This course was geared for entering first-year students in the College of Arts & Sciences. 20 students enrolled. The seminar was taught by Bruce Whitehouse of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology.

Assignments

1. Participation (30% of course grade): This was measured through attendance and discussion in the classroom as well as online (through remarks and questions posted via Hypothes.is and Course Site).
2. Unit essay (20% of course grade): Each student chose one of the course’s thematic units and wrote an essay discussing the most important readings assigned in that unit.
3. Case study essay (20% of course grade): Working with one partner, students selected a book from a list of anthropological case studies (see “Other readings” below), read the book, and wrote an essay evaluating the author’s main arguments.
4. Class presentation (10% of course grade): Each student paired from the case study essay gave a 10-minute presentation to the class about the book they read.
5. Final project (20% of course grade): Students used WordPress to synthesize this blog compiling collective guidelines and recommendations for ways to address global poverty and other problems. Students themselves determined the format and structure of these guidelines, and  allocated tasks for completing the project in a participatory manner.

Reading list

Assigned texts (read by the entire class)

• Acemoglu, Daron and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, chapters 3 and 4. New York: Crown Business.
• Beckett, Greg. 2017. “A Dog’s Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 35-45.
• Bornstein, David. 2007. How to Change the World, pp. 1-40. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bornstein, Erica. 2009. “The Impulse of Philanthropy.” Cultural Anthropology 24 (4): 622-651.
• Cole, Teju. 2012. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic website, March 21.
• Dearden, Nick. 2017. “Africa is not poor, we are stealing its wealth.” Al Jazeera website, May 24.
• Hickel, Jason. 2017. “Aid in reverse: How poor countries develop rich countries.” The Guardian website, January 14.
• Holmes, Seth. 2013. “Segregation on the Farm.” In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, pp. 45-87. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Kristof, Nicholas and Sheryl WuDunn. 2014. A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, pp. 33-45 and 118-140. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Lasker, Judith N. 2016. Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Mehta, Khanjan. 2015. Solving Problems that Matter (and Getting Paid For It): STEM Careers in Social Innovation and Global Sustainable Development, pp. 39-54 and 269-271. Self-published.
• Ojomo, Efoso. 2017. “Obsession with ending poverty is where development is going wrong.” The Guardian website, February 8.
• Oluka, Benon Herbert, Chief Bisong Etahoben, Francis Mbala, Eric Mwamba, Selay Kouassi, and Ken Opata. 2017. “How aid helps the rich get richer.” ZAM Magazine website, June 19.
• Polak, Paul. 2009. Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. San Francisco: Berritt-Koehler Publishers.
• Redfield, Peter. 2013. “The Problem of Triage.” In Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders, pp. 155-178. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Schroeder, Richard A. 1999. Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in The Gambia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Sullivan, Noelle. 2017. “International clinical volunteering in Tanzania: A postcolonial analysis of a Global Health business.” Global Public Health website, July 3.
• Watters, Ethan. 2009. “The Wave that Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka.” In Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, pp. 65-125. New York: Free Press.

Films and videos (viewed outside of class time)

• “The problem with the potential solution” with Khanjan Mehta. 13 minutes.
• “Social impact takes a planet” with Khanjan Mehta. 14 minutes.
• “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” with Slavoj Zizek. 11 minutes.
• “The Water of Ayolé” directed by Sandra Nichols. 28 minutes.
• “Poverty, Inc.” directed by M. M. Miller. 94 minutes.

Other readings (selected by pairs of students for specific assignments):

• Kristen Cheney, Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV/AIDS
• Paul Farmer, Infections & Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
• Paul Farmer, To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation
• James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
• Nell Gabiam, The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps
• Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
• Rivke Jaffe, Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution & the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean
• Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders
• Claire Wendland, A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School

We have not been listening to the needs of the poor…

Many times volunteers enter an underdeveloped country without any idea of what they really need. There is poor communication and not enough research done before trying to help. In order to make the most efficient use of resources and time, aid groups need to talk to and understand the people in need. It is so important to put yourself in their shoes because they know best what they need!

