Complexities of Justice

From Leslie Dorrough Smith

Although we're here in India considering issues of social justice, it's hard not to be struck by the fact that "justice" can mean radically different things in different circumstances. In our sightseeing yesterday, many of us observed women offering strangers the chance to hold their infant children in exchange for money; others offered us photographic access to their children for a few coins. While many of us commented on how, in our culture, such behaviors would be considered child exploitation, it's hard to ignore the fact that our gut reactions are the products of a privileged culture where relatively few of us are forced into such behaviors. We only see it as exploitation because we have the luxury of doing so, to put it simply.

A scholar named Jonathan Z. Smith notes that scholars have a responsibility to "make the strange familiar and the familiar strange." In other words, those who study others must recognize that even the most "bizarre" things that others do have rather mundane features, and at the same time, we must question those things that we take for granted and assume are "normal" to everyone else. For instance, while many US women enjoy wearing the latest fashion trends, many other cultures find Western clothing sexually exploitive of the women who wear them. How one evaluates clothing thus depends on perspectives inspired by a tremendously complex set of circumstances.

There are are no easy answers here; that is one certainty of India, it seems. And just how we conceptualize "justice" in India is equally complex.