money corrupts

Hi everyone,

My husband Tom got here a few days ago, and it's been really wonderful
to have him around—he'll be here until mid-October. While he's here,
though, he's not exactly on one long vacation. We set up an exchange
for him with the nice doctor who helped me when I was sick a couple of
weeks ago. The doctor lets Tom follow him around and teaches Tom
medicine, and Tom talks with the doctor in English and corrects his
pronounciation. It seems to be working out satisfactorily all around.

As happened the last time he visited, I have been doing a lot of
talking with Tom and not so much soliloquizing on this blog, but I
have just realized something interesting that I want to share here.

I have generally emphasized differences between Nicaraguans' and
Unitedstateseans' cultural understandings of morality, charity and
market… but today I'm going to talk about one thing they have in
common. Both in Nicaragua and in the United States, people feel that
money corrupts. The only reason I know the Spanish word for "camel"
is because people here have quoted the bible verse to me that says
approximately "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to get into heaven". In both places,
people feel that the desire for profit and wealth leads people to
commit immoral acts… maybe the desire for money is one of the few ways
that ordinary people can explain to themselves why some
incomprehensibly bad things happen. For example, many people in the
U.S. lost their jobs and retirement savings when Enron collapsed. Was
this attributed to random bad luck? No, it happened because of the
actions of some very arrogant and greedy people.

In the last two weeks in Nicaragua, some 200 people have been
poisoned, over 40 died and a bunch more blinded by drinking what had
been sold to them as liquor, but which was actually a high percentage
of methanol, or rubbing alcohol. Before the culprits were arrested, I
heard a number of theories about how this could have happened,
including attempts to drive a local brewing company out of business by
a rival company. And it turns out that the methanol was deliberately
stolen from an industrial chemical company and re-packaged as
drinkable alcohol. This is only comprehensible to anybody here as the
action of somebody who was so driven by the desire for money that he
didn't care about the people he knew would be hurt.

Interestingly, both in the U.S. and in Nicaragua, the evil of the
profit motive is seen to be only occurring "here", whereever "here"
is. In Nicaragua, people have a sense that since this is a poor
country, the desire for money often overwhelms people here. They
often say things to me like "of course this sort of thing never
happens where you come from". People have a keen sense that they live
in an "underdeveloped" country, and "underdeveloped" implies both
poverty and a generalized sense of educational, cultural and moral
inferiority. I feel like I constantly am telling people that yes,
there is crime in the U.S., yes, there is poverty, yes, there is
corruption. (People here generally assume that I have no experience
with protecting myself against burglars and pickpockets, despite the
fact that I've lived in not-the-swankiest parts of New York City for
the last 5 years!)

In the U.S., on the other hand, ordinary people in poor countries are
often described in ways that make them seem innocent of the corruption
of the profit motive. There have been a number of times I've seen in
fair trade literature, for example, a description of coffee farming as
a job which is done by artisans, using techniques which have been
passed down through generations, for the sheer pleasure that an
artisan takes in creating a high-quality craft. Readers are told that
we ought to support these craftspeople in their art, because if we
don't, sordid economic realities may force them to quit. We are also
frequently told that farmers are trying to support their families—a
euphemism for making money which emphasizes moral and cultural values
rather than anything associated with morally dubious profit.

Of course, there are also contradictory tendencies in both worldviews.
In the U.S., while "small farmers" may be viewed as morally pure and
innocent of greed, governments and high officials are often portrayed
as irredeemably corrupt and undemocratic. And in Nicaragua, while
ordinary Unitedstateseans are portrayed as benevolent and innocent of
both politics and greed, the heavy-handed intervention of the U.S.
government (and the governments of other rich countries) and foreign
corporations and organizations are widely resented.

There is one important difference I can see between these narratives
(except, of course, for the power inequities which shape the
narratives). In Nicaragua, there is a stronger idea of wealth as a
limited good. A couple of months ago there was an expose in one of
the newspapers describing the lifestyle of a Nicaraguan baseball
player, Vicente Padilla, who is pitching in the major leagues for the
Texas Rangers. I was hanging out in the office of the cooperative,
and a number of people were discussing his multiple sports cars, his
expensive houses, his boat. Like there would probably have been in a
similar conversation in the U.S., there was a certain amount of
disgust and a certain amount of envy mixed in with people's reactions.
But people also commented on the contrast between this pitcher's
salary and the salaries of people in the Matagalpa area. Several
people commented on how many people that salary could feed, how many
poor people could be helped with that salary. Would these comments
have been made very often in the U.S.? My feeling is that they would
be made less often, that people do not feel that when one person is
rich there is less money to go around for everybody else.

But, as always, I'm open to being corrected on these points.

-Carrie

P.S. Speaking of baseball, I would like to hereby apologize to all
Red Sox fans—I feel responsible for their poor finish this season,
since I haven't been doing my part to root them. ;-) I'll do much
better next year, I promise! (And hopefully the new Nicaraguan
pitcher Devorn Hansack will help, too!)

Instability of Organizations (and some personal stuff)

Hi Everybody,

I'm back in Matagalpa today, but unfortunately I've been taken out of
commission for a few days due to some health problems. Amusingly,
it's not one of the myriad frightening-sounding diseases with which
The Tropics supposedly menace Unitedstateseans, but rather just an
infection. I won't get into the unpleasant details, but I saw a
doctor yesterday and he prescribed me to take some medications which
add up to about $5.71 per day. Or in other words, about 3 and 1/3
days' salary for an agricultural worker around here.

As I'm writing this, however, it occurs to me to wonder whether
infections might be more common and/or stronger around here than in
the United States. I am taking a strong antibiotic, but the doctor
did not give me a length of time to take it for—he wrote on the
prescription that I should take it "until you get better", (although
he did advise me to take it for at least 5 days.) And I bought the
pills individually. In the U.S. patients on antibiotics are warned to
always finish the entire regimen, even though they may feel better
after only half, in order to be sure to kill 100% of the germs and
avoid breeding extra-strong germs which were able to survive the first
half. But around here, if you're paying 3 and 1/3 days' salary for
every pill you take, the economic incentives are obviously high to
stop when you feel better. And doctors take these realities into
account. (Health insurance is unheard of, but sometimes hospitals may
give out some pills for free, although people have told me that one of
the things that has gotten much worse since the Sandinista government
left is that the hospitals no longer have any medicine.) About there
being stronger germs here, though, I don't have any sense of how local
such a phenomenon would be… any pathologists (or med students, or
doctors of other specialties) reading this blog and want to weigh in?

Anyways, so I've been thinking about why it might be that cooperatives
and similar groups tend to be unstable, forming and then dissolving
quickly. I'm sure there are many complex reasons, but one hypothesis
I've been working on goes something like this:

Many people that I've been talking to here in Nicaragua have an image
of the political/economic world which comes in three broad layers
(although of course there are many more subtle sub-layers). On the
bottom are poor Nicaraguans, who need and deserve aid. Picture them
as ordinary people, standing on the ground. In the middle is the
system of Nicaraguan governmental and non-governmental means of
distributing aid. Picture this as an atmospheric layer of smog. On
the top is the sunshine-drenched world above the clouds where we find
benevolent, well-meaning and rich people from countries like the U.S.,
Europe, Japan, and also China and Venezuela. (I'm not sure exactly
how an economist would classify the economies of countries like China
and Venezuela, but they're definitely in the "rich donor" category
relative to Nicaragua, probably largely for political reasons). These
benevolent people want to give the aid that poor people deserve and
need. And they do, indeed, give massive amounts of money. But this
money gets filtered as it descends through the corrupt layers of
distribution, so that only a small percentage arrives to the
recipients. (I mentioned this, describing it slightly differently, in
my last entry.)

Given this image, it is easy to see why people would be interested in
finding the most direct linkages possible to donors. In my last entry
I wrote about how people therefore bypassed government, which is
especially connected with corruption in people's minds. But
corruption is not perceived as a government monopoly. To a greater or
lesser extent, it is associated with ALL structures that intervene
between people and aid. (I've been wondering, actually, whether
corruption could actually be understood in this context as anything
that (illegitimately?) subtracts from the aid on its way to the
recipients. Because I've heard instances of incompetence, or even
just decisions which were understandable but unfortunate in
retrospect, as being described as corruption.)

This creates a bit of a paradox. In order to access aid, you need to
be part of an organization, like a cooperative, because
(international) aid almost never comes to individuals. But
organizations are perceived as potentially/probably corrupt. (And
indeed, if they're subtracting operating costs, and I'm right about
the definition of corruption, they all are.) So people tend to
abandon established organizations in response to a new chance to
access aid more directly, and they establish new organizations, which
then get perceived as corrupt in their turn and abandoned when the
next chance comes along.

