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Karla Flores, Assig.12

In ” Do Muslim women really need saving? anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others”, Lila Abu-Lugnod discusses the involvement of US in Afghanistan. She starts by  mentioning how the attacks on Sep. 11, 2011 everything changed for them too. Americans started to look for almost an excuse to go into their country and start a “war against terrorism”. To the people there, it was clear that the attention  was focused on all the wrong places to try to look for something to fix. She takes first lady, Bush, to show how American troops were there and ‘liberating’ them from terrorism and supposedly from the Taliban. Instead of studying the history of the situation the country was in, they came in to ‘save’ women from the wrong factors. She criticizes that instead of getting to know their culture, the Americans came in trying to change the way they were treated to almost the same as it was in America. Here the liberation women have is different from that of women in Afghanistan. As the government announced in the first few months of the ‘war against terrorism’, women had gained some minor liberties like being able to listen to music, yet they left out things that women had been fighting against for such a long time. As she said there “was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish”(Abu-Lugnod,784). To Americans it was communicated that these women were being saved in some way, but they did not addressed the real issues that they needed to. Maybe it might had been because they did not analyze their cultural struggles before coming in to fight a war. These women did not need the type of saving the Americans were trying to offer them.