by Yoko Arisaka

1. Technology and the Human Condition
In the rapidly changing arena of global politics today, nothing looms larger than the framework technology provides in determining the cultural, political, and economic fate of a people. Japanese philosopher Kiyoshi Miki observed already in the early 1940s that technology is not merely a sophisticated manipulation of tools but that it is fundamentally a ﾒform of actionﾓ expressing a cultural and political orientation through the means of material production.1 The very nature of technology is cultural and existential, and its power, according to Miki, has to do with its ability to make our imagination concrete. But in this process, our values are concretized as well. Thus, while the scientific principles that are used in engineering might be value neutral, the decision-making and actual implementation are always embedded in historical, aesthetic, political, and cultural meaning. Needless to say, such a background also includes spirituality; while spirituality and technology might appear to be at odds with each other at first hand, through the medium of culture, the edges of these conceptual demarcations become blurred.

What it would mean to ﾒbeﾓ a woman, for instance, is not merely a question of identity, symbolism, and political recognition; it involves how each woman actually lives under particular material conditions such as provisions for the family, housing, and means of or access to employment. This involves real circumstances created through technology and the political culture of technical decision-making, or a lack thereof, along with a host of personal values, family situations, and the overall spiritual orientation of both the individual and the culture itself. In other words, the existential content of what it would mean for one to have an identity at allﾑbe it gender-based, race-based, otherwiseﾑcannot be fully addressed without paying attention to the technological milieu that is fundamentally a part of oneﾕs cultural identity and meaning. Obviously the more variables one adds, the more complicated the analysis becomes, but no matter how complex, one cannot avoid the issue of the most basic existential constituent of our livesﾑhow we live through engaging with the ﾒstuffﾓ that shapes our existence and survival.

For our generation and beyond, this is not simply a theoretical question but a real question with global implications, as technology is a ubiquitous politico-cultural force that encompasses even the remotest regions of the world. It changes peopleﾕs lives permanently and profoundly. In this context, the analysis of the role of technology in todayﾕs complex global situation poses several obvious challenges.

In particular, the issues are delicate as well as politically contentious where they involve the implementation of technology in non-Western countries. As we know, we live in a world of drastic inequity as far as the distributions of material goods are concerned, and technological adaptation is one of the key elements affecting such distribution. We are faced with both theoretical and practical questions such as: What is the relation between the so-called universal applicability of technology and specific cultural and spiritual traditions? Is the paradigm of ﾒWestern, modern technology vs. traditional or non-Western cultural valuesﾓ still adequate? Who should manage the introduction as well as the maintenance of a new technology in a new cultural setting? How should we analyze the inevitable power struggles involving global capitalism, technology, women, and cultural and economic domination?

How does technology relate to human liberation when technology is fundamentally alien to the cultures that employ it?

This paper is an attempt to address some of these issues by reflecting on the existential nature of technology and its relation to culture and spirituality. The main focus of this paper is a discussion of the work of MIT environmental engineer, Susan Murcott, who is also a feminist and has extensive background in Buddhism.2 Her current project, carried out in conjunction with a nonprofit organization, Women and Water International3, involves researching and designing household water treatment systems for rural peasant women in Nepal. Her other projects include Burma, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, and Haiti. Her work illustrates how technology is indeed existential, and at the same time how it can serve as a liberating force without falling into the old pattern of colonizing Westernization. I conclude by relating the theoretical issues to this example, by emphasizing that ﾒtechnologyﾓ is not a unified enterprise nor some kind of an ontologically closed phenomenon (there is no ﾒtechnologyﾓ as such, or to put it differently, technological essentialism is wrong). But more important than this ontological thesis is its political implication. If technology is not a thing in itself but inherently a process of historical and political culture, a technical development can serve as an opening for a new direction not only technologically but also politically. As I will show, this implies that political empowerment itself may have forms other than what is imagined in the West.