Incidentally, many people say that Nicaragua would be rich and
prosperous if it weren't for all the layers which prevent aid from
arriving to people. This sounds naïve and mistaken to people used to
the most stylish economic model among policy makers today (neoliberal
economics), according to which aid distorts The Market, and therefore
society, by changing the balance of reward and punishment. But there
are alternate economic theories, too, which tend to actually support
this statement. It has been shown that inequality is a big cause of
both poverty and poor economic prospects—so you can have two countries
with the same gross national product, but in country A the richest 20%
of the people have 95% of the money, and in country B the richest 20%
of the people have only, say, 30% of the money. Not only will you see
a lot more poverty in country A, but you can expect country B to have
a much bigger GNP than country A in ten years time. And, obviously,
assuming B has kept its egalitarian economic structure intact, the
proceeds from that GNP will be enjoyed by many more of B's
inhabitants. So… a better distribution of wealth would, in fact,
probably help Nicaragua to be richer and more prosperous. That is, if
this distribution of wealth could ever be accomplished without certain
large powerful countries to the north waging campaigns of economic
sabotage.

I'd love to hear any thoughts from anyone reading this, and especially
from people who might have Nicaraguan knowledge or comparative
perspectives. Does this sound familiar to you? Do you know of
similar perspectives being held by people in other places? Am I
completely mistaken? (Feel free to email me rather than posting a
reply here. My email is carolynffisher AT gmail DOT com).

-Carrie

globalization and sovereignty

Dear readers,

Well this time I'm writing from Managua, for a change, where I've come
to consult some professors at one of the universities and to meet with
some people at an NGO which finances cooperatives in Matagalpa. Down
this close to the equator, the major factor that determines the
climate is altitude. Matagalpa, where I am normally located, is
something like 900 meters above sea level, and the climate is really
pretty idyllic, except for the rain (we're in the rainy season right
now). It only gets really hot, but never humid, around mid-day. At
night, it's probably in the sixties usually, but never any colder—I
don't even have any blanket for my bed. But Managua is much lower,
and is really, really hot. I'm constantly covered in a sheen of
sweat, which just makes the dust stick to me. But I'm spoiling myself
tonight, and my hotel room actually has air conditioning!

What I want to write about today is the idea of governments and
globalization. Globalization is a phenomenon which is widely talked
about, but there is no widely agreed-upon definition. Some people say
it means that the world is "getting smaller" via improved
communication and transportation, but this is not the case in many
important aspects for the world's poor. (There may be an internet
café in the nearest town, but if you never learned to read in the
first place, let alone use a computer, that's not going to do you much
good.) On the other hand, the world's poor are perhaps more mobile
and more dependent on resources far away from where they live. For
example, among the members of the cooperative I work with, a very
large percentage of adult males, and a smaller percentage of females,
have gone for a several month period to work in Costa Rica, where
wages are higher. This is often done to send money back to their
families, or to buy land or build a house. It is just one of many
strategies that farmers use, in addition to farming, to try to make
ends come a little closer together, even if they're not able to make
them meet.

BUT, what some people have said is that due to globalization, the
importance of national-level governments in poorer countries is
diminishing, and the importance of other bodies—like multinational
corporations, international governing bodies like the World Bank and
the United Nations, and international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) providing development aid, charity projects, and forums for
political action.

I've been thinking a lot about this hypothesis. At first, I thought
that in Nicaragua, at least, I was seeing exactly the reverse. I
noticed that the government is seen as responsible for solving most
group problems, even when in my opinion, the government couldn't
really do much about it. For example, last year there was an
encampment set up in Managua, the capital, of people who had been
injured or poisoned by pesticides applied on banana plantations owned
by a U.S. based corporation. The pesticides applied are illegal in
the United States, I don't remember right now whether they are illegal
or not in Nicaragua. Through the protest, the people were petitioning
the government of Nicaragua to get the company to do something to
recompense them for their injuries. At the time, the company had left
Nicaragua. I'm a little vague on these details and may have got some
of them wrong. But both then and now, I was really unclear what the
government of Nicaragua could do to pressure a foreign company. (I
think it was eventually resolved, after the people had been protesting
for over a year, by the government giving them money.)

Another example: this last May, a group of eye surgeons came from the
U.S. and provided a bunch of people in Nicaragua with cataract
surgeries. But something went wrong—either they didn't follow
sterilization procedures, or were using expired medicine—and a number
of the patients got infections and were blinded. The commentary in
the newspaper was not saying that the NGO should make amends, but
rather that the government should provide the people with pensions and
make stricter regulations for foreign medical brigades in the future.

All this sounded at first to me like the government's sovereignty may
be weakened by these foreign actors, but that it has not lost its
legitimacy in the eyes of the public. But now I'm beginning to
wonder. People are very aware that the government of Nicaragua does
not have unlimited funds, and many are aware that it has strict limits
placed on its actions by its international creditors. But an
important role of a good government, as many people have told me, is
to cultivate international donors and get them to bring development
projects to the people. That is, although the government itself
doesn't have the cash, it is seen as doing a good job when it channels
cash from a presumably vast supply outside of the country.

But people talk a lot about government corruption as a huge problem.
I don't know myself how wide-spread corruption is in the government,
and it probably would be impossible to quantify with any accuracy.
But people here have the perception that it's very wide-spread, and
that a lot of the aid which comes to the country does not get properly
channeled through the government to the people, but rather stays in
the pockets of government officials.

Given this, people logically begin to think that it would be better to
go directly to the source, and not have the aid filter through the
government. (Which is why my presence is so symbolically charged: I
am a Unitedstatesean and am seen as a representative of the place
where a lot of the aid comes from. I am seen as a direct link to the
source.) And this therefore undermines the legitimacy of the
government. But it doesn't look like the government is being
undermined by outside forces—rather, it looks like the characteristics
of the specific government itself are causing the problem, and if it
would only shape up, it might become legitimate again even in the
current international climate.

-Carrie

P.S. I am not going to take credit for coining the word
Unitedstatesean, but I do really want to get it incorporated into
common usage in English. After all, Nicaraguans are just as much
Americans as any gringo! Ten points and a cookie for the person who
writes the best set of lyrics for a patriotic song using it. ("I'm
proud to be a Unitedstatesean" …my meter is a little bit off.) And if
you then get rich from the royalties, all I'll ask for is a footnote
on the album liner. And 1%.

P.P.S. I've recently become aware that a fellow doctoral student
researcher named Noah Enelow also has a blog about coffee and fair
trade. He's starting his research soon down in Peru, and his blog is
at: http://fairtradecoffeeinperu.blogspot.com. It sounds like for
now, at least, he's much more directly focused on fair trade than I
have been, lately. Good luck, Noah!

Dignified Earning or Paternalistic Manipulation?

Hi Everybody,

So I've been thinking about the ways that a single development aid
program can be interpreted in very different ways among recipients and
donors. This is connected with earlier entries I've made here about
charity and morality, although I'm going off in a different direction
today.

Like I've said before, in the U.S., the recipients of charity are
highly stigmatized. It's pretty common to hear people talking with
the assumption that if you're accepting charity, there must be
something wrong with you—you're lazy, you're disabled, you're mentally
ill, you're otherwise somehow less than a fully functioning adult. It
is assumed that self-respecting people want to get off charity as soon
as possible. You can reference the welfare reform debates in the late
90s if you want more on this.

Because of this, there has been a change in the fashion of how to
design a charity or aid program. This change has occurred probably
over the course of the last 15 to 20 years. So many charity and
development aid programs today are designed with the idea that giving
lots of money with few conditions will do more harm than good in the
long run, fostering dependency and a "culture of poverty". Programs
are set up so that recipients will not sit back and be given things,
but will rather have the opportunity to earn aid. For example, here
in Nicaragua it is common for an NGO to donate building materials, say
for a school, leaving the actual construction work to be done by
members of the recipient community.

This all sounds great, given the assumption that self-respecting
adults do not want to accept charity. However, in Nicaragua, like
I've written before, I've found that there is less stigma attached to
the idea of accepting charity. Need—like hunger, or poverty—is
accepted as a legitimate reason for giving and accepting money, food,
or development aid.

People here recognize that aid programs are changing. People have
been saying things like "Before, the programs came and helped us more
freely. They gave us tools and seed to plant and food so we had the
strength to work. But today, the programs come and have all these
strings attached. When they give us things, we have to pay them back
with interest, even if the crops fail. They make us go to lots of
meetings and talk about things that aren't important. We have work to
do!" (This is not a direct quote, but all these statements have been
made to me, sometimes by different people at different times.)

Further, these programs come with agendas. For example, a single
organization that works in one of the communities where I've been
working has groups (and therefore meetings) about making gender
relations more equitable, about environmental conservation, about
agricultural diversification (growing more types of crops), and about
improving the productivity of small farms. The program about
environmental conservation, for example, provides credit to construct
coffee processing systems in which the waste water will not run into
the rivers. It also occasionally donates tools or provides credit to
buy organic fertilizer. It also holds trainings and meetings on the
importance of environmental conservation, talking about things like
watersheds, species diversity, and long-term health effects of
pesticides. In order to get access to the credit and donated
materials, people must attend the workshops and meetings.