Here are some examples of how volunteers have failed to listen up:

• Mosquito nets meant for preventing malaria end up being used for fishing
  • What is one of the most common words associated with Africa? Malaria. So when people want to help in Africa, one of their first thoughts is to combat the issue of malaria. So mosquito nets were created as a cheap way
    to keep mosquitoes away from humans while they sleep. However, many villages found the nets more useful for the purpose of fishing rather than keeping the mosquitoes away.
• Clean cookstoves made to help poor villages
  • New cookstoves were created by aid groups with the intention of burning less fuel and producing less smoke. However when they were brought to villages in India and Africa, the people did not find them useful. In fact, studies have shown there were no improvements in health outcomes nor the amount of wood consumed with these stoves. Therefore, money and resources were wasted on what was thought to be a cleaner and better technology for these communities, but actually failed.

What do we do to change?

Communication has definitely improved, and aid programs have altered their approach to be more beneficial to the communities in need. As Polak wrote, we need to “transform the way design is taught in developed countries to embrace design for the other 90% of world’s population,” meaning that the products designed for underdeveloped countries need to be more specifically tailored to these communities to be as effective as possible. Currently these great ideas being designed are not always necessary for the country. 

TED talk by Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen

The most effective way to help someone is to listen. The first and most important step is to learn what they feel, think, and experience.

“This process involves observing, engaging, and empathising with the people you are designing for in order to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in their physical environment in order to have a deeper personal understanding of the issues, needs and challenges involved.”

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy

Click the quotes to read more about them:

“If we are going to interfere in the lives of others a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.” -White Savior Industrial Complex 

“Universities cannot simply hand over knowledge or discoveries. They must ask what partners need and invite them to co-lead the exploration for solutions.” –Mehta’s Solving Problems That Matter

How To Listen UP!

• Talk to people: ask questions and listen
• Immerse yourself in a community, observe and learn about the way they live — cultural understanding
• Go in with an open mind
• Be prepared to possibly change ideas and designs if they originally are not helpful

The Transformation:

Many groups have recognized the faults in their programs, and they have altered the way they approach these volunteer situations. People are starting to listen more to those in need, for example:

• Students from a university working on a project to help a Guatemalan community linked up with students in Guatemala to effectively communicate through the design process. Each student was paired up to talk to the students to fully understand the needs of the community. (Polak’s Out of Poverty)
• A humanitarian aid group spent 18 months building relationships with partners before even making a plan for the project. They believe this time spent on effective communication will make them on target to achieving their goal. (Lasker’s Hoping to Help)

Grace Gardella and Megan Fennell

Culture is extremely important in the world of humanitarian aid. Most people fail to recognize that culture is never static, that all cultures are different from one another. Most organizations put each country in a “one-fits-all” packaging in that aid in one country will work well in another country. Moreover, ethnocentrism exists as the way one looks at other cultures through the lens of their own culture. As Professor Bruce Whitehouse of Lehigh University says, “If anthropology has taught me anything, it’s that we should always consider, before intervening to help people of another culture, whether they perceive the problem the same way we do.” Being insensitive towards another’s culture fuels a cultural gap, or a “cultural disconnect” (Ethan Watters). It is when cultural relativism – the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself – arises that this cultural gap can be diminished. When the cultural gap is not bridged, volunteer’s efforts can lead to episodic solutions and development. Humanitarian organizations and volunteers who don’t acknowledge the importance of the host country’s culture are unable to evaluate correctly the needs of the host community or communicate effectively with the host community. In order for volunteering in foreign countries to be deemed effective, one must familiarize themselves with the culture they are helping which can generate enduring solutions.

Understanding → A lack of understanding local values through race and religion can impose harmful connotations during the administration of aid.

• Race → Greg Beckett introduced the idea how some Haitians feel as if they are being equated to dogs. Immediately, this connotes how Haitians are being disempowered as they are the recipients of aid “owned” by the donors and volunteers. If a volunteer isn’t culturally aware of the differences in race, he/she creates this power hierarchy, something that is to be avoided when helping those in underdeveloped communities. If one is to be thought of as “below” in the power hierarchy, he/she is in a state of learned helplessness, and this state prohibits one from being hopeful that their physical, social and/or economic state will change.
• Religion → The enforcement of a religion on a community could result in the hosts betraying their own beliefs just so that they could receive aid. Sometimes faith-affiliated organizations would make aid recipients sit through sermons or say prayers in order to get medical help in which most from underdeveloped countries would not seek help at all. Those who turn away from this aid aren’t willing to betray their own beliefs in order to adopt someone else’s, even though they might have desperately needed help.

Language → Language is a manner of communication, and if communication fails, aid fails.