Again the significance of the example has to do with the fact that when the actual lives of people are at stake, liberation requires a real intervention, but this intervention may take the form of technical cultural change where political subjectivity and identity-formation as conceived in the West are not the most obvious means, as in the case of rural Nepalese women. Thus, the main thesis of this paper, elaborated in the last section, is that for our complex global culture today, what we need is a postcolonial praxis that is existential, technologically aware, and democratic. Concrete projects such as Murcottﾕs invite us to broaden our political as well as our technical imagination for a more inclusive framework within which to think about our future.

2. Women and Water
Those of us who live in the industrialized world take our access to clean water for granted. Water is the barest necessity for human survival, and for millions of people today the lack of access to adequate potable water is an issue of critical struggle on a daily basis. But why ﾒwomen and water?ﾓ Because water is so much a part of daily domestic life, in most of the rural parts of the developing world women have been assigned the care and maintenance of life surrounding water. Let me first introduce some facts about her work.
Murcott is a Boston-based engineering consultant at Ecosystems Engineering and a Lecturer at MIT. She is an environmental engineer who specializes in water treatment. Her past projects included establishing a local water-purification lab for a small community in north Burma, where more than half of the patients at a local hospital were there on account of preventable waterborne diseases. Murcott learned the local water practices with the local residents as well as chemical and bacterial components of the water itself, and successfully established a purification system using local Burmese aluminum sulfate and other metal salt products to reduce turbidity as well as contamination. Because she was consciously attentive to the local social and cultural practices surrounding water and the claims made by the residents at every step of her way, she introduced very simple methods of water purification which could be easily adopted by the residents into their social structure and ﾒwater wisdomﾓ that was in already place. Partly inspired by Murcottﾕs work, and partly motivated by their recognition of the water-borne disease problem and by their own cultural values, the local residents themselves undertook the design and construction of a new water treatment system. They could therefore integrate the new system into their lives without the sense of foreign intervention. After participating in two International Conferences on Women and Water, her current project involves working with rural peasant Nepalese women.4

More specifically, Murcott identifies three reasons for the significance of the coupling, ﾒwomen and waterﾓ:
First, women in rural Asia (and elsewhere in developing countries) are predominantly responsible for providing water for the family and community, and they ﾒsuffer on account of scarce and/or polluted water.ﾓ5 The women literally spend 3-4 hours a day carrying heavy loads of water, sometimes for long distances from remote sources because of the general scarcity of water in the region.6 Moreover, ﾒwhen children or other family members become ill because of water-borne diseases, diseases which are preventable and which have largely been eradicated from the developed world in the past 100 years, women are burdened with the responsibility of caring for those who are ill.ﾓ7 Even when these women themselves become ill, they must still carry loads of water to care for the rest of their family and community. Malnutrition caused by extended water-borne sickness can cause severe dehydration, stunted growth, and mental retardation in young children. ﾒOne in three children in Nepal die of waterborne illnesses before the age of three.ﾓ8 Water-borne illnesses affect those with a compromised immune system much more severely, such as the elderly, often causing death. In this way their day-to-day lives are largely defined by their relation to the water the family and community need for survival.

Second, despite the fact that these womenﾕs lives revolve around water, they are ﾒnot empowered to make important decisions about water.ﾓ9 Decisions, especially technical decisions about water management, are often made by men who are politically in charge. Murcott notes:

Sometimes these decisions by the male-dominated engineering and water management professions are in the best interest of all. But other times, there are serious oversights that are the result of womenﾕs nonrepresentation. These decisions might be as simple as the design of a latrine or repair of a pump handle or as major as a decision to build a multi-million dollar hydro-electric dam or water treatment plant.10

Often local women must fight to gain some control over decisions about water, but this is often a path practically unavailable because of already very heavy domestic responsibilities as well as a cultural setting in which women do not normally participate in such decision-making processes. About 80% of Nepalﾕs population is rural, and only 23% of Nepalese women are literate. For most Nepalese women, though they control much of day-to-day domestic life, access to political power is virtually nonexistent.