I personally feel that environmental conservation and more equitable
gender relations are very important. But these issues seem very
abstract to many of the small farmers I've been talking to, who are
more concerned with making enough money with their next year's crop to
feed their families throughout the year. Species diversity is a
pretty idea, until it means that the rising populations of large
mammals keep stealing the chickens. Producing organically is great,
until the crop yields go down dramatically and the promised increased
prices don't materialize.

This type of program, therefore, instead of seeming like a dignified
opportunity to earn a living, instead seems like manipulation. It
seems like a quid pro quo, in which farmers are forced to parrot the
party line in order to get access to needed aid programs which used to
be given without these conditions. It seems like paternalism—the very
attitude that the programs were designed to combat.

In this context, things like organic certification and fair trade
certification look pretty similar to other forms of aid. The
certifying agencies seem to be saying, we promise to give you this
seal, which will give you more leverage as you're searching for buyers
who will pay a better price for your coffee, if you in turn agree to
be organized in a cooperative, to avoid using this list of fertilizers
and pesticides, to rigorously document all your farm's activities
(this among farmers who are far too often illiterate or barely
literate) etc.

A colleague has asked me whether I see any resistance to these aid
programs and this type of manipulation. I'm not sure whether low
levels of participation in meetings, frequent defaulting on loans, and
widespread very cynical attitudes count as resistance. But I've been
wondering whether fairly frequent embezzlement from the programs might
count as resistance, even if it's not constructive resistance. I've
also been wondering whether even more frequent accusations of
corruption might count as resistance.

And you know what? Despite all this, I haven't given up on fair
trade. I haven't developed a hostile attitude towards aid programs.
I haven't been able to identify a Bad Guy. I really see a lot of
well-intentioned and even idealistic people involved in these aid
programs. I see many (if not all) of the intermediaries who directly
administer the programs as genuinely concerned with farmer well-being,
angry about the problems with the system, and distressed at not having
a better way of doing things. And I see farmers who are concerned
about how to best make a living under very difficult conditions, who
are conscious of being both intelligent and deficient in formal
education, and who resent being treated like children.

What is the solution? I've got no idea. A friend of mine here
generously thinks that a little bit of pointed anthropological
analysis might help. I'm trying to share his optimism as my work
progresses!

-Carrie

politics

Hi Everybody,

Well, it's election season here in Nicaragua. There will be elections
for a new president on November fifth, and the possibility of a change
of government somehow ends up playing a part in almost every
conversation I've been having lately.

There are three major candidates and three or four minor ones. The
two leaders are pretty much tied in the polls, the last I saw, both
getting around 30 percent of the vote, and the third major candidate,
from the Liberal Party, gets about 15 percent. I'm counting the
Liberal as a major candidate because the last three presidents have
been Liberals, although the current president is widely agreed to be
an ineffectual failure and his predecessor is technically a prisoner
(although he's really under a very mild house arrest) for corruption
and money laundering.

The two frontrunners are Daniel Ortega and Eduardo Montealegre.
Daniel Ortega, as you may or may not know, was the president of
Nicaragua from 1979, when the socialist Sandinistas took power after
an armed struggle to oust the U.S.-supported dictator Somoza. Daniel
and the Sandinistas lost power in the elections of 1990, after a
decade of war and hyper-inflation left the country exhausted. Some
people will emphasize the U.S. economic blockade and (illegal but
well-documented) CIA support for the rebel guerrilla groups of Contras
in explaining this loss in 1990. Others talk about mistaken
Sandinista economic policy, the widely-resented military draft, and
governmental unilateralism. Eduardo Montealegre is the U.S.-supported
candidate (although foreign intervention in the elections is
technically illegal), and represents an alliance between a dissident
branch of the Liberal party and the conservative party.

By the way, the word "Liberal" in Latin America means pretty much the
opposite of what it means in the U.S. In the U.S., a Liberal is on
the left of the political spectrum. It is the Conservatives, or the
right side of the political spectrum, especially Neo-Conservatives,
who are currently in favor of unrestricted free trade, the
privatization of state services, and the reduction of the jurisdiction
of government in favor of the supposed economic benefits of letting
The Market solve all problems. In Latin America, on the other hand,
it is the Liberals who want to do these things. The conservative
party in Nicaragua is not politically viable by itself except on a
local level.

So, one really interesting thing about all this to me is WHY people
seem interested in the possible change of government. They almost
always relate it to the direct benefits they themselves expect to
receive, or not to receive, from a given government. For example,
people say things like: if the Liberals win, the candidate has
promised to fix the road that goes to our community; if the
Sandinistas come to power, they will halve the salaries of all the
government officials and put the proceeds into a development bank
which will give us loans at low interest; if Montealegre wins, the
U.S. will send more development aid projects to us; if the Sandinistas
win, the U.S. may cut off aid, but Venezuela, China, and Cuba will
give us help instead. And in this context, aid doesn't mean loans
made to the government, but rather specific projects that will come to
benefit the exact individuals I'm talking to.

Many people are very cynical about the promises politicians make, just
like in the U.S.. Oh, politicians make beautiful promises, but once
they get into office they forget all about us. However, the
interesting thing is that everybody seems to accept the premise that a
GOOD politician would bring projects and direct benefits to the poor.
I've been asking people, especially the cynical ones, what the country
would be like if the politicians kept their promises, or were honest.
And they say, the politicians would be working hard to bring us
development aid from foreign NGOs. They would execute other projects
themselves. And we wouldn't be so poor. Nicaragua would become
developed.

I started out thinking that this sounded very strange and almost
naïve. But lately it's been seeming more and more natural. And I've
been asking myself, what do people in the U.S. want from their
politicians that a proposal for direct improvements to conditions
sounds illegitimate? For example, a politician who promises "job
creation" is absolutely run of the mill. But a politician who
promises the creation of a specific job for a specific someone sounds
corrupt. A politician who is interested in improving infrastructure
sounds responsible and down-to-earth. But a politician who wants to
improve a specific road in his or her specific district is accused of
sordid motives.

Am I right about this? And if so, what makes this distinction
meaningful? Is it that we want our politicians to be impartial, and
not to care about us, specifically? Or do we have so much disdain for
government—the hardy/hearty, independent, self-sufficient frontier
pioneers that we all are—that when we bother to participate in
politics we just pick the guy that we'd most like to have a beer with?
Is this difference connected with my earlier entry about the
differing attitudes towards charity? If in the U.S. there is a lot of
stigma connected with accepting charity, or government hand-outs, do
most people then feel that since they're not planning on accepting
anything from the government, they think it is demeaning or sleazy of
politicians to promise, or even follow through on, specific benefits?

If this is accurate, it strikes me as bordering on delusional. I've
read some fascinating science fiction in which the government is
shrunk to really doing nothing (Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, eg.),
but it is very, very clear that this is fiction. And that it is not a
world that even the most fervent NeoConservative would ever want to
live in. Although it might appeal to some Libertarians (are they
still trying to take over New Hampshire?).

Anyways, here I am, working away, having a good time in general. I'm
getting a lot of interviews done, having some great conversations, and
feeling like I really could probably sit down and write this
dissertation right now, if I weren't so interested to see what happens
next. Of course, that probably means that I'm oversimplifying. Which
is why it's so much fun being an anthropologist.

-Carrie

Commitment

Hi Everyone,

Blah, I've been feeling a little bit sad the last couple of days.
While I was gone in the U.S. during the month of July, there were a
number of big changes in the cooperative I've been working with. A
couple of the officers were removed in a special election, and others
voted in instead. One of the people who was removed is someone I had
been working with pretty closely, and had stayed in his house in the
campo a number of times, getting to know his family. I had considered
him a friend.

When I heard he had been removed, one of my main ideas was to wonder
how to approach him without embarassing him, and how to approach the
new people who were voted in. But I went to see him this week, and he
greeted me just as normal. We made small talk, and I completely
avoided the topic of the cooperative. Until he brought it up himself.

He started talking about the situation, describing it in great detail,
and all about these other projects he claimed to be doing. The
problem is that I know that he wasn't being entirely truthful with me.
This goes beyond people having different perspectives on things.
Some of it was probably exaggeration, and some of it was him
optimistically describing things as already being the way he plans for
them to be soon. But he came across to me as being totally out of
touch, either with the community or with reality, or a little bit of
both. There is another possibility, which I don't really like to
think about, but it's possible. He may have been deliberately
misrepresenting the situation in order to try to stay interesting to
me. To maintain some influence over me. To reinforce a claim over
me.

