One of the things I really enjoy doing while living in another country is taking an art class, particularly in a local craft. Here in Tanzania, batik is one of the most popular art forms. All along the town streets young men hawk piles of batiks to tourists, offering deals of “just 10,000 tsh”. Many of these batiks are simple, black outlines of animals in the Serengeti, backed by sunsets of yellow and orange. A huge industry, these inexpensive batiks are produced en-masse. At the same time, there is a market for high-end batiks that are incredibly detailed and can be as large as ten feet long.
I decided that I wanted to learn how to batik while I was living here. I was introduced to a local artist, Mollel, who agreed to give me lessons. On the first day I met him at his house and was introduced to his wife and three of their children. They were all warm and welcoming, and very excited to meet an American. Over the past two months I have gone to their house and learned how to make simple batiks, but I have also learned so much more.
For my third lesson I showed up at the house around noon. Because of confusion created by the language barrier, Mollel had not understood I would be coming. Instead of telling me to leave, he invited me in to join him and his family for their afternoon. I spent the next three hours talking to them about local culture, life in Tanzania and how the US differed. His wife taught me how to wear the local kanga around my waist and gave me one as a gift. She showed me how she braids her daughter’s hair in tiny rows, while her daughter taught the youngest son how to iron his clothes with an old fashioned iron that is heated with coals. After this day my art lessons became history and cultural lessons as well.
When Mollel does not know an English word, he draws a picture of what he is trying to say and I tell him what it is in English. In this way I help him improve his English and he teaches me about Tanzania’s history through stories about his own life. One of the things I have learned the most about are the Maasai. One of the largest tribes in Tanzania, they are traditionally nomadic pastoralists and have been very resistant to ‘modernization’. One of Mollel’s stories explained how he had grown up in Arusha rather than a Maasai village. When his father was a young boy, he was taken away from his parents by local missionaries and forced to attend school. As a result he became a doctor in town, which is where he met and married a woman from the Chagga tribe. Their children grew up in town and therefore do not have the traditional stretched earlobe that is a traditional Maasai practice. I asked how they stretch the earlobe and Mollel drew a picture of a turtle. The Massai take a piece of turtle shell, put it behind the person’s ear, and slice the ear open in order to insert a piece of wood so as to stretch the lobe. When I jumped at the idea of cutting your ear, he laughed and explained that if I was Maasai I could not do that. Maasai are a strong people and it is unacceptable to show pain during the process.
During another conversation I told Mollel about the Maasai homes I had seen during a safari. He asked me what the houses looked like, so I described them. They are round structures that look like they are made out of cement, with a pointed thatched roof. He laughed and told me these were not actually traditional Maasai homes, that these were what most of them were converting to so as to modernize their lives. He drew a picture of what a traditional home looks like. A low, flat structure, the traditional houses are made by spreading fresh cow dung on a reinforcing structure made of trees. I asked why the Maasai had stopped building their traditional homes, and Mollel explained that with globalization many Maasai have started to lose interest in living in their traditional ways. Besides building more modern structures, they have stopped burying their dead in the traditional practice and many have moved to cities and rejected the life of herders.
My conversations with Mollel have made me wonder about globalization and what we are loosing by the opening up of borders. While we often see modernization as gains, technology to make our lives easier, what is lost? What kinds of cultural practices should be maintained? As I drove down a street the other day I noticed a billboard advertising for a local cell phone company. The ad asked ‘Do you want to get rich? Text ‘r-i-c-h’ and you can win!” The ad pictured an African couple in what could have been in an LA nightclub sipping champagne. As someone whose travel here was made possible in large part by globalization processes, I am in no position to judge, nor do I have the correct answer. But I do have to wonder what Tanzania will look like in another twenty years? Will there still be Maasai in their traditional red blankets herding cows through the hills?
Under the ‘Culture’ section of the Lonely Planet guidebook, it says that Tanzanians are an extremely generous people, who will often invite you into their home for food. Mollel and his family are the epitome of this. Every week they invite me into their home, they give me gifts of mangos and cloth, and Mollel teaches me his craft. In all that might change in Tanzania, I hope this generosity is something they as a people hold on to. It is a warmth that transcends how a house is built or what a person is wearing. Because of Mollel and his family I am leaving Tanzania having learned about East Africa, but more importantly, I have been welcomed into a family not as an outsider, but as a participant.
