Message-ID: <970105142448_1224017570@emout20.mail.aol.com> Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 14:24:50 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: pushing development- To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
In a message dated 97-01-05 12:07:35 EST, mailto:astingsh@ksu.edu (kerry miller) writes:<< I think you're getting ahead of yourself ;-) I take you to mean there is no other way than pain - but then, what news is that that we should say so? Do you think a thousand year old subsistence culture hasnt figured this out? Can our 'telling' be anything but a confession of our own (cultural) naivete? >>
No, the subsistence culture hasn't figured this out, nor has the capitalist culture. Religious parents send their children away to college thinking they will get the benefits of education, and are shocked to find their children going through the painful process of alienation from family, community, God. "Developers" can't prevent the unintended consequences of their well-intentioned interventions.
What is naive, Kerry---and I think you fundamentally agree with this--is believing that there are magic bullets for dealing with cultural change--"communication" techniques, or "intermediate technology" techniques , or "Buddhist economics"--that will somehow eliminate the pain, or anesthetize it.
<<But if it is news to us, then what *have* we been telling everybody up to now, if not a kind of snake-oil pitch that 'development' is a magically painless cure for what ails them?>>
For myself, not guilty. If I'm asked to help, I help--but if I'm asked I warn. I say whatI am saying here--that development, no matter how it's practiced, can be traumatic.
Incidentally, I'm no longer sure who the snake oil salesmen are.
'm beginning to think it's the hucksters of indigenous, painless development--just follow their prescriptions for "sustainable development" and "appropriate technology" and "participatory culture change" and you can have the gains without the pain.
That's snake oil.
<<That we *do* know what we're doing when we extract the ore and whittle the timber and crank out Coke (and coke) by the million ton and dispossess 30% of the population, and it's all fine and painless? I would say its high time we learned to stand up and say to everybody, No we don't know what we're doing, we've only been at it a hundred years and there are a lot of bugs to be painfully worked out, and *we need your help*.>>
I think that what you've just said is an important piece of the truth: for a long time we were ignorant of the prices we would pay for the rush to "development".
But you're missing the opportunity to tell the part of the story that's often overlooked when the conventional story of Western evil is mindlessly repeated.
People live longer now, and suffer from fewer plagues (I know about AIDS). Ordinary people by the millions are now freed for part of each day from backbreaing toil, and cn spend time with a child or a book or music. Ordinary people--the children of immigrants, like me, whose immediate ancestors were beasts of burden, worn out early from endless and mindless work--the same endless routine that you see so often in the countries where our "development" hasn't yet reached.
I don't want to go back to my indigenous culture, as painful as my self awareness is now, and I don't wish that authentic indigenous culture on anyone.
Why don't you tell that part of the story: the story of Emma Lazarus' poem on The Statue of Liberty.
> No matter how hard you try to respect and preserve the local culture, your
> very presence alters the culture you work in irrevocably, and the skills
and > technology you bring, no matter how modest, how intermediate, how
appropriate > will set off a chain reaction that you can not control.
>
<< Again, I think you've confused two levels of thinking (shall we call them the literate and the illiterate? ;-) - if *you*, individually and respectfully, live in and among a local culture, do you honestly think you 'set off' something that a) cannot be controlled, b) needs to be controlled, and or c) needs to be controlled by you? Then, respectfully, I think you didnt live there long enough to recognize that 'culture' is nothing more or less than the set of ways people develop to address ('compensate for') such individualistic effects. (in other words, you didnt suffer enough...)>>
Yes, I think your very presence and intervention and work alters the culture you live in, and I resectfully suggest the confusion may be yours.
I respectfully suggest that there is no way to teach a people to read without changing their lives and culture forever.
And if you don't understand that, you've perhaps suffered enough, but not read enough!
<<The literate level, of course, uses the generalized and impersonalized 'you' that stands outside and looks (*down*) and analyses the 'cultural' effects of wearing shoes, or immunization or literacy programs, or privatizing water resources which had been communal before PVC pipe was introduced. It does not take account of the personal pleasure (e.g. of affordable shoes), or dignity, or desperation, or responsibility or any other such off-topic nonsense. In this perspective, a phrase like "trying hard to respect and preserve" *seems* to make sense - but of course it doesn't mean a thing. (Try to explain it to an illiterate...) >>
Are you perhaps suggesting here that you and others here who read and write have some superior insight that immunizes them against the effects of literacy, cures them of intellectual and cultural diseases which callous folks like me have?
I respectfully suggest you're fooking yourself.
> (Perhaps the training of anthropoligists, for example, should include
> knowledge of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, so that they learn that
> their very presence with cameras and recorders changes the local culture
in > ways that that they can not control.)
>
> The only way to avoid personal responsibility for participating in
cultural > destruction is to stay out of the development business.
>
<<The only way to take personal responsibility for cultural growth is to recognize you are in the development business, wherever you are.>>That's not quite so.
When you're in your own culture, your own interpetative community of discourse, you get into arguments and debates of the kind we're having, but the outcome and the impact is not the same as when you change the meaning perspective of another person or group.
Teaching someone to read, for example, sets off a train of consequences that can not be controlled, no matter who tries to teach them with pictures and generative words so that they understand that they are the "oppressed" and the others, including the evil West, are the "oppressors."
You try to teach them that, and they get hold of something to read that describes the life of ordinary people in the States, and instead of fighting domination, they want to open a business or come immediately to the US to get a radio and a tv.
And as soon as Colonel Sanders puts up a sign in their town which they an read they desert their authentic pubs and flock to the plastic and junk life.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish it didn't happen in Barbados, or Kenya, or Tanzania, or Mexico.
But it does, no matter how hard our American visionaries try to prevent it.
It just takes longer in some places than others.
Cheers.
Steve Eskow
>>