I have no illusions that this would be because I'm such a fantastic
person that everybody wants me to be their friends, that I'm the cool
kid in junior high and everyone is wildly jockeying just to be seen
with me. There are a couple of things that I think I represent in
this social context. This man knows perfectly well that I don't have
any connections with any NGOs or any development projects which could
bring material benefits to the community. But as a gringa, my
presence symbolizes access to the world of development aid. If I am
staying in somebody's house, it symbolically associates that family in
the eyes of the community with these powerful sources of assistance.
(And I think that despite effort on my part to deny this, most people
in el campo are still not convinced that I'm not part of a development
project. After all, almost all the other gringos who show up and say
they're doing "studies" are doing them as an evaluation prior to
bringing in development aid.) And second, when I have stayed there
overnight, I have given them a little bit of money. I really hate to
think that the small amount I gave them (about $8.50 per night) has
made a big difference in their economic situation, but I'm afraid that
it might be true.

It terrifies me to think that I may have inadvertently caused people
to depend on me. That they may have been making plans based on the
expectation that I will continue to be a source of income. And I
don't know why I feel so strongly that this is a scary thing. I think
it goes beyond wondering if I have anything personally to be ashamed
of (have I mistakenly misrepresented myself, or said anything which I
should have known was ambiguous??) I think it's about the whole idea
of dependence.

Making commitments is not inherently scary to me. I got married on
the young side, right out of college, and even at the time I wasn't
freaked out thinking about the commitment part of it. I've been lucky
enough to have had in my parents great role models about how to do the
work required to be part of a couple. I feel like it is a beautiful
and natural thing for people to be strongly committed to groups,
whether they are a family or a group of friends.

Maybe what is scary has to do with the fact that I'm only in Nicaragua
for a year. It's not like I'm moving here for the rest of my life.
Any commitments I make will have to be temporary. Or very
long-distance. And this is not a terribly natural state of things.
(Listen to the anthropologist talking about how things are,
"naturally"! I would be laughed out of a graduate seminar.) What I
am scared about is making promises that I won't be able to keep. And
making more than superficial friends, with all the mutual favor-doing
and relying-on-each-other which that involves, feels like making
promises. So am I saying here that I'm scared of making friends?

This entry has gone in a bit of an unexpected direction. I started
off being sad about a friendship which isn't working out, and maybe
wondering if this was part of the nature of doing ethnography far from
home. But I think I've ended up revealing my perfectionist tendencies
a little bit too clearly. If I make friends, we have to be friends
FOREVER! If I have relationships with people, they have to be
PERFECT! And if I can't achieve that, I just won't have any friends
or relationships. Hmph. But this is so silly. Even families under
the best possible circumstances are always changing—people marry in,
other people get born, people die. There are fights and feuds, and
significant others and fictive kin (friends so close that you include
them in the "Dear Family" emails.) So why should I feel like my
friendships should be so pristine? The best we can ever do is just
muddle along, trying to do more good than bad.

Course, all this doesn't necessarily help me figure out what to do
about this man, and especially his family (stop talking to them
altogether? try to be good friends with them still? still stay in
their house? stay in a different house? just never stay overnight in
that community any more?). But it makes me feel a little bit better
about things, anyways.

charity and perceived alternatives

Hi Everybody,

Well, I've got two questions for anyone who's reading this. It's
multiple choice, and you can respond either to my email address or in
the comment section here. I'd also love to hear thoughts and reasons
why you answered as you did, if you feel like it.

Here are the questions.

1) If you were hungry and had no way of getting food besides the
following choices, would you rather (A) mug somebody with a knife in
an alley to get money; or (B) ask people on the street to give you
money?

2) If you were poor and had no way of getting money besides the
following choices, would you rather (A) break into a big house where
you were sure nobody was home and there was no burglar alarm and steal
things to sell; or (B) apply for welfare?

Have you decided what you're going to answer yet? Okay, now I'll
explain why I'm asking.

I think that here in Nicaragua there are two ideas about charity which
are in conflict. One is very familiar to those of us who live in the
US: accepting charity is a fairly shameful thing. Accepting charity
implies a confession that you have failed in some way—that you are not
able to get or keep a job, one of the ways that United Stateseans tend
to measure personal worth and dignity. (This is why some feminists
have been so anxious to dignify "homemaking" as a legitimate,
challenging job, for example.) Accepting charity also puts you in a
certain moral danger of becoming dependent on that charity, of
stopping to try to work, of becoming lazy. Here in Nicaragua, there
is a popular saying, most frequently repeated by NGO employees, which
means something like, "When somebody gives us something, we take it
and have a party with it" (in contrast to what we earn ourselves,
which we put to constructive use.) It rhymes in Spanish and is much
more catchy. It is this idea about charity which brought us the idea
of the "deserving poor"—some people are poor because they can't help
it (they had an accident and weren't insured, they have a disability,
they were victims of a natural disaster), and therefore they deserve
help in getting out of it. Other people, the undeserving poor, are
poor because it's their own darn fault (they're lazy, they're sexually
promiscuous and so had too many kids, they're wasteful, they're
addicted), and they don't deserve our help.

This is in contrast to a second idea about charity which people
sometimes talk about, which feels very unfamiliar to me. According to
this idea, charity is not as stigmatized, and need does not imply
blame. If somebody is poor, they should be given charity. I have
been startled a couple of times by the respect with which people treat
beggars. In the house in el campo where I've stayed a number of
times, a homeless woman with two small children sometimes stops in to
beg. She is given a seat in the house, her children are allowed to
run around, and she is brought a glass of water, a cup of coffee and
some bread, or sometimes a plate of beans and a tortilla. She may
stay an hour or two. She is possibly mentally ill, and people have a
couple of times indicated this to me with gestures, behind her back,
but nobody ever tries to kick her out. I have seen this happen in the
city, too. Once when I was going to look at a room I was thinking
about renting, I was inside the house chatting with the owner, an
elderly widow. Another woman, a stranger to the owner, knocked at the
door asking for coffee. The owner gave her a seat, a cup of coffee
and some bread, and a couple of coins. I had finished talking about
the room, but all three of us sat together talking in the living room
until a heavy rainstorm passed. One final example, which was very
surprising to me at the time: during an interview, a man was telling
me about some men he knew. They're drunks, all they like to do is
drink. And they support themselves by asking for money on the street.
But they would never steal from anyone, they're very honorable men.

There is another popular refrain which means "it's better to ask for
charity so that you don't have to steal," which I associate with this
second idea. The thing that's interesting to me about the refrain is
that there are only two alternatives posed—asking for charity or
stealing. This implies to me a view of the world, probably pretty
realistic around here, that when you're down on your luck, it's not
easy to just go out and find work. There is an astronomical level of
unemployment, and most unskilled labor (agricultural labor, I'm
thinking) earns 20 cordobas a day, or about one dollar and 18 cents at
current exchange rates. And this is only available to most people
during the coffee picking season, mid-November through February.
We're now in the "time of silence", when there is almost no work to be
had if you don't have land and you don't have a permanent job. So…
people don't blame other people for being poor, and there is less
stigma attached to asking for or receiving charity.

One thing I've been asking recently in my research is… what do the
existence of these two different sets of ideas mean for interactions
between charities and rural beneficiaries? Does it cause bad feelings
and misunderstandings on both sides? Does it increase the sense that
work by non-profits, which is seen as charity or aid by its United
States funders and probably by most of its workers as well, is seen by
the beneficiaries as a business which has ulterior motives besides
just helping them?

Maybe in another blog entry I'll write a moderately blistering
indictment of all the ulterior motives which non-profits working in
this area do apparently have. But this one is getting a little bit
long, so I'll sign off now.

Looking forward to hearing what you have to say!
-Carrie

zero sum game?

I want to respond a little bit about this comment. I certainly don´t
want to argue that technology does not and could not make a difference
about the total amount of goods being divided up among people of the
world. Goodness knows that the agricultural technology that was
introduced in the 1970s, which made possible a doubling and tripling
of the yield of many food crops, would be enough to clinch any
argument about that. But I also don´t think that the changes we´ve
seen over the last couple hundred years are enough to invalidate a
hypothesis of zero-sum.

Picture the world economy as a single system, within which goods and
people circulate. Picture it being subject to entropy: it tends
towards a state of even distribution of wealth. However, due to the
application of energy via more or less coercive economic/political
relationships, most of the wealth flows to just one part of the
system. (There are a number of problems with this metaphor which I
won´t go into now.) Another dynamic of the system is that there is a
constant demand for growth in the rich parts of the system. There are
two ways this can happen: first, more wealth is taken from the poor
parts, leaving them even poorer. Second, the total area encompassed
by the system grows.

