Message-ID: <970104104435_1223853652@emout20.mail.aol.com> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 10:44:35 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: pushing development--or pushing the status quo? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
My exchanges with B. Diamond and JC Wandemberg are motivated by several concerns.My overriding concern is with the growing disenchantment of those in the US (I cannot speak for the other "developed" countries) with development, and their growing unwillingness to provide tax and private funds for development activities.
And that unwillingness extends, I think, to the transfer of technology activities which are the primary concern of this list.
I think I understand one strand of that disaffection more clearly as a result of the messages here.
If JC is right, and the schools and universities we have helped to build and staff have not helped those attending them, why should we continue to fund and build them?
If Brett is right, and anthropology students believe their discipline demonstrates that illiterates might be better off without the alphabet, why fund and staff literacy programs?
If even the professionals in the development community believe that our work abroad destroys indigenous cultures and foists market economies and factory work styles and capitalism on peoples who are better off without them--why spend our tax funds on such efforts?
And that skepticism would extend to transferring technology, of course.
I have come to these predictable conclusions.
The stories that are told here about heroic indigenous and villainous developers are, like all good fictions, fictional.
They are one view, at most a partial view, of "reality".
There are other stories that can be made of our development work: in these stories the villager who learns to read, learns that there are other ways and other worlds beyond his village, and begins the painful journey that begins with separation from the family and friends and ways of his childhood, has not been destroyed by literacy but freed by it, set free to search for new possibilities.
In still anther story, the community that chooses Burger King and Levis and The Grateful Dead and abandons the glorious folk culture that the outsider so enjoys has to be allowed to make that choice, and the outside anthropologist or developer or cultural purist must not be allowed to interfere with this choice.
I conclude this:
All of us who see ourselves as "change agents" are in the business of cultural destruction, whether we like it or not.
Teachers. Therapists, Counselors. Evangelizing Christians. Developers. Transferrers of technology. Even anthropology students, who don't understand that living in a village as they do with their notebooks, and cameras and tape recorders are helping to change a way of life.
So: I'm for participatory approaches. And sustainable development. And respect for indigenous cultures. And all the more noble approaches to development.
But I have to begin by acknowledging that no matter how much the participation, how little the external control, the school that I help to build, the seeds that I bring, the battery-powered transistor radio I distribute: all of these are part of a process that will undo the culture that has endured for so long.
Change agents change.
There is no escape.
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow, President The Electronic University Network 288 Stone Island Road Enterprise, FL 32725 407.321.8770;Fax:407.321.4861 January 4, 1997