Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.970104203424.19188C-100000@fox.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 21:27:32 -0600 From: kerry miller <mailto:astingsh@KSU.EDU> Subject: Re: pushing development--or pushing the status quo? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
I had hoped to have time for a more thorough 'development,' but the latest posts inspire me:JCW, > > Change agents change.
> Right again, but the crucial question must
> remain: in what direction? and who is to decide?
I start here because throughout the discussion, from waterlines onward, there has been precious little interrogative syntax. (The water supply project is actually a very apt image for dev't, for the general effect is that having asked for water, one gets a hydrant full in the face. Of course there are ways to turn the volume down and control the rate of change, but hey, they didnt ask for that... and soon the question of who's asking for what is lost in the flood.) In any case, I congratulate Dr Wandemberg on bringing these questions out - rhetorical as they may be.
Clearly it *should* be the host nationals who decide their course. This is not to say that they are being 'given' some new responsibility - for this charge is exactly what cultures bear, and had been bearing before - but rather that they are about to discover that they don't have as much decision power as they might have thought. The implication is that the business of the change agent is to raise the consciousness of the host to explicit and intentional awareness of the ways the traditional culture works, the ways it deals with change, so that those critical *values* can be preserved, regardless of the material paraphernalia that are about to descend.
B. Diamond, > the key point here is our motivations and not just the ends.
The key point is that we *communicate* our intentions. The distrust and skepticism that has been cited is not because these outlanders turned out to have some agenda of their own - that's the way the world works - but that they came off as twofaced. Forked tongued, some might say.
Steve, > All of us who see ourselves as "change agents" are in the business of
> cultural destruction, whether we like it or not.
>
Whether we are _inevitably_ in the business of destruction is beside the point - which is that we _may_ be, and yet fail to appear *to the beneficiaries* to be aware of the possibility. If change agents had just a modicum of orientation to this, they could work to communicate some of the ambiguity of development. Then at the very least, when disillusionment sets in, we have more defense than, "But it wasn't supposed to happen that way" -- and we may discover that the remaining fragments of cultural integrity will serve to help host and client (that is, 'donor') work *together* to rebuild the rest (which of course, would be an integrated synthesis of old ways and new). Wouldn't it be just the most amazing outcome if we all discovered that 'destruction' -- any more than 'progress' -- was not the end of the world?
Cheers, kerry