Voicing Difference

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges in our work as social critics and engaged anthropologists. Within this context, it will show how academically trained anthropologists respond to the tensions between cultural specificities and universal values that they encounter in their research. To develop the argument, the article relies on ethnographic research among women workers in Karachi’s ready‐to‐wear export garment industry to show how lower‐class women live and navigate the gendered public spaces in Karachi. Following this theme, the article introduces the process through which grass roots activists inspired by a language of universal rights and women’s empowerment seek to address working‐class women’s social and work‐related problems. However, juxtaposing this with women’s own voices, the article shows that such developmental priorities may suppress women’s own points of view. In doing so, it will foreground the larger structural forces that create socioeconomic uncertainties in their lives. It will then share women’s own experiences to argue that these voices, while asserting their independence, their right to work, and their right to equal wages—a sign of contractual and assertive individualized agency—also simultaneously hint at their emphasizing of familial honor and respectability.