{ 15 comments }
Hello, My Name is Tina and I’m a Quilter-a-holic. I adore batiks. Is there any way that I could plead for a photo (or 2 or 90) of batiks? They make me swoon.
Well, at the risk of sounding anti-whatever I hope not. Subsistance farming, or herding, is a rough, hard, and largely unpleasant life, and I hope they can get out of it and live better lives.
If someone wants to do it, that’s their concern, but mostly “traditional” means “poverty stricken”, and the reason people give up the traditional ways is because they’re hard, unpleasant, and not at all fun.
I’m as opposed to the homoganized, McDonalds/Wal-Mart/Applebees “culture” that seems to be spreading as the next liberal. But the reason people go for it, in such numbers, is because it is better than the traditional lifestyle. The purely immateral aspects of a culture, some of those I’d like to see preserved (others I’ll throw a party when they die out), but realistically can they be separated from the poverty that produced them?
I’ll agree that its disturbing that as greater wealth comes into a nation far too often the people of that nation rebuild themselves into an imitation of America/Europe, I’d like there to be another way. However, if the choice is between people living poverty stricken traditional lives or becoming yet another America/Europe clone, I’ll take the latter.
Unfortunately, I think, its often difficult, if not impossible, to separate the parts of a culture that aren’t dependent on crushing poverty from the parts that are. Did the Japanese, for example, largely abandon the family sleeping together because a) it was a product of housing too small to let people sleep separately, or b) because they saw sleeping separately as a sign of Westernization and progress? I certainly don’t know, and anthropologists have devoted a large amount of study to that exact question and they don’t have an answer either.
I do know that all the economically successful societies are largely similar. I hope that doesn’t mean that in order to be economically successful a society has to become like all the others, but if that is the case I suggest that its worth the price. I really hope it isn’t that way because I also know that diversity is essential to survival.
Anne, I agree that traditional cultures are changing drastically. One of the anthro courses I teach is on globalization and I’ve thought a lot about this issue. I will admit I cringe a little when we westerners lament the loss of “culture” because it is usually said by people with privilege referencing the modernization of developing countries. I totally feel sad that languages and unique cultural practices are being homogenized but I also worry that the “what are we losing” sentiment can be used to suggest that the Maasai somehow SHOULD be in their traditional blankets herding 20 years from now (not that I think you are saying this). I guess all I mean to say is that we as outsiders should be very cautious when we talk about the preservation or destruction of another culture. Ultimately I hope it will be the Maasai and the Maasai alone who determine the direction of their cultural identity, whether that includes cement housing and cell phones or not.
Course that is separate from a much larger conversation I think we could have about the unsustainable western lifestyle that is being adopted around the world.
Oh and I will second the request for batik photos!
It reminds me of the years-old Onion “point/counterpoint” section:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34159
I think there’s a difficult balance to be struck between resisting the undermining of local economies (especially without an adequate replacement economy) and romanticizing “primitive” cultures. After all, there are myriad European peasant customs that have been lost, but not many of us people of European descent would trade them for antibiotics, clean food and central heating in the winter.
Fizgig, I am very strongly of the opinion that it demonstrates our privilege when we lament the loss of “culture.” What people mean, of course, is “lived culture,” which often conflicts with changing, evolving social systems. Every society has gone through many, many changes over the course of history, including the Masaai. We lose out if we fail to celebrate the ancient cultures and heritages of people around the world, and if we fail to record them for posterity, but how “wild traveller” does it sound to suggest that these people should go on living out on the plains, herding cattle, as the city grows up around them?
It’s paternalistic at best. Those decisions belong to individuals. They aren’t wildlife.
Maasai*
One of these days I’ll learn to read.