This system has only recently reached its current size. Preiously,
say 600 years ago, the "world economy" may have only encompassed the
metropolitan centers of Europe and the Middle East. During this time,
there was less total wealth encompassed by the system, so although the
rich centers were rich compared to the poor ones, they weren´t all
that rich compared to current standards. Over the next centuries,
however, as technology improved (under the favorable conditions of the
concentration of wealth in the rich places) more and more places were
incorporated into the system, partially due to the application of that
technology. Now the wealth is still flowing towards the rich parts,
but there is a lot more of it, so the rich parts are better off. And
technology is advancing even faster.

What´s the difference between now and a few hundred years ago? We´ve
hit limits in two directions. First, there are very very few places
left on this planet which are not incorporated into the world economy.
(Nicaraguan peasants, for example, are very very completely
incorporated. That´s a big reason why they´re so poor.) So since the
system is still demanding growth (read stock market analyses if you
don´t believe me) the only alternative is to get more and more wealth
from already-incorporated places. And there are limits to this sort
of thing. Even if it doesn´t provoke a revolution which directly
opposes the rich countries, people die out... from plague (think HIV),
or from other, easier-to-fight wars (think the Congo), for example.
Second, we´re rapidly approaching an environmental crisis, if we
aren´t already in it. (My husband´s uncle and aunt strongly recommend
a book called The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler. I haven´t
read it yet myself, but I very much respect their endorsement.)

Frankly, I think that the one way we could really get out of this
without a total break with the system (which would probably involve a
lot of human death, unless we´re way luckier than we deserve to be),
is space colonies, both to increase the area encompassed by the
economic system and to have an environmental safety valve. So maybe
I, too, am a believer that technology can be a way out.

In any case, now that I´ve made myself sound like a total radical, I
want to say that I´m not a nihilist, I´m not terminally depressed
about the immediate future of the human race, and I don´t rule out a
non-violent solution. I´m not arrogant enough to think that I can
forsee what will happen in the next 100 years. I just firmly believe
that we won´t be able to proceed the way we´ve been going on.
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" -Antonio Gramsci

voluntary simplicity

July 25, 2006

Dear friends and family,

I'm typing this entry from the plane as I fly back to Nicaragua after
about a month in the U.S. I visited family, got an old friend
married, and accompanied Tom as he started his clinical rotations
(during the third year of medical school they send the students into
the hospital wards to experience the nightmare-ish schedule and begin
to learn how to do doctoring.)

As I expected to, I had a lot of culture shock on my return.
Fortunately, this is a familiar thing for me, so I knew what to
expect. When I get culture shock, I alternate between intensely
loving and intensely hating the things that are different. I love hot
water from the tap! I hate cars and the lack of alternative
transportation! I love the wide variety of food! I hate how much
stuff people feel they need!

It is perhaps this issue of overconsumption that I have continued to
think about most after getting over the first couple of days of the
emotional rollercoaster. The amount of spending and using up of
resources that we do in the U.S. is both environmentally and
economically unsustainable, even if we are the only ones who do it.
(The least controversial reason why it is economically unsustainable
has to do with the huge amounts of debt that we currently take out to
maintain our levels of spending.) And the object of development
programs, even sustainable development programs, is to raise the level
of consumption of poor countries up to that of the U.S. The idea of
reducing the consumption of rich countries is never on the table in
any powerful forum, although you do hear about it in alternative
venues like the World Social Forum (which meets at the same time as
the World Economic Forum).

Why do the policy makers of the world continue to pursue such
unsustainable strategies? I think it has a lot to do with the scale
that they think on. Mainstream economists and policymakers think on
the level of the nation-state: the economy of the United States or
the economy of Nicaragua, for example. They might also think in terms
of the economy of a particular sub-region, like the economy of New
Hampshire or of Matagalpa. But they almost never think on the level
of the world economy. From the perspective of the nation-state,
economic development looks possible and attainable. Taiwan and
Singapore recently moved from being poor countries to being rich
countries via a process of economic development beginning with export
assembly manufacturing, for example. So why not Nicaragua?

Anthropologists in the theoretical tradition that I belong to, on the
other hand, tend to think on the level of the world economy (maybe we
have this luxury because we are not often called upon to participate
in economic decision-making.) From this perspective, we see that the
system, as it is set up, depends on their being both rich countries
and poor countries. (Where were your clothes made? Do you think they
would have cost the same if they'd been made in your hometown in the
U.S.?) We see that yes, Taiwan and Singapore moved from being poor
countries to being rich ones. But this doesn't much matter to the
system as a whole, because there continue to be plenty of poor
countries, so we're not destabilized. But wealth seems to be, in the
long term, a zero-sum game. From this perspective, I can understand
the efforts of any given poor country to compete with other poor
countries and try to get out of poverty. But the efforts of the World
Bank, for example, which has the mission to work for the development
of ALL the poor countries in the world within the confines of the
current system, seem futile at best, hypocritical at worst.

This is all very disempowering and depressing. Sure, even if it's
true that our wealth depends on the poverty of others, what should we
do about it? Even if we gave up all worldly possessions, the world
economic system would stay the same, right? Well, I've been feeling a
renewed commitment to lower my consumption levels, for example
thinking about how we might be able to avoid acquiring a car when we
move out of New York City (it's easy to be an environmentalist when
the subway system is way easier than driving anyways). Maybe our own
efforts won't make any difference at all, but I feel like it's at
least a morally defensible position. And it's also comforting to find
that we're not the only ones in the U.S. thinking along these lines:
www.voluntarysimplicity.org is one example (if I'm remembering the URL
right—I'm on a plane and can't check. If this is wrong, try googling
"voluntary simplicity".)

Ursula LeGuin has a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas" which I first read in a high school literature text book, and
I think it's very relevant to the current discussion. It's only four
pages long, and I would absolutely love for everybody reading this
entry to read the story, if you haven't already. I found it a while
ago in a number of different places on the internet, so I assume it's
in the public domain. You can read it by clicking here
http://teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu/crawfor/apcg/Unit1Omelas.htm .
And let me know what you think.

-Carrie

Nicaraguan Tourism

Hi Everybody,

 

Well, predictably, since Tom showed up on May 30, I’ve been really busy with things that I’m observing at the cooperative.  In consequence, Tom has spent a lot of time in the hammock, reading, practicing his guitar, and wandering around Matagalpa on his own.  We got away for a mini-vacation last weekend, though, going to the beach and to Granada, Nicaragua’s “backpack Mecca”, according to my guidebook.  It is a beautiful little city, and we had fun hiking and paddling around an archipelago of the enormous Lake Cocibolca in kayaks. But as obvious tourists (tall, light-skinned, wearing good shoes and talking with funny accents) we were treated with obvious kid gloves.  Restaurant owners shooed beggars away from us, and there was even a pretty heavy presence of police with “policía turística” (tourism police) written on their uniforms.  We saw them inspecting restaurants, and we felt safe in assuming their main job was not to keep the tourists in line.  At the beach at San Juan del Sur, I’m not sure we saw any Nicaraguan-born people—our hostel was full of these incredibly tall, incredibly tanned, incredibly blond surf gods and goddesses.  When we feel like going to the beach again, I’ll probably search out a much less-touristed place, even if it means less convenient transportation. 

 

Transportation for the two of us, unfortunately, hasn’t been made any easier by my motorcycle.  I had a mechanic lower the shocks so that I could more easily reach the ground, but this has made it so the poor thing can’t really handle the weight of the two of us.  So Tom patiently folds himself into the seats of the fleet of underpowered second-hand United States school buses that makes up the bulk of the public transportation in the country.  I really love these buses, actually, despite the many discomforts.  Most of the time, the new owners have made a lot of modifications—luggage racks are welded onto the top for bulky bags and agricultural products, a radio and speakers are installed, a handle runs down the ceiling over the center aisle, and there are usually racks above the passenger’s heads for smaller bags.  They almost always have air horns.  The outsides of the buses are often painted, with the bus’s usual destinations prominent on the front and back, and there is usually a name, either of the bus or of its driver, or a phrase saying things like “God Bless this Bus and its Passengers.”  Some bus owners also decorate the insides, with colorful fringes across the top of the windshield, cloth seat covers, and ribbons wrapped around the steering wheel, door-opening lever, and inside luggage racks.  In this way we lurch around and through the potholes, passengers crowded together clutching children, bags, and the occasional chicken, Reggaeton dance music blaring, ribbons swinging.  On steep hills, pedestrians sometimes outdistance us. 

 

Hmm, I actually intended this entry to be about the organic certification inspector, whom I observed for two days last week.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to post about him soon.

 

-Carrie

religion in el campo

Hi Everybody,

I spent the last few days up in the campo, but now I'm in the city,
enjoying time off, privacy, and food that isn't beans. Not that I
have anything against beans. But they get old after eating them three
meals a day. I also seem to have caught a cold, so I've been spending
a little bit of time sniffling, feeling sorry for myself, and drinking
tea. Being sick is much less fun when my husband isn't around to fuss
over me. But speaking of Tom, he'll be here in a week! I imagine
that I'll be making less-frequent blog entries when he's around, since
I tend to talk out most of my ideas with him, and writing seems like
more of a repetitive chore than a necessary aid to thought.

