Message-ID: <970105064338_2021210474@emout13.mail.aol.com> Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 06:43:38 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: pushing OUR development? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
In a message dated 97-01-04 18:37:18 EST, mailto:juwandem@NMSU.EDU (JC WANDEMBERG) writes:
<<I would like to know why does this "growing disenchantment" concern you? Is your job at stake perhaps?>>
B. Diamond questions my experience and credentials, and J.C. questions my motives.
Motives and credentials are often important, and if these are of interest I would be happy to describe mine. Is this the direction you want to take this discussion? If so, you begin with your motives and your credentials, and I'll follow suit.
<<At this point I must indicate (for those who may not already know this)that the economic returns to the US far outweigh the "tax money" used for foreign aid.>>
Alas, Western capitalist/imperialist must not believe this. If they did they would be instructing Newt Gingrich and the rest of their governmental minions to spend more money on foreign aid. Instead, the USAID budget is slashed, many dozens of AID offices abroad have been closed, fewer schools and roads will be built. . .
Please furnish me with useful statistics on the economic returns on foreign aid, and I will send those to my capitalist friends immediately and ask them to support an enlargement of the USAID budget.
Incidentally, sir, how do you feel about the shrinking of our foreign aid?
> 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?
<<I've never said this. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that this "laudable aid" helped even more those providing the "help" and this is what I find repulsive.>>
Why is this "bottom line" (!) repulsive? Would you approve of building schools and roads and tube wells and distributing improved seeds if the US got nothing in return for its support?
<<Perhaps you should take a closer look at all the "conditions" and provisos aid recipients must meet in order to "qualify" for "help".>>
Can you tell me of a recent, actual USAID or World Bank project that required recipients to meet conditions that you find distasteful?
I, too, find the provisos and conditions for all US grants and support, domestic as well as foreign, incredible and counterproductive. Do you have a theory as to why all these conditions? If not, you might want to skim "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip Howard.
<<To top it all, one must add government corruption on the recipients side.>>
Yes. The receivers are as corrupt as the givers. The only uncontaminated ones, apparently, are the critics--including the Christian Marxists whose liberation theology has "helped" cultures avoid the evils of the market and capitalism by introducing them to the comparable, or worse, evils of socialism.
> 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.
<Reality is out there,is suffices to go a look at it! I suggest you do that!>>
You might be willing to consider that reality isn't what it used to be. That reality, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That reality is socially constructed, a narrative that people of a particular community tell each other.
There are other stories, other pieces of research, other movies than the ones you watch and cite.
> 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.
<< Had this choice internally originated you may have a point. However, the way is goes is that this "choice" was simply a natural consequence from the external stimuli.>>
Choice, J. C.,is not well described as "internally originated"--as if people choose Christianity without the "help" of external agents and influences.
Choice and growth and development are always, I think, dialectical: and with the new media of communication it is almost impossible to prevent an indigenous culture from hearing Madonna or Billy Graham or some other Christian trying to get the indigenous to repent and walk in new ways.
> 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.
<<Your conclusion is brilliant!. Unless "change agents" are willing to become "communicators" or "facilitators" they'll continue to shove their stuff down the throat of their "laggard" "underdeveloped" clientel.>>
These are distinctions without differences. Is the preacher a communicator or a change agent? If people listen to the communication, and change as a result, their earlier selves and cultures are gone forever.
"Communicators" and "facilitators" are often skilled technicians of cultural change who gently move their subjects in the directions they choose for them: they are as culturally destructive as those you criticize. It just takes them a little longer, and creates the illusion that the "indigenous" chose communitarianism, or socialism, or Christianity, on their own, without external influence.
That is: if Paolo Freire does his literacy pedagogy with uettered peasants you know exactly how they will end up: knowing of their "oppression" by the dominators.
I don't how it's possible to shove Big Macs and Coke and Madonna down anyone's throat. What I see is joy at the supermarket, not fear.
> Change agents change.
<<<Right again, but the crucial question must remain: in what direction? and who is to decide?>>
You might reverse the order of those questions: who is to decide is first, and if the answer is that they will decide, then one of the things they will decide is the direction in which they want to go.
So I propose that what we have , or should want to have, is the free market place of ideas. The Westerners will try to convince the indigenous of the virtues and glories of the market and Coke and burgers, and the Christians and the Marxists and the cultural purists will paint all of these things as evil, and try to get the locals to preserve their localisms.
And I presume that if the locals choose I love Lucy and rock and junk food, and the market, you, J. C., will get out of the way and respect their decision.
Or will you?
<<Best regards, >>
And my regard to you.
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