — except most of the tariffs levied on poor country exports are aimed at that three per cent….
The agenda could … be broadened in other ways to incorporate the interests of the big new players. Bringing services — including those involving the movement of people — more fully under the roof of the WTO would provide an enormous incentive for India, a large services exporter. Issues like rules covering the inspection of cargo at ports are likely to become more important as countries deal with national security concerns.
The notion of the grand negotiating trade round involving all WTO members might have to be replaced by more manageable formats. The opening of trade in services, for instance, might be hammered out by smaller groups of exporters. Other countries could accede to the deal if they wanted. This approach might help the WTO address the challenge of global warming, to bring everything from carbon trading to potential trade retaliation for emissions of greenhouse gases under its rules.
The WTO is perhaps the only institution of policy coordination capable of imposing discipline on its members. One of its challenges will be to devise rules to cope with the dynamics of globalisation and global warming and to manage the rise of a set of new world powers. — (Aug 2)
Before we look at some seminal trends in the research on language and gender, I would like to briefly mention Jesperson’s work, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. Jesperson’s book, published in 1922, contained a chapter about women’s language. The title of the chapter was ‘The Woman’ which suggested a language deviant from the norm. The norm in this case was the language spoken by men.
The first important book, completely devoted to language and gender research, was Robin Layoff’s book, Language and Woman’s Place in 1975. The book focused on women’s language and the attributes that make it ‘weak’. Some of the characteristics of women’s language highlighted by Lakoff are: (a) women have a large stock of words related to their specific interests, generally related to them as ‘woman’s work’; (b) ‘empty’ adjectives like divine, charming, cute; (c) tag questions, (d) the use of hedges, for example well, y’know, kinda, and so forth; (e) the use of the intensive ‘so’; (f) hyper-correct grammar; and (g) women don’t tell jokes.
Lakoff talked about the dilemma that women face. On the one hand society expects a woman to act ladylike and on the other hand when women’s speech is ladylike their language is said to have become weak. The Lakoff approach to women’s language is popularly known as the deficit approach as it considers women language deficient. Lakoff’s book was criticised for its non-scientific research methods as she relied heavily on ‘introspection and linguistic intuition’ and also for its dichotomising language groups on a sex basis. Despite this criticism Lakof’s book remains a central reference book in research on language and gender. It is interesting to see that just after the publication of this book, a large number of short courses, articles and books were launched for women to train women on assertiveness. The intriguing part of it was that the model or standard to which all the training was geared was in the assertive style of men.
After Lakoff came Dale Spender who wrote an influential book, Man Made Language. Instead of talking about the deficiency of women, this book focused on the dominance of men. The book claimed that differences between the language of men and women in fact reflect their social differences in real life. The men play a dominant role in society and this dominance shows in language use as well. Spender claims that “English language has been literally man made [sic] and that it is still primarily under man’s control …”
Like Lakoff, Spender dealt with men and women as two distinct groups and did not take care to address the sub-groups within the two major groups. This model (based on Spender’s book) is called the dominance model. Both of these models, deficit and dominance, are accusative in nature.
A third book that influenced discussion on language and gender was Deborah Tannen’s, You Just Don’t Understand. This book offered a new thesis regarding language differences. According to Tannen, men and women are brought up in two different cultures, i.e. men-specific and women-specific cultures. This two-cultures model is called the difference model. It is different from the deficit and dominance models in the sense that it does not blame either men or women. But it seems to be similar to these models as it also dichotomises men and women on the basis of sex.
Tannen’s book became an instant bestseller as people could relate to their daily life communication experiences. At the same time the book came under a lot of criticism from feminist critics as, according to them, the “difference model” is not sensitive to the socio-political realities where men wield power because of their dominant social roles. As the book doesn’t appreciate the socio-political context of language it is termed as a ‘to do book’ that does not try to problemitise the issue of language, gender, and power.
For a long period of time the focus of research on language and gender was on the difference of language (grammar, lexicon, pronunciation, etc) spoken by men and women. Gradually a more important question came into focus, i.e. language used about women. This question raised the issue of power and representation. We see some useful research in the discriminatory use of language, i.e. naming, titles, use of the masculine pronoun, collocation, etc. But to understand the problem at a deeper level we need to understand the politics of discourse and the hegemonic role of language. We see some enlightening research by Jane Sunderland and Ruth Wodak who approached the issue from a critical discourse analysis and tried to trace the dynamics of hegemonic representation with special emphasis on the construction of discourse.
The feminist critique on the question of language and gender came in the form of Deborah Cameron’s edited book called Feminist Critique of Language. This book is structured around three themes, i.e. the theme of silence and exclusion from language, the theme of naming and representation and the theme of behavioural differences in language.
Deborah Cameron’s critical introductions to each of these themes are quite insightful. Hall and Bucholtz in their book, Gender Articulated, suggest three directions of feminist research on language and gender: “the investigation of how cultural paradigms of gender relations are perpetuated through language; the study of women’s innovative use of language to subvert this dominant belief system; and the examination of how women construct social identities and communities that are not determined in advance by gender ideologies.”
The contemporary stance on language and gender is more interdisciplinary in nature as the question of power needs to be explored from various different angles. The other change is that instead of dividing men and women on the basis of sex into two distinct groups the researchers realise the significance of sub-groups formed not strictly on the basis of sex. A third change is that instead of focusing on the language used by women, the emphasis has shifted to the language spoken about women. The question of representation has come to the forefront.
The writer is director, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics and author of Rethinking Education in Pakistan.
shahidksiddiqui@yahoo.com
The ban had been deeply embarrassing for the IOC, which had said that journalists would have the same internet access they had enjoyed at previous Olympics.
It was initially thought that only the Olympic media centre and hotels used by journalists would have access to such sites, but they are currently visible to internet users far outside those locations.
However, sites with information on the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, Chinese dissidents, the Tibetan government in exile and the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests are still inaccessible.
The U-turn came as President Hu Jintao said his country would stand by the pledges it made in bidding for the games, in a rare interview with a select group of foreign reporters. “The Chinese government and the Chinese people have been working in real earnest to honour the commitments made to the international community,” said Hu.
But he also warned critics against politicising the Olympics, saying it would not help to resolve contentious issues.
IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said earlier this week that some IOC officials had made a deal to let China block sensitive websites to the media, despite repeated promises of an unrestricted internet. He said the unannounced censorship had been embarrassing for him and that Beijing organisers “could have done better”.
But on Friday he said that the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, had assured him that its stance had not changed. “We met with Beijing organisers and the Chinese authorities and they have addressed these issues,” said an IOC spokeswoman, Emmanuelle Moreau.
A spokesman for Amnesty International said: “It’s good news that our site has been unblocked in Olympic venues and perhaps elsewhere in Beijing, but it is still a long way from the ‘complete media freedom’ promised.”
—The Guardian, London
