Message-ID: <32CE3626.7D00@mind.net> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 10:51:18 +0000 From: "B. Diamond" <mailto:bdiamond@MIND.NET> Subject: Re: pushing development--or pushing the status quo? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM wrote:
> 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?
You are twisting my words to suit your own ends. I never said that people would "be better off" without the alphabet, I merely stated that literacy in and of itself will not solve the problems facing many third world cultures. What will help these peoples is when the industrialized nations stop mining these countries for cheap natural resources and labor. Teaching a sub-saharan bushman snowmobile maintainance is not likely to be of any real benefit, nor is teaching a landless, starving, peasant farmer how to read going to be of any real benefit--we should focus on why he/she is starving and landless, no?
>
> 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?
For three reasons. A) it makes us feel good to think that we're helping, which B) offsets (in our minds) the guilt the industrialized nations have from representing 15% of the world's population, yet consuming 80% of the world's resources. Perhaps Dr. Eskow, you could explian to us how the world could support 6 billion middle class citizens? We need to focus more energy on lowering our standards of living rather than raising that of others. Lastly, capitalists need a return on their capital, and an ever-increasing cutomer base to whom they can hawk their wares. World Bank funding provides interest dividends to bankers, who in turn provide ever-more consumers to the marketplace, (via the destruction of cultural sovereignty) all in the name of profit.
> 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.
I'm not aware of your "credentials" Dr. Eskow, but for you to summarily dismiss those views who counter your own as "fiction" tells me a lot about your naivete to the issues we discuss. Have you ever actually worked directly with indigenous peoples in a third world environment? If so, was your stay there counted in weeks, months, or years? >
> They are one view, at most a partial view, of "reality".
You mean your "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.
And is this "painful journey" necessary and/or good? Why must this young man seperate himself from his family, his culture, his WORLD? So that he can get a job, buy a house and car, and be a good little capitalist? Furthermore, what gives you the right to judge him and his culture and to piously and arrogantly suggest that he has been "set free?" Set free from what? Are we still entertaining the the notion that non-whites are "heathens and savages" that need to be led out of their lives of poverty, despair, witchcraft, etc. and into to the "cultured world" of whites?
>
> 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.
In essence, you are suggesting that people who want indigenous peoples to choose their own destiny are really only "keeping them down" for our amusement and entertainment...a living musuem of culture if you will, and people like yourself, only want to bring people Burger King, Levi's, etc. so that they can know a "better life." Dr. Eskow, I can provide you with hundreds of examples of indigenous cultures that were descended upon by outsiders wanting to help, only to dicover years down the road that the material possessions that these changes brought paled in comparison to the loss of their culture, rituals, and their autonomy with their world. Can you show me just one example where representatives of a native group have left their homes in the jungle, rainforest, etc. and embarked on a journey to A) alert the outside world to their "plight" of living in a traditional manner, and B) beg us to come to their aid and rescue them from their savage ways? We have of course provided food and other assitance in the wake of natural disasters, and this type of temporary relief is welcomed and necessary, but we should leave it at that: temporary. Dr. Eskow, if I were your neighbor, and wanted to borrow your socket set to fix my car, would you simply loan me the tools, or would you insist that i convert to your religion, become a vegetarian, or perhaps change careers to your liking as a condition of your help? Because this is exactly what many so-called development projects are all about.
>
> 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.
Are you really saying that we must destroy cultures to help them? Did we not learn anything from our rampant abuse of Native N. Americans--boarding schools, sterilization, etc.???
> 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.
Anthropology is very well aware of our impact on the people we study Steve, but thanks for your help...I'll be sure to mention this at the next AAA meetings. Perhaps the key point here is our motivations and not just the ends. What are your motivations Steve?
> 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.
This type of logic is frightening, and it is precisely the reason why many development projects fail miserably...YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DESTROY A CULTURE TO "SAVE" IT. If you take this approach to development projects then you will engage in self-fulfilling prophecy at the expense of others.
"Ignorance provides no protection from the consequences of our actions."
B. Diamond