Murcottﾕs third reason is symbolic-spiritual: ﾒWhat women and water have in common is that both are the source of life.ﾓ The Bagmati river in Nepal as well as the Ganges in India are both revered as goddesses that give life, and this mythic-spiritual symbolism which connects women and water is why women have been assigned throughout history as the caretaker of water in many traditional cultural settings, including Nepal where the majority of the people are Hindu and the rest Buddhists. The division of labor is not simply pragmatic; it is embedded with deep spiritual significance and the women often view themselves in this role. Water symbolizes life itself; with water the women are in charge of constant renewal, cleansing, and sustenance. The very meaning of day-to-day life cannot be separated from the life surrounding water and caring through water. In this sense, in much of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, domestic work is a form of spiritual exercise. As a former Buddhist scholar and practitioner pre-dating to her engineering work, Murcott is acutely aware of these womenﾕs spiritual self-understanding which places them in domestic contexts which are very different from those of Western women.

These reasons show clearly that ﾒwomen and waterﾓ is indeed a globally significant problem not only of politics and technology but involving cultural and spiritual significance and most importantly, survival.11

3. ﾒHomeplaceﾓ and Life-world
In analyzing the situation of the Nepalese women in phenomenological-ontological terms, water is one of the most, if not the most significant factor in the life-world of these women.12 It is more than a commodity or an item of utility. It is a life-shaping condition for the very existence of the people. Oneﾕs daily routine begins with fetching water and the entire social life of the women surrounds water-related activitiesﾑgathering at the water source, exchanging conversation, washing, bathing, and caring for the animals. The location and particular set up of the wells and springs are more than an accidental geographical configuration; it is a gathering place, a place of solidarity as well as conflict that cross over generations. They determine where they live and how they live. In short, the womenﾕs ﾒbeing-in-the-world,ﾓ their very existence, is this connection to the land, to the people through this place, to water. Let me turn to another Japanese philosopher, Tetsuro Watsuji (1889-1960), to illustrate this point in a little more detail.

In his work Fudo (1929, revised in 1931 and published in 1935), Watsuji develops a philosophical category of ﾒfudo,ﾓ which roughly means ﾒmilieu.ﾓ13 This notion examines the way in which human existence is inherently tied to our spatial-social-natural environment. Oneﾕs geographical location and the associated cultural-natural environment are not some contingent fact about the person, but an integral aspect of the way in which that person is through her interactive relation to the surrounding environment. As a contemporary Japanese philosopher Megumi Sakabe explains, fudo ﾒdenotes the environment as ﾔlived through,ﾕ ﾔexperienced,ﾕ and ﾔinterpretedﾕ by its ﾔinhabitants.ﾕ In other words, fudo means, originally and principally, the concrete and regional human Umwelt, or the totality of the human-environment relationships in a region.ﾓ14

Another contemporary Watsuji scholar and geographer Augustin Berque elaborates further on the existential conception of milieu. He emphasizes that Watsujiﾕs notion of milieu is phenomenological, not naturalistic or deterministic.15 His understanding of the sense of milieu combines ﾒhistorically the ecological and the symbolic, [and] expresses in environmental terms a more general process that is both subjective and objective.ﾓ16 Accordingly, the ﾒhuman subject ﾔunderstands itselfﾕ by dint of its identification with the milieu; which, in turn, is no other than the mode of this self-understanding.ﾓ17 For both Watsuji and Berque, the self is not an isolated entity independent of its environment, but rather it is essentially mediated through the environment. The self is what it is by virtue of living through a certain milieu. In Berqueﾕs words, the self ﾒmelds with the environment by identifying with patterns of nature which are, nonetheless, culturally constructed.ﾓ18 Watsuji explains this melding of the self and the environment through a discussion of how we experience coldness:

When we feel cold we tighten our bodies, put on extra clothing, go near a fireplace. More importantly, we put extra clothing on our children and push the old folks closer to the fire. Or we work in order to buy clothing and coal. A charcoal dealer bakes charcoal in the mountains, and the textile factory produces fabric. In other words, in ﾒdealingﾓ with coldness we individually and socially engage in various practices to prevent it…Milieu-based self-understanding reveals itself in these practices; it is not about understanding ﾒsubjectivity.ﾓ19

Our daily practices are in this way collective, and they are inextricably connected to a milieu. In case of the Nepalese women, their milieu is the homeplace surrounding water.