The woman I stay with in the campo is very involved in her local
Catholic church. There is a shortage of priests in the area (probably
made worse by the terrible transportation situation), so lay leaders
get designated to be "delegates of the faith" and to lead services,
including mass where they take communion. My hostess is one of these.
In the month of May, the community goes to every house belonging to
church members in the community, taking one day at each house. A
statue of the Virgin Mary is brought, and people gather to sing, hear
a sermon and some readings, and pray the rosary together. It makes
for a busy schedule with several hours every afternoon devoted to this
schedule, but it's only for a month. It's also fun to gather and
sing—these gatherings are not seen as burdensome. An interesting
thing for me about these ceremonies is that they take place in every
house, including the poorest. (Probably I caught my cold germs from
gathering with forty other people into any of several 10 ft by 10 ft
dirt-floored, poorly-ventilated rooms for two hours.) Those who can
afford it provide food—the owner of one of the biggest farms in the
area gave us a meal of rice, chicken, tortillas, and coffee, while a
more normal thing is to have coffee and sweet bread. Sometimes the
poorest houses don't give out anything. And the food given is always
reported back. If someone didn't go, they will ask the returning
attendees how it was, and these will reply, "they gave us bread and
coffee."

Tomorrow, my hosts will be hosting a rather more elaborate version of
this ceremony, which will last not just a couple of hours in the
afternoon but all day and half the night (until midnight, probably,
they told me, but times are usually wild estimates). They are hoping
to serve both a meal and bread and coffee at different times. I do
not get the impression that they are richer than their immediate
neighbors—they do not have much land, and only a few other
money-making activities, none of which I can imagine produce much in
the way of profit (except, perhaps, for hosting me, and I'm not
predictable). But they are definitely both in leadership positions of
the community. The husband is both the president of the cooperative
and what I guess I'll translate as deputy mayor. The wife is a leader
in the church, like I said. They both have wide family networks
throughout the community, and live centrally, where people are
constantly dropping in to visit. So it's interesting to think of this
family as working on a project of consolidating these leadership
positions, and this ceremony as a part of that project. When I go
back (I'm going to the ceremony, assuming my cold doesn't get worse),
I'll ask them about how and why they decided to host it.

Not everybody in the community is Catholic, however. There is also a
significant minority of Evangelical protestants. This is common
throughout Central America, where Protestant churches have put in a
lot of evangelizing effort in the last few years—I've read that in
some places in Guatemala, for example, the Protestant population has
reached fifty percent.

I had an interview with an Evangelical leader on Saturday, and he was
anxious to understand my own religious affiliations. This is a
complicated and awkward question for me to answer. Religion is
important here. Atheism and non-church membership, which are seen as
approximately the same thing, are interpreted as symptoms of despair
and nihilism. I am neither an atheist nor a nihilist, but I am not an
official member of any church right now. However, I feel that
organized religion, or its equivalent (such as being a Red Sox fan?)
is a necessary and beautiful part of the human condition, and I both
respect and enjoy it. Really, I very much agree with some of the
Catholic thought I've been hearing, for example about loving your
neighbors as a necessary part of achieving salvation, and the way that
the church, which they worship (at least sort of), is the same as the
group of people that make up the church.

I was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, and suppose I still am one
(it would be hard to disidentify with a religion which tells you to
seek your own truth, even if I wanted to). So I answer any questions
about religion by describing UUism, and don't mention that I don't go
to any church on a regular basis. I say it is a Protestant church,
but not Evangelical, and to my knowledge there aren't any in
Nicaragua. (If somebody knows that there are UU congregations here,
please don't tell me!) So while I'm here, I go to churches where I
have friends. This statement has gotten me invitations to the
Evangelical church, and I think I'm going to try to make a point of
going this Sunday, if I can, both from curiosity to see what it's like
(will there be speaking in tongues?), as a way to get to know some of
the Evangelicals better, and as a strategic move to send a message
that I'm here with the whole community, not just the Catholics.

Finally, I want to tell those of you who remember me in my squeamish,
vegetarian days that I was in the kitchen when my hostess brought in a
dead strangled chicken, feathers and all, and watched her make soup.
I then ate that soup without a qualm, including using hands and teeth
to get the meat off the bones. The next day, I watched the chickens
run around in the yard with the same amount of enjoyment as yesterday.
Aren't I a big girl!

-Carrie

How´s the weather?

Hi Everyone,

During the dry season in Nicaragua, it is hot during the day, even up
in the mountains of Matagalpa. But the heat dissipates after the sun
goes down. Sometimes, while sleeping, you might even wish for a light
blanket. Once the sun comes up, you have a few precious hours of
coolness and mist to get things done. The mist burns off and it
starts to really warm up before noon. It is dry and a thin film of
gritty dust covers everything. A conscientious Nicaraguan housekeeper
mops about twice a day, it seems like. (I am not a conscientious
housekeeper!)

I have had to be careful during the dry season—it is not humid, and my
sweat evaporates instantly, so I don't notice the bright sun so much.
I have only been saved from sunburns a couple of times because I
always wear clothes that cover my shoulders and legs—both because of
insects and because of the ubiquitous, monotonous, masculine
commentary.

The last week or so, on the other hand, it has been hotter and humid,
starting earlier and lasting later. There has been a sense of
building meteorological tension. Last week, half the sky was filled
with bright stars, while the other half was flashing with silent,
spectacular cloud lightning. There have been more ants
around—according to my landlord, they have been busy storing up food
in anticipation of the rains.

Farmers, too, have been waiting for the rain with mounting tension.
As the dry season wears on, the earth gets browner and browner,
dustier and dustier. The number of flowering bushes gets fewer. A
small coffee farmer almost always grows other crops, like corn, beans,
and potatoes, sometimes for household consumption, and sometimes also
to sell. But no crops can grow without irrigation, and the only
places with irrigation are the big haciendas, or down on the plains.

Today, finally, it rained. It was the release of a tension that had
been building for weeks, like shattering a glass jar on a tile floor
after hours of swallowing frustration, like the shock of swallowing an
ice-cold drink after a day of physical labor in the dry heat.

It rained at first gently, a misting sprinkle that warned people to
find shelter, then a little harder, so the gutters started to flow,
and then pounding, rattling the tin roofs, flooding the patio,
carrying away what looked like the top inch of the steep dirt road a
few blocks uphill from here. The electricity went out and I, sitting
just inside the door to my patio, moved my chair back out of the
spray, first by about a foot, and then halfway across the room. I
felt a delicious, almost cold breeze touch my hair where it was still
wet from my sweating under my baseball cap. I watched, fascinated, as
the water rose in the gutter in my hall. I would need a raincoat to
get to my bathroom! Would it also flood my bedroom? But before it
got close to overflowing, the rain slackened, and stopped, leaving my
ears ringing, my patio full of puddles, and my body more relaxed than
it has been for a week. If I were a smoker, I would have lit a
cigarette.

I will be leaving tomorrow for almost a week in the campo. I'll be
going on my motorcycle! This morning I practiced going up the road
I'll be taking, and had no problems. During my practice sessions in
the last week, I've come to feel more and more like I'm in charge, not
the beast machine, and my trip this morning has greatly increased my
confidence to the point where my work, rather than my transportation,
is the main thing I'm thinking about.

Wish me luck!

-Carrie

methods and research questions

Hi Everybody,

It's Sunday night, and for one of the first times since I've been in
Nicaragua, I can't sleep. I've had an exciting day—practicing my
motorcycle and an electrical blow out at my house with dramatic sparks
due to some generator being run next door—but I think I'm awake mostly
because I'm thinking about my research. I've been here almost a month
now. Have I made any progress towards answering my research
questions? Am I heading in the right direction? What, in fact, ARE
my research questions?

I spent a lot of the entire year and a half or so before leaving New
York working on writing grant proposals. During this time, I wrote
many research questions, most of them more oriented towards research
that sounded fund-able rather than questions I thought needed
answering, or that I was interested in researching. I was not worried
about this, maybe because of The Anthropology Fieldwork Mystique.
This Mystique goes something along the lines of: nobody ever starts
out with the same questions that they end up answering. The best
research findings come about by accident, luck, and maybe an ineffable
talent on the part of the researcher—certainly nothing to do with
methodical, plodding work. The plodding work is what you do until
you're hit with the good luck, or the inspiration. I've written
before about a different aspect of this mystique, that of the total
denial of self in fieldwork, and how much I reject it. But I seem to
have fallen a bit into this other aspect of the Mystique.

