IEW Reflection
I chose to attend the IEW Event Asia 101: Stories and Secrets to Keep Spirits Away. I’ve always been a big consumer of scary content, whether that be horror films, Stephen King novels, or urban legends. However, I’ve never really exposed myself to horror from this perspective. I thought this would be helpful in destabilizing my perceptions of “Western” horror narrative tropes, and also allow me to learn some new and fun stories.
The session was run by two students who recounted fables and stories of their culture. They were from Japan and China, and decided to split up the presentation by this distinction, which I found interesting. Drawing this back to my original point, hearing these stories made me consider how deeply entrenched Western “horror stories” are in Christianity and religious complexes. Some of the highest grossing horror films of the past decades such as The Exorcist, or The Nun are embedded and reliant upon aesthetics of a Christian world. Though this may be intentional, or not, it still made me consider how our cultural narratives directly influence our view on the world. Though horror stories might be a spooky, fun activity, they’re also intrinsically connected to rituals of death, burial, and the afterlife – things that strongly reflect systems of faith and religion.
One of the speakers spoke about differing processes of burial according to Japanese customs, and according to how “modern” the family is. Funerary rites are very complex and can differ wildly based on a family’s wishes, quite similarly to cultural practices surrounding funerals in the US. These practices were directly involved in ensuring the family members easy passing into the afterlife, a common motif across many cultures. These funerary rites and spooky stories all reinforce one thing, family.
This event offered a lot of fun, spooky, and interesting fables which really made me consider my positionality being raised on folklore founded in Christian themes, morals, and motifs. Although I was exposed to other stories as a young child of course, I grew up in America where traditions like Halloween very subtly reinforce the Christian foundations of this settler-colonial nation.
Odede/Posner Chap. 5-10 Response
“I altered the strategy a bit by using the money I saved from my factory job to give personal loans ot people. Upon receiving a loan from me, a person agreed to simply pay the loan forward, to help someone else start a small business, rather than pay me back. People started barbershops, vegetable businesses, and more. The “pay-it-forward” approach paid off faster than I could have ever anticipated.” (Odede and Posner, 159)
What this book has offered me, past the perspective altering information that will forever impact how I look at poverty and institutional failures, is how and why endemic community organizing is so powerful. NGOs and non-profit organizations can flood Kibera with resources and money, but this often feeds into larger systems of oppression, corruption, and disenfranchisement that are the roots of the multitude of problems discussed in Find Me Unafraid. For instance, a lot of the UN and NGO health clinics simply become enveloped into the vast network of social relations that build Kibera. There is a vast difference between a foreigner, who has no understanding of the rich and complex social intricacies at play within a certain neighborhood or community, coming in to “save” or “help” people, and a native who is aware of the best and most effective methods for improving the daily lives of their people.
Though generalization is often not useful for the understanding of a varied and complex continent such as Africa, there is a long seen sociopolitical context of corruption within many African countries. With such an incredibly resource rich continent, the political history of many leaders taking wealth and power for themselves is all too familiar. Reading about Odede’s efforts to put his money and safety on the line for the people of his community, even when he had opportunities to take advantage of people, was really inspiring. In the anecdote I quoted above, he made the distinction that his loans were “pay-it-forward”. He sacrificed his own money, time, and security so that others would have the opportunity to grow or start businesses, feed their families and more. This offers a stark contrast to aid trucks coming into a “slum”, dumping bags of flour and then leaving. In one instance, there is a particular emphasis on community building through communal agency, and in the other there is a system incredibly susceptible to bad corruption and bad actors. This text has offered me so much in understanding why certain aid does and doesn’t work. It also brought me to recall my previous research into social initiatives like the Black Panther’s breakfast program that grew from a few blocks in Oakland, to a nation-wide movement that was eventually even picked up by the U.S. government for schools across the country. In these instances, it is pure and incredible selflessness that propels these initiatives.
Pathways to Equity – Response
Tourism has been and continues to be a site of incredible economic promise for underdeveloped countries. However, as is clearly displayed in this text, it is often rife with colonial histories and neocolonial processes of exploitation. For these “destinations”, figuring out how to configure the tourism industry where money from foreigners is being directly reinvested into local communities is crucial for sustainable development. However, with the flow of money that is often highly unregulated, tourism often encourages sites of corruption, greed, and exploitation. It is very easy to present aesthetics of a “pure”, angelic landscape for tourists without them having a hint of the extent of exploitation or poverty in a country. In many instances, entire “resorts” are developed rather as compounds – keeping tourists in and locals out. This is harmful for both parties, preventing foreigners from truly understanding a country (and its people) while also preventing locals from seeing any direct benefits from the use of their country’s land. When I was traveling in Guadeloupe, I spent a few nights in the biggest port city of the country named Point-A-Pitre. Here, I experienced this phenomenon of tourism firsthand. Behind the gates of a group of resorts and restaurants, all I could see were White French tourists, sipping on margaritas on white sand beaches. As we traveled into the interior of the island Basse-Tere, beyond the high walls of the resorts, we found a city full of decaying infrastructure, open sewage, and crime. We also experienced incredible vibrancy, kindness, music, and food from the local people who were excited to see tourists venturing outside of the resort gates. The people we met were generous and thoughtful, giving us insight into the island and its many attractions (including beaches only the locals knew!) despite our broken French. This is all to say that no country or nation is perfect, but achieving equity means dismantling systems of exploitation, especially in connection with tourism. The resorts we stayed at in Point-A-Pitre were managed and run by French nationals, foreigners to Guadeloupe. The locals couldn’t benefit from the economic influx from tourism because they had no access to the tourists. Notions of “trickle-down” economics and tourism for people living in the decaying infrastructure of one of the largest French colonial ports in the Caribbean is rather a promise of exploitation.