Thus, the connection between ﾒwaterﾓ and ﾒlifeﾓ is not something incidental or external to oneﾕs livelihood as it might be in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It is rather the central, defining factor of life and oneﾕs selfhood as well as that of the community.

Carrying heavy loads of water is not merely an act of necessity; it also materializes the womanﾕs whole social condition. It may also materialize something personal–wish for the survival and well-being of her family members, or her despair that she has no choice but to carry out an endless and repetitious duty she resents. Through this daily activity, she may understand herself as a carrier of the way of life of her own people. Or she may experience frustration in her inability to transcend to a better way of life. The pitchers and water pots are not merely containers; they are the very vessels of life, the extension of a way of being. Their particular shape and size affect the body and posture of the woman over many years. As a girl grows up, her embodied being-in-the-world adapts to carrying water and becomes a part of who she is. Her very body becomes the existential nexus of self and the world, of milieu, as body in homeplace, body carrying water.

In this way it is not an exaggeration to say that their very existence, self-understanding in the cosmic scheme of things, and the continual day-to-day struggles are defined in terms of their lived experiences that surrounds water. The geographical and the cultural are ontologically co-dependent in the life-world, and this whole system of lifeworld in turn is comprehended from a larger spiritual point of view. The grand cycles of life itself, the perpetual change over generations and beyond, are all marked by the daily rituals surrounding water. The everydayness of their existence in relation to water is decidedly different from those of us who turn on a faucet for clean hot water every day, and this difference involves the totality of the life-world of the women.

But if so, changing their relations to water could fundamentally change not only their lives in the practical sense but their very sense of cultural selfhood. Thus, any intervention would have to pay attention to this level of understanding, as there is a good possibility that changing an aspect of their relation to water could have unforeseen consequences and trigger a dynamic change in the lives of these women.

Murcott is in a unique position. In both the Burmese and Nepalese cases, the usual model based on development economics might have suggested building a modern, centralized system modeled after designs that maximize efficiency. In fact, this is very much a standard model used in civil engineering based on the general conception of ﾒtechnical progress and rationality,ﾓ fueled also by global capital exchange. Had such a method of development been applied in the Burmese and Nepalese situations (not that anyone was ever interested in such an intervention), it would have disrupted the lives of these women significantly. There would have been too much of an incongruity between the ﾒsystemﾓ and the ﾒlife-world.ﾓ The women would have been disempowered in the midst of foreign devices which would have made them even more dependent on those who controlled the technology. In fact, in India and elsewhere, the construction of dams has displaced thousands of people and created hundreds of semi-permanent refugee camps.20 As an activist, Murcott explicitly opposes such a model in favor of the self-sustainability of the local residents.

In addition, as someone who understands Buddhist as well as feminist concerns, Murcott is acutely sensitive to both the political and spiritual significance of womenﾕs existential involvement with domestic work in Nepal, as well as its consequence regarding empowerment and what it would mean for these womenﾕs lives to ﾒimprove.ﾓ At the same time, she is a civil engineer who can provide them with water-treatment technology, as modern as the residents would like or as simple. She and her team always conduct a careful survey as to what kind of devices are welcome. Because of the uncomplicated and easy-to-operate systems she sets up, the children and the elderly are less sick, and because her systems are a co-creation with the local women, they gain control over the actual manipulation and maintenance of the system, rather than relying on some outside power disconnected from their lives. She notes,

The challenge to me was how to give women, especially rural women, direct control over their water quality. Just as we in the West want our personal computers and private automobiles, the Nepalese village women want to have control in their own hands, personally, instead of being controlled by outside forcesﾑupstream villages, local, state, or national government agencies, whatever.21

Though important, the point is not simply that Murcott is able to facilitate the transfer of technology into a new cultural setting in a women-friendly manner. The more important point is that she adopts a democratic procedure in doing so, and in this process the local women gain a new sense of awareness and control regarding their own lives. This is a form of empowerment that comes from working together, and because Murcott works on behalf of these women, listening to their stories, needs, and wishes, understanding their worldviews, rather than simply ﾒgiving them Western tools,ﾓ the system becomes integrated into their local practices with minimum sense of cultural disruption. It may be a small step, but the women come to feel that not only are they the owners of the system, but also that by being in charge, they are actually enhancing even their spiritual lives as well.