• As Susan Knell, a clinical psychologist, states in her chapter of Khanjan Mehta’s Solving Problems that Matter, “Language includes many cultural values and norms; it is not just a matter of learning new vocabulary and pronunciation. This is true even in English where different English-speaking countries use different words to capture the same idea. Embracing a new language will provide you with insight that will not be available to you if you conduct all your interactions in English.” Even if it doesn’t involve knowing how to carry a conversation directly with someone in the host country, Judith Lasker mentions how one should take the time to learn how to greet one another in the host’s’ culture in her book Hoping to Help. For example, one would greet someone in Thailand using the wai, the act of pressing both hands together in front of them and bowing slightly.
• A prime example of this occurs in Haiti, where locals believe that AIDS is sida, and that people become sick as a result of sorcery. Because of this, they turn to voodoo witch doctors instead of trained medical professionals. Healthcare workers need to be cognizant of this in order to address the Haitians in an educated and respectful way (Paul Farmer).
• Aid fails from miscommunication through language since not knowing a language can even lead to exclusion within the local community. When volunteers don’t know the host country’s language, it excludes locals from participating. Local participation is essential since they are the ones being helped; thus, they need to be understood, talked to, communicated with.
  • In Haiti, some donors don’t even speak or communicate to NGOs in its language, Kreyol: “These groups considered ‘partners’ subsequently critiqued the process for running roughshod, without meaningful dialogue and participation, no mechanisms in place for debate, not enough time for discussion, noting in Kreyol” (Mark Schuller, 161). Communicating in French led to the exclusion of most Haitians in the NGOs, and the distribution of aid came solely from the NGO’s “partners.”

Trust → Distrust can arise from volunteers not knowing a host community’s culture. This unbalance can lead to the volunteers taking over the project and initiative from the locals, which only provokes the absence of local participation.

Unity → When a volunteer understands the culture that they are entering into, they are more likely to be able to relate and effectively interact with those that they are helping. For instance, if a volunteer who knew the language and local customs came to a village, they would typically be more well-received than a volunteer who speaks none of the language and has no knowledge of the norms of the local village. In order for a volunteer or humanitarian group to be unified with those they are serving, they must be able to communicate and interact with those they are helping. Unity and trust go hand-in-hand, because when volunteers are one with the people they are helping, they are less likely to do harmful things to the community.

Respect → It is necessary to be culturally tolerant when helping others. A cultural disconnect can stem due to a lack of respect, which can infer that one isn’t volunteering for altruistic reasons, but perhaps in a more selfish manner.

Experience → The lack of knowing the local language can affect a volunteer’s experience. Professor Noelle Sullivan mentioned how regardless of language, a volunteer is able to “see the delivery of the aid” being implemented, but when one doesn’t know the host country’s language, the volunteer is missing out on learning experiences. For instance, in Tanzania, sometimes relatives would need to help local doctors since they better understand the culture and language than the volunteers. A lack of being immersed into the country’s cultural aspects before visiting can also affect the volunteer as they won’t know the everyday normalities of the country.

• For example, the everyday food eaten may be much different from what the typical volunteer is used to. In some cases, the

  

  volunteer would resort to food they would typically find in their home country, but this defeats the purpose of being integrated into the host community’s culture.

All of these factors affect the way in which aid can be carried out. Focusing in on the host country’s culture can lead to better understanding of situations and experiences that could only lead to more enduring solutions, sustainable development. Learning about a culture can come from a textbook, or through direct experiences. However, just make sure that the organization you work with aligns with the values that you have, and the values in this guide.

FOCUS ON CULTURE, and do so with trust, understanding and respect.

Page by Lexi Harris, Ginger Pojednic and Maggie Perlman

What do you personally think is the most important aspect to culture using our acronym? Take our poll and see what others have to say!

Icons of poverty- and how they mislead us

Why is it important to understand media’s affect on displaying poverty in society? 

It’s crucial that people striving to give back are aware of media’s effect on society’s understanding of poverty. This is so that in a climate where a wide variety of information is published online, people can be properly informed about about current world affairs. As a result, they can come to their own conclusions about what the right ways to combat poverty are.

How are people misled by icons of poverty? 

Entertainment

Movies, songs and other products of media can be created to be sold and to benefit specific charity causes in mind. However, some particular pieces of “charitable entertainment” have become icons of poverty themselves. Their “icon-statuses” have been achieved through constantly being shared and recreated. Although it appears helpful that media of this sort gains pop-culture credibility because it can spread awareness of an issue, deeper investigation reveals that we are mislead – such legacies have the capacity to create more harm than good.