Fizgig hits on one very important aspect of our (that is, foreign, most likely Western, privileged in various ways etc) thinking about these kinds of issues. I think a good way to avoid some of the dangerous traps (romanticizing poverty) is simply to remember that 1) All societies change constantly and 2) There is no one right way to change. Modernization is not an all-or-nothing process: the Maasai don’t have to choose between either fossilizing their current way of life into a “tradition” to uphold indefinitely, or adopting US ways wholesale. What’s really important here is to look at the distribution of power involved. To what extent do the Maasai have the power to decide for themselves what happens to their land, their economy, their political structure? Do they have the resources (financial, political, educational) to make changes they wish to make? (Of course we can also take a look at who precisely is making these decisions–there are politics and power struggles within any group. Is there a small elite within the group that is ’selling out’ the others? Are most of the people interested in pursuing the same goals?)
These are very tricky and delicate issues, and I’m not sure it’s even possible to find a perfect balance between being genuinely helpful and being overly interventionist. At the least, we should try to educate ourselves as much as possible, and above all keep ourselves humble enough to recognize that we don’t have all the answers.
Cola, I can’t tell if you are reiterating my point or if you misread my comment and are suggesting that I said the Maasai are akin to “wildlife”?
I agree with JFM entirely that cultural change happens and there is no one “right” path. Just about any western/northern hemisphere intervention into southern hemisphere cultural change is wrought with historical and political implications rarely understood by anyone outside the lived experiences of the people themselves. As a member of the privileged west I envision my “duty” born from privilege is to work to help ensure that all individuals around the world have equal access to full human and civil rights and that everything beyond that is up to the individuals themselves. Of course even that goal can bring about unintended negative consequences….
I think that this is a really complicated issue (obviously, as does everyone else responding, so I’m not even sure why I felt the need to state that. . .)
I am currently a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, a neighbor of Tanzania, and I wrote a post in my lj recently about this issue in Malawi. I think that as privileged westerners there are a couple of things just to be aware of–one is that modernization happens more slowly in the cultures that develop the modernization than in the cultures that adopt it. This often allows time to determine how and what and why and which cultural aspects are to be preserved. Not that there aren’t unintended consequences, because of course there are, but developing the changes just gives a little more breathing room than adopting them does.
The other thing is that I don’t believe that cultural annihilation is necessary for economic growth. But in order for (for instance) the Maasais to see what of their culture is worth preserving to them, they have to have a more realistic view of us. Right now our technology is exported along with our culture and a whitewashed and oddly distorted view of our lives (For a rather silly example, I have a sink in my dining room because apparently all North Americans of any class whatsoever have sinks in their dining rooms). So then it looks like there are no flaws with our system and only flaws with theirs when obviously every culture has problems. Only with a clear picture can people figure out which cultural and technological advancements for which they are willing to pay the cultural price.
One note on “all the economically successful societies are largely similar,” Our economic model has been exported wholesale to many diverse countries with horrible results–which tells me that there must be another possible model out there; my guess is that it’s going to have to grow from the cultures who are going to use it. But I’m not an economist, so I could be wrong.
Sika I’m not an economist myself, but I am a Japanese historian, and I specialize in the Meiji Era (ca 1868-1912), which is the beginning of Japan’s industrialization.
I think Japan is a useful place to look for culture vs. economy vs. cultural annihalation, becuase its one of a very few places that *have* successfully modernized and aren’t European [1]. Actually, I can only think of one other exmaple, and that’s South Korea.
And Japan has a lot in common with Europe, but retained enough Japaneseness that it isn’t a copy of Europe.
Whether that model can be replicated elsewhere I don’t know, but I rather doubt it. There were some rather unusual circumstances surrounding Japan’s rise, as well as the fact that when it started its industrialization process they only had to catch up to roughly 40 years of progress. A lot of places are looking at close to 140 years of progress to catch up to now.
There’s no arguing that the nations which developed modern tech had a somewhat easier time adapting to it, but its hardly as if Europe had a smooth transition or didn’t lose a great deal of its culture. The position of religion in European society was radically changed, in England a large culinary tradition was lost, etc. Which isn’t to deny that the undeveloped nations today aren’t going to have an even harder time, even if they were getting a fair chance economically speaking, which they aren’t.