4. Technology, Westernization, and Liberation
In Questioning Technology, Andrew Feenberg defends what might be called an ﾒantiessentialistﾓ and ﾒpolitico-existentialistﾓ approach to technology and modernity (a culture said to be marked by rationality and technical progress).22 His work problematizes and politicizes the very process of material production and decision-making, and this process, Feenberg argues, is what is meant by the ﾒtechnological.ﾓ As such, there is no ﾒessenceﾓ to technology that can be properly defined on its own terms. Technology is always a particular configuration of patterns of actual stuff, an engineering design, a project, a budget, planners, users, a series of decisions, location, cultural milieu, and so on. The scientific principles of engineeringﾑmathematics, physics, and chemistryﾑare universal (at least they are not contested between dominant and subordinate social groups in modern societies), but for a particular technology to emerge, they must be implemented as a particular, concrete project in the world. In this process of materialization, a piece of technology becomes ready-to-hand, a value-laden thing with a practical existence for us. If there is no ﾒessenceﾓ which determines the nature of technology or modernity in themselves, then these notions take on their specific forms within a context of particular social, historical political, and aesthetic cultures. Forms of technology and modernity are themselves socio-political and cultural institutions, reflecting the power structures which establish them and the resistances they encounter. Therefore, even at the level of design and production, a political critique may be applied and the call for democratization is in order.

This is the main idea behind Feenbergﾕs ﾒnon-neutralityﾓ thesis regarding technology.23 Technology appears to be ﾒneutralﾓ in that a diesel engine is a diesel engine whether it is created in the U.S. or in Japan; cultural difference seems irrelevant. From such an observation, many theorists of technology mistakingly treat it as if it has a purely instrumental nature of its own. Feenberg denies such a separation of the ﾒtechnologicalﾓ from the rest of the politico-cultural milieu and argues that technology is never culturally neutral. The apparent neutrality comes from the fact that the cultures in question have enough similarities that the particular technology in question functions similarly in them. If there is functional equivalence, then a particular technology appears ﾒneutral,ﾓ but it is not ﾒessentiallyﾓ so. It is only a contingent fact about cultures and not about technology. This idea challenges technological determinism and most conceptions of modernity which implicitly rely on a reified conception of ﾒtechnological progress.ﾓ Feenberg claims that modernity need not develop according to some principles inherent in technical progress as such, but develops in culturally specific ways.

From this follows the more important political thesis that technology is inherently ﾒpolitico-existentialﾓ and vice versa; the process is always a particular set of negotiations with economic, political, and technical concerns, involving the question of who controls the actual design in whose interest, and the question of availability, means, and ends. Furthermore, because the tangible material result has the power to shape our real living environment, the ﾒexistentialﾓ is not merely a question of the symbolic or of political identity but has to do with things that exist in the world. So responsibility for decision-making may go far beyond the realm of the human into a much bigger concern for the physical environment, as witnessed by current ecological debates. This reformulation questions the very nature of what it means to be ﾒpolitical.ﾓ

The Nepalese women who gain control over their water quality are becoming empowered, and to the extent that they are much less subject to the control of other villages, the state, and the government, their new lifestyle is indeed more ﾒliberatedﾓ than before. But this liberation is not simply Westenization, because local norms, practices, and value systems remain largely unchanged. The introduction of a new form technology was seamless and well-integrated into the cultural and spiritual life of a people, and because there was relatively little disruption, the adoption of a new water purification system succeeded.