One classic example is the song Do They Know it’s Christmas by Bob Geldof’s Band Aid, recorded to raise money for an Ethiopian famine which unfolded in 1984.

Another version was recently released in 2014, which shows how enduring this song has been as an icon of charity.

For many, Christmas marks a season of giving, and charity aligns with this concept. But what makes this song misleading?

1. It makes generalizations of African people as a whole. Not only is a significant portion of the African population Christian, but there is no reason to assume that most Africans are unaware of the holiday just because some areas of the continent are dominant in other religions.
2. It’s demeaning. The lyrical content of “Do They Know it’s Christmas” revolves around the illusion that Africa is a place “where nothing ever grows,” where “the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears.”
3. It perpetuates a “White Industrial Saviour Complex.” The lyric, “throw your arms around the world at Christmas time” perpetuates the notion that we can “save them” simply because of our cultural context.
4. Those who buy the song in support don’t know how this money is being used. The song deserves credit for bringing the world’s attention to a particular issue and raising money for NGOs that did save lives. However, critics of Band Aid argue that “it may have contributed to as many deaths.”

These are only a few of the reasons why Band Aid’s “Do They Know it’s Christmas” spreads misinformation to the masses. As a result, the song demonstrates that entertainment as an icon of poverty has the power to mislead public perception.

Celebrities

Through social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, celebrities encourage individuals to donate money and/ or clothes to charities. People want to copy celebrity actions because celebrities are role models in society who are implying that if you donate money, you are a valuable person. However, these donations can actually be more harmful than helpful. The post “The Harm of Charity and Donations: Money doesn’t fix every problem” explains how donating money to a campaign, such as TOMS Shoes, prevents people in poverty from digging themselves out of their sad reality. The post also addresses the question of where our aid is going, which is important in displaying that the money we donate is not having the positive effect we believe.

Do celebrities help combat poverty? 

Yes! Even though some celebrities encourage the wrong ways of helping, other celebrities use their fame to fight for social justice. For example, Bono, the lead singer of U2, endeavored to end hunger, poverty, and disease. Through media, Bono raises awareness about his nonprofit ONE.

This TED talk, “The good news on poverty (Yes, there’s good news),” features Bono sharing data that provides us with hope that the end of poverty is near. 

Have You Ever Thought About Where Your Donations Are Actually Going?

Oftentimes people donate material items to fulfill a perceived pressing need in the moment, but this type of giving can do more harm than good. In reality, people’s good intentions are meant to help developing countries progress towards the eradication of poverty, but may in actuality inhibit progress towards escaping poverty. This leads to the creation of dependency for both the people and the government of the poor country on donations, and creates a cycle which hinders self-sufficiency necessary for economic and individual success.

**Visual edited by Melissa. Click to see original.

Effect on local businesses and entrepreneurship

Those with money or power often believe that they can do good by filling some need with material things or simply monetary gifts. While in the short term this may be helpful, this kind of aid is ultimately detrimental to the recipients. When donations of some material are sent to an area, this automatically erases the need to produce or sell the same object locally. This, therefore, is detrimental to local businesses and takes away the opportunity for individual entrepreneurship.

The Example of Haiti:

→ Africa and other areas of widespread poverty are often used as a dumping ground for the unwanted goods of privileged westerners.

→ After Hurricane Katrina, millions of old t-shirts were donated to Haiti to aid those who had lost all of their possessions (including clothing).

→ When villages are given thousands of donated t shirts, it takes away the demand for making and selling clothes by local people.

→ This reduces opportunity for jobs and therefore does nothing to improve the lives of these people in the future, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that it is ultimately our intention to break.

Interesting Articles to Consider:

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00.html

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/12/business/second-hand-clothes-africa/index.html

From Dependency to Self Sufficiency

Charity and donations often help the recipients put a “band-aid” over their true problems. It then causes the recipients to become dependent on aid and inhibit their self sufficiency that they are capable of. In addition, charity undermines a recipients efforts in generating their own profits. This especially affects the people the most, because with other countries donating items or money, the people are not moving towards the progress of getting out of poverty.

TOMS Shoes Donations = No Good

Business Model: Donate 1 pair of TOMS shoes to children in need around the world, for every pair of shoes that are sold.