Towards the end of my grant-writing process, I came on a set of
questions that was both interesting to me and possible to write up as
a proposal. These questions had to do with whether fair trade
certified cooperatives, or maybe cooperatives in general, were likely
to increase or decrease inequality in their local communities. This
seems to me an important thing that I would like to both know and
share with the world. Fair trade as a movement tends to make claims
to the effect that it is promoting more equitable development at all
levels, in sharp contrast to conventional coffee trading, which makes
some people rich and other people destitute. Is this really true? Or
is fair trade not really that different from many other development
projects, which have been shown to often lift a select few up into the
middle class, while imposing arbitrary-seeming requirements on the
majority of the population for the few years while the project is
active, and then drifting away, leaving things largely unchanged, but
more unequal.

In the Nicaraguan context, too, I am also interested in asking about
the viability of cooperatives in general. Although cooperatives, I
think, are in style in international development right now, in
Nicaragua there is a particular historical resonance with this
organizational form. During the decade of the 1980s, under the
revolutionary, quasi-socialist (depending on who you talk to)
Sandinista government, most agriculture was collectivized, either by
creating state farms with de jure collective ownership by the workers,
or by having small land owners join together for the purposes of
collective purchasing and marketing. This latter form was called a
cooperative, and cooperatives are today associated by many with the
military draft, the war, the rationing and shortages, and the
hyper-inflation of that decade. For others, it is also associated
with the sense of new possibilities after decades of repressive
dictatorship, and with the social programs put into effect, despite
the economic hardships: a country-wide rural literacy campaign taught
by university students, universal health care, the redistribution of
unoccupied land, and new mobilization for women's rights. This
memory, or vision, is one of a couple reason why there is a
possibility, at least, of the Sandinistas winning the presidential
elections coming up this fall, despite the many uglinesses of the
candidate, Daniel Ortega. (The heavy-handed threats uttered by the
United States ambassador to Nicaragua about what will happen if Daniel
wins may actually be spurring more people to support him.) I wonder
what it would be like to be here if the Sandinistas actually take
power again? Certainly it would be an accident, or luck, which would
qualify me for a piece of the Mystique.

But I was busy fretting about my research questions. As I was saying,
I'm interested in equality and inequality as affected by fair trade
and cooperatives generally. I'm also interested in some more
conventionally "cultural" questions—like what are the differences in
the ways that charity and aid are seen by United States-eans and
Nicaraguans, and how does this affect their ties formed through fair
trade? And what does it mean to people and the economy in the
Matagalpa area that there is an absolutely incredible density of NGOs
and development projects and aid in this area? (All Nicaragua is not
like this, it's just in Matagalpa and surrounds. The more remote you
get, the fewer NGOs. But around here, after learning that I'm
foreign--usually before I even open my mouth--most people want to know
what organization I work for.)

All right, I've written myself into sleepiness now. Maybe tomorrow
I'll post again with some thoughts on how to actually research these
questions, and an evaluation of how I'm doing.

-Carrie

money and manners

Hi folks,

As I may have mentioned before, there is a big difference in how much
things cost here. When I first showed up, I stayed in a hotel which
charged me 90 cordobas a night for a room with a private bathroom. At
about 17 cordobas equalling one dollar, that works out to about $5.30
per night. If you were really determined, you could probably pay as
much as that for a really good restaurant entrée for one person. A
nice, cheap, filling breakfast will run you about 20 cordobas. The
internet cafés where I get email, read news, and send my blog updates
charge 10 cordobas, or about 59 cents, per hour.

This would make it pretty easy for me to live like a rich person if I
wanted to. And in fact, the way I do live, and the things I have,
pretty much put me into the category of very rich regardless of what I
want. For example, I have a cell phone, and a computer, and a watch,
and of course I have just bought a motorcycle. And people here are
not shy, ever, to anyone, about asking what things cost, or how much
they paid for something. At first this horribly embarassed me, as I
tried to figure out whether to lie, or to wildly justify owning things
(I only have this because it was a gift!), or what, in fact, to do. I
have gotten used to it lately, have stopped trying to lie, and have
acquired a much better memory for prices, out of necessity.

This economic difference has made for some weird and uncomfortable
social dynamics. For example, when I go to a restaurant with a
middle-class family that I am friends with, do I let them pay for me,
as they often insist? (Answer: yes, when they propose we go to the
restaurant. But then I invite them and pay the next time.) When I go
to visit a poor family in the campo, and they bring me a huge plate of
food without asking, do I 1) Try to pay them, running the risk of
insulting them by implying they wouldn't have offered me food if there
wasn't money involved; 2) Bring them some sort of other present, like
meat or pastries; or 3) Just accept the food and not bring it up if
they don't. (Answer: I need to rethink this approach, but usually 1,
and everybody involved gets really embarassed and they reject the
money. Unless I'm also staying the night, in which case a combination
of 1 and 2, but always offering money with lots of awkward protests
until we work out a regular arrangement.)

My first trip to Nicaragua, this was all arranged ahead of time, so I
didn't have to deal with it. But the second trip, when I was on my
own, I started out by insisting on always paying for everything, and
blundered quite a bit. The mistake I made was that although realizing
that I have superior buying power, I didn't realize that to accept a
present, without reciprocating, is to accept a social position of
inferiority. There was quite a lot of anthropological work done on
this, and it seems to be very wide-spread, maybe even universal, in
human cultures.

To understand in an American context: employees receive a Christmas
bonus without feeling a need to reciprocate. Children are not
(usually, until they're adults and earning money) expected to give
their parents gifts which are approximately equal in monetary value to
those they have received. This is because they are in acknowledged
positions of social inferiority. But friends and siblings must
exchange gifts of roughly equal value, or risk generating resentment…
ON BOTH SIDES. If a person gives you gifts of much smaller value than
those you give them, maybe you get annoyed if you are uncharitable, or
maybe you don't care, and feel benevolent and virtuous. But if a
person gives you gifts of much larger value than those you give them,
you are much more likely to feel anxious that they will be annoyed.
You will probably feel anxious to give a bigger gift next time, and
maybe even resentful that they have put you in this position. In some
social contexts without formal political systems, one way a person can
become a leader is by acquiring followers by giving them gifts they
can never hope to reciprocate, thus putting them under permanent
obligation.

So what I have come to realize is that I shouldn't go around paying
for everything if I want to avoid putting myself in the position of
patron and benefactor, socially above the people that I actually want
to be learning from. On the other hand, both some things I can't or
don't want to change about my own position here (stuff I own), and the
positions taken by other foreigners—individuals and institutions—makes
it impossible to get out of that position altogether. Usually, when
foreigners visit the campo, for example, they are there as
representatives of some NGO or other organization which wants to give
things to people and help alieve their poverty. (Have I mentioned
that Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere? Only Haiti is worse off.) So when I say I want to
understand the economic circumstances of the community, I'm following
a well-worn path. Once I understand these circumstances, the next
step along this road is for me to reveal how my group can help the
community. So people tend to approach me with suggestions for gifts I
could give the community, or programs they need. (For example: The
Catholic church in the rural community of El Castillo wants to buy a
piano. It will cost about a thousand dollars. Any brother/sister
church groups out there who want to donate?)

This is made more complicated by the fact that I am trying NOT to do
abstract research without giving back. I have a commitment to
actually attempt to be a net benefit to the cooperatives, either
through helping them connect to outside resources like grants and
buyers, or through doing research they really need. But so far, more
of the former. When I get introduced to third parties, this tends to
get emphasized, and the research becomes an auxiliary to it. So I
sound more like an NGO than ever.

Striking a balance here is really difficult for me so far. But I've
got a while to figure it out!

-Carrie

Fwd: birthday, chickens, motorcycle

Hi Everybody,

My birthday was Monday, and I celebrated by having one incredibly
unproductive interview (with someone who isn't too crazy about me, maybe I'm threatening to his turf?) and by having one very cheerful dinner with some friends. I'm
twenty nine! And for real, not because I don't want everybody to know
that I'm thirty-something! My first prime number age since 23!

This last weekend I spent two nights in the campo, in the house of an
official of the coop. He took me on a short tour of his farm, and among other things told
me all about the approximately million varieties of bananas and
plantains he grows. I also got to have some really great conversations about the local circumstances, the history of the area, etc.

I think the thing that makes it most obvious that I'm not from around
here... besides the fact that I'm tall (no, I'm not kidding) and blond
and have a funny accent... is that I'm just hypnotized by the
chickens. In the campo, and also sometimes in the city, but not so
much, chickens wander in and around the people with a wonderful
freedom. Floors are dirt, and so when it's time to feed the chickens,
for example, people just throw a handful of corn down on the floor.
The chickens rush in and gobble it up. And most of the time they just
wander around and underfoot, unregarded. Chickens are silly! I like
the baby ones best... they run around in groups so they look like a
fast-moving liquid. Awkward adolescent chickens, especially the ones
with the bald, featherless necks, are maybe the funniest. They squawk
the loudest and jump the fastest when someone shoos them away. And
the handsomest ones are the roosters, with big red combs, striding
around calmly. Other animals hang around with the same freedom:
dogs, pigs, sometimes cats. And at a meeting I went to last week, two
children drove large calves through the meeting room as it was
breaking up. The horses and adult cows don't hang out in the house,
thank goodness.

