Yeah so I’ve been having more problems. Repeated apologies.
We are presented with the following case to examine: a group of Elon students travel to Malawi in order to participate in an demonstration of altruism. The shock! The horror! No doubt they sought to inculcate the natives into Western modes of thought. The Elon University website describes their actions as consisting of “service projects and immersion in [Malawi’s] culture.” God above knows what that means. The website goes on to detail their accomplishments: “Elon students helped build a garden to provide children with fresh produce, and they assisted with renovations to the center itself,” while in another location, “construction projects involved building a kitchen, clearing and enlarging a garden space, and creating a drainage ditch.” Scandalous. Now the Malawian street children possess food to eat when they need it, a roof over their heads, and the fishing village is now irrevocably polluted with the taint of proper drainage and expanded horticultural premises. No longer can the Malawians rely on their own, native traditions of walking in their own filth and digging up dirty roots to eat! The White Man’s Burden strikes again. Surely these colonialist, almost racist overtures must cease. This is the 21st Century after all! I mean, the website even provides further evidence for the misdeeds of these imperialist scum: “Participants spent a day working with an HIV/AIDS support group learning about the difficulty of living with the disease,” and “the group also toured Blantyre to see the streets from the children’s perspective.” So you see, their so-called noble intentions result in the destruction of native African cultural modes and the introduction of Western ones, rife as they are with history reminiscent of our darkest hours.
Quite.
So Sorry.
The suggestion that an expedition by Elon students to a rural African community, such as the one presented here, could have “unintended consequences […] in terms of “cultural transference” ” is laughable at best, insulting at worst. Laughable because the overall effect of such trips seems to be inflated and the nature of activities contained therein poorly understood, insulting because it associates the students with modes of thought they no doubt do not and have never considered. Not that such modes of thought are necessarily bad in and of themselves, but they probably are to these students. The concern here lies with the same people I explored here, in a post dealing very much with the exact same issue – how does the “West” affect those to whom it gives humanitarian aid – except reduced in scope to students instead of larger initiatives. The people I’m talking about are again the ones wh0 aren’t able to tell the difference between uplifting a people, and imposing upon them. When a nation gives another access to the items and concepts required to function in the world they live in (and this is another point I’ll come back to) and demands from the beneficiary something which the benefactor needs for it’s own interests, this is uplifting a nation. On the other hand, it is culturally invasive to simply force cultural traits which aren’t relevant to being able to function within the global context. For example, extolling the virtues of tea amongst colonized peoples versus building hospitals. This is on the historic scale of 19th Century colonial politics.
On the scale we’re discussing, the scale of student charity trips, the exchange is much more one-sided. The students, at their own expense, arrive in a foreign country, help build things for the natives, attempt to understand the difficulties they experience, then leave, with nothing more than feel-goodery in their hearts and another line on their curriculum vitae. The students in this specific case didn’t travel to Malawi to impart the Western way of life. Well, if you define “the Western way of life” as “having access to food, having facilities to use, and having proper drainage,” then I suppose you couldn’t be faulted for claiming they did travel for that purpose. But I want to refer to what I mentioned earlier: the world we live in. We live in a world which for a variety of reasons and for better or for worse, is dominated by the West. Western standards are the norm in terms of appreciating quality. Western standards are, objectively, superior to others when it comes to such things as medicine, sanitation, and construction (though of course not in other realms, especially not the more metaphysical ones). This makes charity work of the nature we’re discussing uplifting for those benefiting from them. I wouldn’t call this culturally invasive at all, it is helping at no cost a people improve itself so it can compete on a more equal playing field.
I want to go on a small tangent and point out that the Malawians could have planted their own gardens and dug their own ditches. All they needed, presumably, were the resources which could have been paid for from the U.S.A. itself. The presence of the Elon students was wholly redundant and was largely for their own benefit, though the service rendered was for the benefit of the Malawians. A relatively unimportant distinction, but I don’t want it to be thought I am sanctifying the Elon students. Their motivation was fell-goodery.
Donini in his article talks of “cultural transference.” I suspect “invasive” is a better term for what he is describing than “transference” but that is his semantic choice. And certainly he has a point. Humanitarian aid is often tied to a certain Western imposition of itself onto the recipient, but usually this is found at the level of state-to-state rapport, or that of major organizations-to-state. On the scale of student trips, I believe a certain degree of “transference” occurs but perhaps in the reverse of what might be initially suspected. I would posit that (again, we’re continuing the exploration of this specific case relating to Elon students in Malawi) experiencing the life of Malawian unfortunates affected the Elon students more than contacting Western youths affected anyone, children or otherwise, in Malawi. The children will continue to live the lives they have lived, and unless they formed some sort of mystically deep connection with one of the visitors, will proceed as normal. Maybe they’ll die before they reach adulthood, who knows. The Elon students however, being very much (one hopes) their own minds and their own selves, will be affected by their journey as they are invaded with pity for the condition of the Malwian urchins or admiration for the fortitude of their sidaiques (AIDS sufferers).
Donini also speaks of universalism, but having already covered ethnocentrism and how beneficial an image of cultural superiority resulting in cultural uplifting is, I don’t think I should approach it redundantly. I will say that Donini has the insufferable habit of putting words in quotation marks. Words such as “us”, “we”, “they”, or “modernized” which are simply descriptors or group-identifiers not based in any kind of bias, and not indicative of any kind of position be it ideological or otherwise…
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Donini, Antonio. “Humanitarianism, Perceptions, Power.” In the Eyes of Others: How People in Crises Perceive Humanitarian Aid. Doctors without Borders, n.d. Web. 20 June 2013.