TOMS Intentions: Providing children with a pair of shoes for the rest of their lives.

What TOMS is Indirectly Promoting: By donating one pair of TOMS shows to a child in need, TOMS is creating dependency between the people and TOMS shoes. In addition, they are implying that TOMS wants people in poverty to be without shoes for the rest of their lives. TOMS donating these shoes ignores the reality that “no one in Haiti wants to be a beggar for life.” The donation of TOMS is hindering the capability of developing countries to pick themselves out of poverty. Although the intentions of TOMS were good, it sends the message to Haitians that they want them to be dependent on TOMS shoes.

Solution: Instead of the  “giving fish, rather than training fisherman” archetype, TOMS should set up factories in developing countries to give more job opportunities, allowing residents to buy shoes and not just receive them as donations.

Unwanted Donations

Actual effects: Inhibiting their capability to further grow and progress their industries. In addition, some East African governments feel that by exporting donations, the U.S is undermining their efforts to build their own domestic textile industries.

Voice of the People: Countries no longer want “foreign hand-me-downs dumped” on them because they are trying to be self-sufficient and produce their own clothes. However, they feel as though they as though the U.S is putting them at a disadvantage and restricting their ability to manufacture their own clothes.

Solutions: Stop donating clothes to organizations and agencies that end up selling them to buyers in developing countries. Governments in East Africa are planning to “impose an outright ban by 2019.”

Where Aid Really Goes

A transnational team of journalists “found that the aid projects had all been captured by the elites, whilst the poor were no better off, and sometimes actually poorer than before.”

-“How Aid Helps the Rich Get Richer” by Benon Herbert Oluka, Chief Bisong Etahoben, Francis Mbala, Eric Mwamba, Selay Kouassi, Ken Opala

“In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received.”

–“Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries” by Jason Hickel

“These so-called “illicit financial flows” amount to around 6.1 percent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) – or three times what Africa receives in aid.”

–“Africa is not poor, we are stealing its wealth”  by Nick Dearden

(Foreign Aid: Are we really helping others or just ourselves?)  – great TED TALK: good numbers showing how richer countries get richer

(Does Aid REALLY Help people?)  – shows charity clothes going to waste and how the aid workers are not giving the people what they really need

All in all, the world needs to change their way of humanitarian and foreign aid.  We cannot just throw free things at people because most of the time that is not what they need or want.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be throwing aid at them either.  The aid only makes the country giving the aid richer, and the country receiving it poorer.  This is obviously a corrupt system and something needs to be changed.

– Maddie Major, Elizabeth Kolaski, Melissa Shaw-Patino

A huge company that everyone recognizes is TOMS shoes, right? TOMS is known for their “one for one” mantra, when someone buys a pair of shoes, a person in need will also get a pair of shoes for free. Sound all fine and dandy?

Actually, this “one for one” policy is destroying the markets in other countries.

Think about it. When a truckload of free shoes come in to the country, are people going to want to go to a store and pay for shoes when they can just grab a pair for free? I don’t think so.

Thus, the people that own the shoe stores in the area will go out of business one by one and then the market will go downhill. Then, everyone will need free shoes because they can’t afford to buy them on their own and all of a sudden they are completely dependent on TOMS and other companies that donate free goods.

Here is another site that discusses TOMS more in depth in the aspect of charity.

Kenya actually banned the donation of free clothes to try to remedy this.

This issue is made worse by the spontaneity of the donations.

Even in Haiti, after the 2011 earthquake that devastated the country, there is more money circulation between NGOs that have flocked there than there is in the Haitian government.

The article linked below talks about how humanitarian aid is causing so many issues in Haiti.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/young-professionals-in-foreign-policy/haitis-multi-billion-doll_b_8207494.html

For example, the earthquake transformed Haiti into an aid hotspot, with many NGOs flocking to the country and distributing free rice.

Once considered an uncommon and expensive meal, rice became a staple provided three meals a day, seven days a week. The distribution of free rice contributed to its diminished value, which affected the local economy and incomes of several local Haitian farmers.

This has become such a prevalent issue in today’s world that people have even created  theories about it, one being the dependency theory, which is elaborated in the video below.

We want to know what you guys think about this topic! We created a poll for you that is linked below that we would love for you to answer!

http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=5a271b83e4b055c80d6240d0

Elise Thren, Hyeji Suh, Nell Beatty