I slept on a cot in the front room of the house. I really like
staying with these people, they're really nice and great to talk to,
but I have a tiny problem with flea bites. I think I must be
allergic, or especially attractive to fleas or something. And I don't
like to bring it up, because I'm VERY reluctant to complain about
conditions, and don't want to do anything stigmatizing. I've heard
that Deet insect repellant can help--we'll see, I'm staying there
again on Friday night. Wish me luck.

And finally... I got my motorcycle! It's going to take some getting
used to--I've scheduled a lot of time in the next week for practice in
controlled conditions before I head out onto the open roads. I also
need to get a mechanic to lower the suspension for me, since it's a
little too high. But it's red! I'm going to try to post a picture of
me on the moto, we'll see if that works.

el campo

Dear readers,

 

Yesterday I took my first excursion of this journey into el campo.  For those who don’t speak Spanish, el campo does not mean “the camp”.  El campo means the countryside—and when you’re speaking about Nicaragua, don’t make the mistake of thinking about the countryside as an idyllic, peaceful place where people are one with nature and sheep frolic to the sounds of an adorable shepherd playing pipes.  (Have the people who write about sheep frolicking ever SEEN a sheep?)

 

El campo in Nicaragua is the place where you will find the deepest poverty.  In the U.S. many people (mistakenly) think of cities as the place where poverty is the most problematic.  But in Nicaragua, people who live in el campo are isolated.  Isolation means no electricity.  It means no telephones.  It means no newspapers.  It means no roads, not even ones where a motorcycle can pass.  We’re talking steep, steep footpaths, and you’d better be wearing your hiking boots because of the mud and loose rocks.  Unless you happen to be a child living nearby and generally do it barefoot.  Isolation means that the nearest school might be 3 hours away… distances are measured in time, just like in the U.S., but in el campo, three hours means three hours walking.  When school is 3 hours away, some children get up very early in the morning and walk.  Alone.  Many other children, too young or too scared or just too tired, don’t go at all.  Illiteracy is way, way too common.

 

My excuse for going yesterday was that I attended the meeting of a cooperative.  This cooperative is a group of coffee farmers, who created this group in order to take advantage of specialty markets like fair trade and organic.  Getting this group together, and helping the members get the certifications, has been a struggle, largely because of illiteracy.  For example, both organic certification and fair trade certification require that each farm keep a notebook with their work plan.  The inspectors want to know how many days they spend doing various chores around the farm—in the case of fair trade, this is mostly so that the farmers can’t buy coffee from non-certified farmers and pass it off as their own to be able to sell it at the higher price.  But keeping this sort of detailed record is a big barrier for people who can’t read.  Some have children who can do it.  Others muddle through, putting Xs in boxes and getting neighbors and extension service officers to help them.  And some give up.

 

This meeting they tried to fill an officer’s position which had been vacant.  But in order to fill it and perform the duties, the person has to be literate.  All the literate people already have officer’s positions, and you can’t hold two positions at once.  They finally ended up recruiting a new soon-to-be member, with the understanding that when he joined he’d have this position.  Meanwhile, the room was chock full of members, sitting silently around the edges.  They weren’t asked, and they didn’t volunteer.

 

I was sitting next to a tiny old lady—standing, the top of her head didn’t reach my shoulder.  (Protein deficiency in childhood causes stunted growth.)  She had a small, brown, wrinkled face and long, long grey hair that she wore braided and pinned up on her head.  During the discussion about the vacant position, she leaned over to me.  “We need someone to come and teach us to read”, she whispered.  “Many people here can’t read—at least, I can’t read.  We need to learn.”  She glanced at my small notebook where I had been scribbling, trying to keep up with what was going on in the meeting.  “Not knowing how to read, it’s like being blind.”  I felt like crying.

 

The cooperatives are doing good work in these communities.  If nothing else, people come together, and this reduces the isolation.  If all goes well, the cooperatives will also help people receive better prices for their coffee, bargaining directly with importers instead of taking whatever price they can from intermediaries.  Sometimes successful coops can bring social services to the communities.  Like someone to come and teach them to read.

 

I’m going tomorrow morning to stay for two nights in a different community in el campo.  I hope to do a lot of talking with people, designing an economic household history survey.  I want to know how a family’s economic situation changes over its life cycle—whether young people start out poor and generally get richer and richer, or whether some people start off a little better off and keep that advantage throughout life.  It’s kind of a complicated set of data that I want to collect, so I’m doing a lot of talking and consulting with people to figure out how best to do it.  It’s probable that some of the information I want will have already been collected in the recent census.  At least I hope so!  Keep your fingers crossed for me!

 

-Carrie

 

****************************

http://carolynffisher.googlepages.com

 

ethnography and self--my defensive manifesto

Hi Everyone,

Well, today's Saturday, and I've got the whole weekend without much to
do, in terms of my research. I've been keeping myself busy around
home, though. I figured out, more or less, how to wash my clothes with
a bucket of water and a scrubbing board. And I got a huge feeling of
satisfaction from seeing my clothes all hung out to dry on the line.
I also have done some work in translating my research proposal into
Spanish, to be able to more easily share it with some professors at
the university in Managua. I'm planning tentatively to make a trip
the second week of May to talk to some of them—I want suggestions and
moral support, and also to do some "networking" and as a courtesy let
them know that I'm here. One of the things about my advisor's career
that I admire and would like to emulate is that he has published many
of his articles in Spanish as well as English and has had a strong
involvement not only in U.S.-based academic debates but also in Latin
America.

I've also done some things to make myself more comfortable in the
house (I feel weird calling it "my house"—I don't want to get too
attached to this place, since I'll only have it for under a year!).
The best thing is that I now have a hammock hanging in the patio. I
hung it up this afternoon, sat down to test it out, and stayed there,
"testing," for almost an hour.

I feel some ambivalence about this house, and about being quite so
comfortable in a place where I'm alone. One classic model for what an
ethnographer does is she goes to a "village", sets up her tent or
moves in with a family, and does her best to become a member of the
"tribe." An important sign of success is when she is "adopted" as a
member of a family or tribe. She does her best to emulate the
behavior and even thought patterns of the people she is studying.
Thus, by an almost mystical act of total empathy and, perhaps,
negation of her own Self, she comes to know the culture with great
authority. This is, of course, a model that has been called into
question in several ways in recent decades by anthropologists, thank
goodness. Maybe I'll talk about them in more detail in a future
entry. But despite this, the model retains a great deal of emotional
authority.

I have attempted a feat like this once before. I spent my junior year
of college in Granada, Spain, living with a family, studying at a
school of the University of Granada, and doing my best to speak as
little English as possible, learning as much Spanish as I could.
Although my conscious objectives were to learn to speak Spanish
better, I came to realize that there is not a clear line between
language and culture. I remember one time I was having a
conversation, in Spanish, with another American student. In the
course of the conversation, I voiced some ugly bigotted joke that I
had heard. When my friend reproached me, it recalled me to my Self
with a shock. It was only then that I realized the degree to which I
had been putting my Self, and certain value judgments which I thought
were pretty close to my core, up for negotiation as part of my project
of learning this language and culture. I'm not going to tell you what
the joke was about, it's still too upsetting to remember, almost nine
years later. There were some very positive things that I absorbed
during that year, too, and I by no means regret the overall
experience. But from that point on, I was more guarded and critical
about what I was willing to try to absorb.

This time, I am not expecting to try to have a totalizing experience
like that. There are a couple of reasons. First, I have a clear goal
in mind this time. I have a dissertation to write, and my
dissertation isn't an attempt to describe culture. I don't have time
and energy to try for a mystical experience of communion. Second, I
am in a permanent relationship. Somebody else has a claim on my Self.
I have a responsibility not to alter it beyond the point where he
won't recognize it. (I know, and know of, so many Anthropologists who
have been through multiple divorces. Is it just statistical, or is it
something to do with the rigors of fieldwork?) Third, I'm just too
damn old to do that again. It's really hard work. By definition it
involves huge emotional highs and lows. I have enough of those in
everyday life anyways, I don't want or need to go seeking them out!
And, maybe, fourth, I actually kinda like who I am right now. Unlike
when I went to Spain.

I do feel ambivalent about this decision, though. Not all
anthropologists will agree that it is a good idea. I've gotten
comments that 9 or 11 months isn't enough time—"you should be there
for AT LEAST a year!!!". But I've made my decision. So there. Hmph.

-Carrie