To illustrate a contrast, a disasterous example of an introduction of a new technology might be instructive. It is a well-known case, but steel axes were introduced to the Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherer tribe of Yir Yoront by the missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century. Up till then, the Yir Yoront lived with stone axes, but the axes were not simply tools but also served an important symbolic function that was thoroughly and elaborately integrated in their kinship patterns, social discourse, and totem and mythic worldview. The production and handling of stone axes shaped their daily activities, interpersonal relations, and various ceremonies and rituals. However, because the steel axes were so much more efficient, the Yir Yoront welcomed them, and increasingly they became highly sought-after objects. The missionaries believed that the steel axes definitely indicated ﾒprogressﾓ over primitive stone axes and introduced them in large quantities, so as to increase the number of axes per capita. Unfortunately, the introduction had a devastating effectﾑit disrupted the social patterns so much and the Yir Yoront had no way of handling the new changes, and as one anthropologist noted, the ﾒresult was a mental and moral void which foreshadowed the collapse and destruction of all Yir Yoront culture, if not, indeed, the extinction of the biological group itself.ﾓ24 The missionariesﾕ conception of progress and penchant for efficiency have led to confusion, resentment, and general unhappiness in the daily lives of the people; it turned out to be no liberation at all for the Yir Yoront. The failure results from an insufficient understanding of the value-laden nature of a particular technology and its total embeddedness in the cultural-spiritual system of the Yir Yoront. A better understanding of the situation may have avoided such a collapse.

If technology is understood at the basic level of the life-world, i.e., at the level of things we use to live and how they transform us in particular cultural instances, then one can begin to notice its existential import. The Nepalese womenﾕs desire for independence and a better life is not cast in terms of the usual political subjectivity and society-building that we are accustomed to in modern societies, but rather in terms of improving their day-to-day lives through implementing and controlling technologies that fit their cultural self-understanding. It is also important to note that the women desired better quality water and self-management of it, but not necessarily a waterline to the house that would eliminate the practice of carrying water. Carrying water is not ﾒlack of technologyﾓ as we might imagine in the West; it is an integral daily activity that enlivens their cultural and spiritual significance. To the question, ﾒwouldnﾕt you want to have an indoor plumbing?ﾓ one Indian woman answered, ﾒbut if the water comes to the house, where do we see each other and talk about everything?ﾓ

One may argue that these are examples from already Westernized practices. But when the issue involves groups outside the West, is it really true that technology can be used in a liberatory manner? Isnﾕt technology inherently a Western tool of domination, in that the powers and structures which dominate are in the very nature of technology? Despite Murcottﾕs approach, isnﾕt the Nepalese rural culture already beginning to erode? Finally, let me address these and other possible objections.

If technology is a ﾒform of culture,ﾓ then it is always embedded in a specific practice, specific value-system, and ways of doing things. If so, there is no ﾒtechnology as such,ﾓ as if it could be removed and analyzed in its own right. Because there is no ﾒessenceﾓ of technology in this sense, technology is only contingently the product of the West. So it is not the fault of technology that results in Western domination; it is the political culture of the West that embeds technology in this particular manner. After all, way before the ﾒWestﾓ appeared on the map, there have been long traditions of various technology for thousands of years around the world, and today, there are many different kinds of technological practices in other parts of the world, such as technologies involving boat-building, construction methods, and indigenous medicine. So the problem of domination is not so much a problem of technology per se, but rather the political problem of who is making relevant technical decisions. Moreover, one must remember that cultures are not static; they are always in the state of dynamic transformation, so in essence there is no ﾒoriginalﾓ culture to be found, destroyed, or ﾒpreservedﾓ for originalityﾕs sake. We must be wary of the myth of ﾒus Westernersﾓ claiming the ﾒpreservation of the natives.ﾓ The introduction of new technology of course alters cultures, some quite dramatically, but that is not in itself the problem. The changes are sometimes brought about entirely within a cultural group without the issue of foreign invasion. The problem is again how such a transformation occurs and who controls the direction. As noted, and I agree that technology is itself a form of culture, so it is in principle adaptable to different cultural forms, norms, practices, and value-systems, and the same piece of technology (a water purification system) could acquire radically different significance and ﾒplaceﾓ in the larger scheme of things. (For instance, in the U.S., a new water purification system might be understood as a ﾒmeans of sanitation,ﾓ but in Nepal it might in addition be something like a ﾒmeans for a better spiritual life and karma.ﾓ In both cases, people would think that their lives are ﾒimproved.ﾓ) If so, there is no reason to believe that technology must be dominating in itself.

