Playing with Fire: Women, Wood and Climate Change in Rajasthan, India

Associate Professor Meena Khandelwal
Anthropology and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies and Professor, H. S. Udaykumar, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Meena Khandelwal and H.S. Udaykumar tell the story of an unlikely collaboration sparked by a brief conversation about a solar cooker project.  Professor Udaykumar took a group of engineering students to visit a village in Rajasthan, India.  He found that women were now trekking long hours to find and haul firewood once available just outside their homessimply to cook a meal.  He believed that solar cooker technology would not only help stem deforestation in the region but would also result in a cascade of positive impacts on the lives of women and girls. Udaykumars efforts to engineer an inexpensive and functional solar cooker were transformed by considering perspectives from cultural anthropology and gender studies.  Wood, for rural women in Rajasthan, is not simply a form of biofuel that stores carbon; rather it is central to their social and economic lives. Nor is cooking simply a technical issue. Culture matters, and understanding this problem in all its dimensions requires the kind of field research conducted by qualitative social scientists.  Khandelwal and Udaykumar make a case for multidisciplinary collaboration that draws broadly from humanities, social science and applied science perspectives in order to conduct problem-oriented research.  The problem of deforestation in India, in the context of rapid social and economic change, is simultaneously one of human behavior, technology and physical environment.