Pelé, Hermán and I were up well before the break of dawn. We would spend the morning in the field, from around six until around one p.m. Then we would go back to their home for lunch and a siesta. Sometime around three they would head back to the field and I would move on to visit another farmer or family. This morning we were up early and the weeding had to be done. The cotton field that Pelé and Hermán worked together was a good kilometer away from their home, and we would set out after drinking máte, just as the sky was getting lighter over Misiones to the east.
Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.
Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.
In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.
The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.
A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.
Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.
Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Tackling Taboo Territory: A Cultural Commentary
On Culture
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
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