But to the extent that carrying water was also a common practice in Europe which was taken for granted for centuries but easily became abandoned, wouldnﾕt the Nepalese women, given time, also would abandon it, because, objectively speaking, is it not simply a better way of life not to have to carry loads of water a day? If so, perhaps technical progress does move in a similar direction no matter where it occurs, and if so, perhaps there really is some essential feature about technology. To this worry I answer that it is probably true that every culture recognizes efficiency as a good, and this fact partially contributes to the spread of technology all over the world (the Yir Yoront preferred the steel axes), but again this is not a feature of technology per se but rather a feature of cultures. But if so, the notion of ﾒefficiencyﾓ itself should have variations across cultures; our motto ﾒmore and faster equals betterﾓ may only be a particular American version that connects the means-to-ends value line. If other cultures become Americanized, then this particular norm might also be adopted (and along with it technologies that realize it), but this is not a guarantee that all cultures favor and adopt this particular model. The French people who reject fast-food chains do not thereby consider themselves inefficient. Likewise, the Nepalese women who opt for carrying water probably do not consider themselves to be choosing inefficiency.

However, for my purposes, the more important question is not so much whether technology inherently carries certain features that would alter cultures, but rather the extent to which the users are participants in the decision-making process. The Nepalese women very well might decide some day that they would prefer living like Western women, with indoor hot-water plumbing and having access to Evian water at the stores nearby. The issue is who is making that decision. If that is what they wish and if they work to attain that end, then it should be within their own cultural self-determination.

The point here is that it is not for us to decide, as it were, that the Nepalese should or should not modernize. The decision-making power should rest with the women themselves, and this is why the question of empowerment is crucial. Here I admit that the negotiations are quite delicate and difficult, especially given the problem of false-consciousness, and probably the future cannot be predicted very well, but the hermeneutical loop is not closed and the cultural exchange and communication should flow in all directions, and no one in this process should dominate or silence other voices.

In the Nepalese case, the hybrid situation of ﾒmodern technology but not Westernizationﾓ is achieved because of Murcottﾕs particular method of working with the local women from their perspective, in contrast to the case of the missionaries. She remains faithful to the actual content of the life-world of the women. These women are indeed empowered by adopting the technology; they gain a sense of independence, and their lives are definitely improved, but they are not thereby ﾒWesternizedﾓ because Murcott did not import the ideological, economic, and political framework and the underlying rationalistic assumptions which shape our technology today. It is not the IMF, World Bank, some multi-national water-purification firm, or the Nepalese government that is making the decisions as to how the women ought to live. Other technologies besides water purification may be successfully introduced, while others, however minor, may seriously disrupt the patterns of their lives. This will depend upon mutual cooperation and negotiation and most importantly, not imposing any agendas by those who will introduce a new element.

The whole point is again the fact that the ultimate decision-making power is shared democratically, in spite of the obvious difference in knowledge, both technical and cultural. It is also important to note that it is inappropriate for us to judge that the Nepalese women are still not ﾒliberatedﾓ because they are tied to domestic work or that they continue carrying water; such a critique does not take into consideration the overall understanding of such issues as domesticity in a larger cultural context. (Would we complain that men who won a strike and improved their working conditions and wages dramatically had achieved little because they still had jobs?) Again, what counts as ﾒliberationﾓ is itself a cultural question in such a way that we must be sensitive not to impose a particular European norm.