In Europe the only economic exploitation that resulted from industrializing was native, which didn’t make it better but at least meant the profits stayed semi-local and could be taxed, etc. Today most “industrializing” nations are essentially turning into serfdoms, and the profits aren’t staying local at all.
Unfortunately my study of history tells me that the result of all this is going to be a series of nasty wars, which appears to have already began. Most Americans aren’t even aware of the Second Congo War, which hasn’t actually stopped despite the fact that it “officially” ended back in ‘03. I don’t see it getting better for a long time.
[1] For the sake of not typing “European and/or USA” I’m going to just roll the USA and Canada into “European”, much to the annoyance of people in all three places I’m sure.
when i visited kenya in 1995 (my brother was living in nairobi at the time), they had a saying: “even the maasai are wearing underwear now” the kenyans told me it referred to progress. i still think it’s a funny expression. do they have it in TZ?
I can vouch for the application of this quote in China’s case as a student of modern Chinese history and someone with relatives who lived/are living in both the PRC and ROC. In examining modern Chinese history from the late Qing(late 19th/early 20th century) to the current day, one major theme among both Chinese intellectuals and Western China studies scholars over the last century is how Chinese society and its members have been dealing with “modernization”* and its side-effects. Many Chinese intellectuals over the last century have felt that China has undergone such rapid change over the last century that the people undergoing it have not had enough time to adjust before the next change arrives.
One common theme I keep coming across is how the pining for “tradition” is different depending on who is doing it. With Westerners, it is mainly focused on the loss of physical structures and superficial external trappings meant to evoke the Western tourists’ idea of traditional China. Though this is also lamented among the older generation of Chinese/Chinese traditionalists to some extent, the overwhelming main focus of their pining seems to be the perceived loss of 人情 (ren qing – treating others with basic manners in accordance with humanity.) among the younger generations. I’ve heard such sentiments among Chinese intellectuals in my parents and grandparents generation about all Chinese born in the Maoist system post-1949 as well as younger PRC-born Chinese intellectuals/classmates to describe the Chinese post-Tienanmen “milennials” whom they see as rude, self-centered, spoiled, socially apathetic, and mindlessly obsessed with the materialist consumer culture prevalent in current day China, especially in the wake of the recent economic boom. I’m betting other non-Western societies have had similar such internal conflicts regarding “modernization”.*
* There is some argument as to whether the way the term “modernization” has been used in the Chinese studies discourse is too centered in Eurocentric patterns of development. Though I’ve heard similar sentiments about other discourses in East Asian and non-Western fields, I do not have enough background knowledge to speak confidently about them.
Re: Brad Jackson’s first comment: “mostly “traditional” means “poverty stricken”, and the reason people give up the traditional ways is because they’re hard, unpleasant, and not at all fun.”
Traditional does not really mean poverty stricken. I used to think that was the case, but then I got to know some “traditional” people and they changed my mind.
I lived in Nairobi, Kenya and worked in a little town outside of Nairobi (Kiserian) at a boarding school for Maasai girls from traditional homes. Many of them were runaways or rescued from FGM or child marriage. One weekend one of the girls fathers invited me to come and stay at their home with the family. I took 3 different vehicles, walked 2 miles through the bush, and waded across a stream to where they lived in their dung hut which was about as big as my bedroom. They live by herding goats and cows.
The thing that struck me immediately was how few material things they have. But the thing that struck me the deepest was that when you look closer, they are really not so impoverished. They have enough to eat and they have a strong community in which any family would help the others in a time of crisis. They don’t feel any poorer for not having a closet full of clothes or a nine to five job. In fact they don’t feel poor at all. Which is hard for my western mind to process, becaue they sure do LOOK poor to me.
What would improve their lives is better access to healthcare, education and water, not a different occupation or “way of life.”
I obviously have lots of thoughts on the topic, but I’ll spare you any more of my rambling.
:(
Hi! Can some one tell me about the influence of maasai culture in house designing?? what really makes them adopting the types of houses they are building. if you were you today! would you consider some cultural aspects while designing a house??
Wolud love to hear from you mates.
Comments on this entry are closed.