But what about the very notions of self-empowerment, autonomy, liberation, and control? By projecting these categories onto the situations of the Nepalese women, are we not imposing Western norms to judge? Celebrating that the Nepalese women are gaining self-empowermentﾑisnﾕt it a Western story to tell? To this worry I would answer that the notions of self-empowerment and liberation from external control have to do with a basic welfare question that is not limited to the West. The European tradition has made an explicit agenda of these political notions and therefore it appears that these are Western preoccupations, but in fact these are fundamental concerns that have developments other than the particular form that developed in the West. With or without the Western notion of human rights (as in Nepal), for instance, people still suffer or prosper under various constraints of empowerment, liberation, and control, and adopting the so-called Western political system is no guarantee that these fundamental welfare questions would be answered adequately. Thus, it is too simple to equate these notions with Western political ideas. What is more interesting would be to develop and support alternative visions of self-empowerment, autonomy, and liberation, as I try to argue here.

Technology is indeed a ubiquitous global phenomenon today with rich existential, political and cultural meaning. In this context, the case of Nepal shows that what should be the object of critique is not technological interventions as such, since they can enter the life-worlds of different cultures if the process of adaptation is executed in a culturally sensitive, democratic and liberatory manner such as Murcottﾕs. Our object of critique is rather the ways in which the adoption is occurringﾑwho is defining the design, power, dissemination, control, for whom and for what purpose, in what context. Murcottﾕs case also shows that spirituality and technology are certainly not at odds with each other. They could be integrated in an effective way, and as her example shows, not just in theory but in actuality. The example also shows that such an integration may be necessary for the true meaning of ﾒliberationﾓ beyond our usual Western political notion.

Works Cited
Berque, Augustin (1992). ﾒIdentification of the Self in Relation to the Environment,ﾓ in Nancy Rosenberger (ed.) Japanese Sense of Self, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Berque, Augustin (1994). Kukan no Nihon Bunka. (Vivre lﾕespace au japon), Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko

Feenberg, Andrew (1991). The Critical Theory of Technology, New York: Oxford University Press

Feenberg, Andrew (1999). Questioning Technology, New York: Routledge

Hanchett, Suzanne, and Jesmin Akhter and Kazi Rozana Akhter. ﾒGender and Society in Bangladeshﾕs Flood Action Plan,ﾓ in Water, Culture, and Power: Local Struggles in a Global Context (1998), John Donahue and Barbara Rose Johnston, eds. Washington DC: Island Press.

Miki, Kiyoshi (1968). Miki Kiyoshi Zenshu [Collected Works of Miki Kiyoshi], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Murcott, Susan (1991). The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha, Berkeley: Parallax Press.

Murcott, Susan (1998). Report in Crabgrass: Report from the Field 5:3.

Roy, Arundhati (1999). The Cost of Living, New York: Random House

Sakabe, Megumi (1991). ﾒSurrealistic Distortion of Landscape and the Reason of the Milieu,ﾓ in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives. Eliot Deutsch (ed.) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Sharp, Lauriston. ﾒSteel Axes for Stone Age Australians,ﾓ in Human Problems in Technological Change (1952), Edward Spicer, ed. New York: Russel Sage Foundation

Simpson, Lorenzo (1995), Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, New York: Routledge

Watsuji, Tetsuro (1935, 1979, 1991). Fudo: Ningengaku teki Kosatsu [Milieu: An Anthropological Study], Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko.

Yoko Arisaka is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and Graduate Faculty at the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. Her areas of research include modern Japanese philosophy, phenomenology, consciousness studies, philosophy of technology, feminism, and political philosophy. She also conducts research on the philosophical issues surrounding sustainability and works with an environmental NGO in Japan. Her website is at http://www.arisaka.org


A modified version of this paper appears in New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation (2001), J. Paris and W. Wilkerson, eds., Rowman and Littlefield. In completing this essay, I wish to thank Arindam Chakrabarti who kindly extended his invitation to me to the 8th East-West Philosophersﾕ Conference and subsequently provided me with suggestions for the essay, and Vrinda Dalmiya, Andrew Feenberg, Martin Jay, Martin Matustik, Eduardo Mendieta, Susan Murcott, Jeffrey Paris, Hans Sluga, and William Wilkerson.