Exploring the responses of societies with strong local traditions to the pressures and opportunities of a globalizing world. Forty features from 27 countries, plus a 60-page website and six hour-long specials distributed by NPR. Jonathan Miller was the project’s executive producer.
Worlds of Difference
ProjectsDates
2002-2005-
Sandy Tolan, Elif Shafak
Worlds of Difference
The Street of the Cauldron Makers
Sandy Tolan, Elif Shafak
Worlds of Difference
The Street of the Cauldron Makers
Modern Turkey emerged in the 1920s as a secular, westernized nation where the rule was always to look forward, never back. But novelist Elif Shafak says buried memories have a way of rising to the surface. She takes us on a tour of an Istanbul street, where battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity, and minority rights have played out in miniature.
Turkey has long been known as a nation at a crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity. Literally straddling Europe and Asia, it is considered by many to be the exception in the Islamic world: a large country with a majority Muslim population and a westernized, secular political culture. It seemed a natural place to explore the heightening tension between tradition and change – a central theme of the times in which we live, and the central interest of the Worlds of Difference project.
As with all our stories, we wanted to capture that tension in a lyrical, sound-rich way that would privilege the voices of ordinary people. In the end we found a voice that is quiteextra-ordinary: that of Elif Shafak, a young, fiercely intelligent Turkish novelist and social scientist whose own work drills deep into the multiple layers of her nation’s history and psyche.
In late 2004, I called Elif, the author of five novels, including The Flea Palace and The Saint of Incipient Insanities. She splits her time between Istanbul and Tucson, where she was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. In Turkey, she explained, the secularized, western orientation engineered by the country’s modern founder, Kemal Ataturk, taught Turks always to look forward, never back. This one-way gaze came at a cost, she said: the loss of a national memory, of both the beauties and the atrocities of the past. I thought this sounded fascinating. But how could we turn such an abstract idea into a radio documentary? She had an immediate answer: Let’s approach it through the voices on a single Istanbul street.
She had the perfect street in mind: Kazanci Yokushu, the “Street of the Cauldron Makers,” an unremarkable, litter-strewn lane tucked below Taksim Square and the Iskitlal pedestrian thoroughfare. Elif saw the street, where she once lived and wrote a novel, as a metaphor for Turkey’s modern history – a place where the nation’s battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity and minority rights have played out in miniature over the decades. A walking tour from top to bottom would reveal more about modern Turkey than any scholarly treatise.
I admit I was skeptical. How could a single street serve as a metaphor for a great nation’s history? But in the voices of the butcher, the barber, the grocers, the tailor and the domino players, I believe we were able to unearth a good many layers beneath the gray, gritty stones of the Street of the Cauldron Makers.
According to Proust, the smell of a biscuit dipped in tea can liberate memories long sequestered or suppressed. I feel fortunate to have traveled with Elif Shafak to her old street as she searched for a way to unlock some of her nation’s memories, and to dig for clues to its future.
– Sandy Tolan
Date
October 15, 2005Other Contributor(s)
Melissa RobbinsOutlets
Weekend Edition -
Melissa Robbins
Worlds of Difference
Fighting the Water
Melissa Robbins
Worlds of Difference
Fighting the Water
On the tangled braids of earth and marsh that form the Mississippi Delta, the Houma Indians have lived for centuries, isolated by water. But now the land is dissolving beneath their feet, and many Houma fear that their unique culture will dissolve along with it.
“If we get a major hurricane, this place could be wiped out tomorrow. It’s not a question of if we get hurricanes. We know we get hurricanes. It’s just a question of when.”
– Louisiana wetlands activist Kerry St. Pe, February 2005
In early 2005, I took a trip to the bayous of southern Louisiana to report on how the United Houma Nation is confronting an environmental and cultural crisis: the loss of their traditional lands to coastal erosion, and the resulting threat to their viability as a people. A story that felt urgent and compelling at the time has, since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, taken on an almost symbolic importance for me. The voices, which seemed then to be pleading for an audience, have become eerily prescient echoes in my head.
For 200 years, the isolation of the bayou has been a blessing for the Houma, helping them to maintain strong ties to each other and to pursue their traditional livelihoods as shrimpers and oystermen. But dams and levees along the Mississippi River have deprived the delta of silt from natural flooding, and the Barataria Terrebonne region, southwest of New Orleans, is now the fastest eroding land mass on earth. The loss of wetlands has left the coast increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. In recent decades, vast expanses of the Houma’s traditional territory have disappeared under water. And one by one, Houma families have been forced from their homes.
Houma leaders fear that this gradual dispersal will soon undermine tribal identity. As Vice Principal Chief Michael Dardar, puts it: “Native American existence is about a people and a place, a community and its relationship to each other and its relationship to the land it belongs to. So if you lose that, you’re still individually Houma, but you lose that sense of nationhood. And you lose what we’ve struggled to maintain for 200 years.”
Like dozens of other Native American tribes, the Houma are not recognized by the federal government, which means they don’t have the protection of a permanent reservation. Michael Dardar and other leaders have been looking for ways to purchase a plot of land where the entire community can relocate – where tribal traditions can be kept alive for future generations. But not everyone is on board. The proposal, like the flooding, has divided the tribe. Many Houma can’t bear the idea of abandoning the lands they have occupied for centuries, and have vowed to hold on for as long as they can.
Postscript:
My reporting was completed before Hurricane Katrina and Tropical Storm Rita devastated much of coastal Louisiana in August and September, 2005. The community of Isle a Jean Charles, which is featured in my story – the ancestral home of Curtis Hendon, Virgil Dardar and Chris Brunet – was spared the worst of the storms’ damage. But many other Houma, spread throughout the Gulf Coast region, suffered terribly.
– Melissa Robbins
Date
October 1, 2005Outlets
Homelands.orgTags
Regions: North America -
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
Relearning the Peace
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
Relearning the Peace
Burundi’s Hutus and Tutsis practice the same religion and speak the same language. Intermarriage is common. But decades of violence have made even the most imaginary differences tragically real. In 2005, voters in Burundi approved a constitution that requires the two groups to share power. For the country’s new leaders, that means unlearning bad habits. Marianne McCune attends a retreat for the newly integrated national police.
After decades of violence and civil war, the Hutus and Tutsis of Burundi, in Central Africa, are trying to govern the country together. Their new constitution requires power sharing in every government agency. Yet many on both sides of the conflict are still armed, and few have experience negotiating political disagreements without violence.
Howard Wolpe, a former U.S. congressman and President Clinton’s special envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes region, says the problem is not that Hutus and Tutsis hate each other. Burundi’s colonists and corrupt leaders taught them to blame their problems on each other, he says. And once war and violence took hold, the conflict was self-perpetuating.
“War creates a situation where people are convinced that their own survival can only come at the expense of the other,” Wolpe says. “The challenge is trying to change the culture that war creates.”
To do that, Wolpe is bringing to Burundi an American-style corporate leadership workshop that Burundi’s new senators and generals and police chiefs swear is helping them work more constructively together. The idea is to interrupt the culture that war has created and reintroduce a culture in which people understand that their own survival depends on their ability to collaborate.
“It’s true in all conflicts that when people get into a war, communications break down,” Wolpe says. “Stereotypes emerge. Barriers are put up. So the techniques we use are techniques that open up the lines of communication and equip people with the means of transcending their earlier conflict.”
When Tutsi General Jean Bikomagu and Hutu rebel spokesman Jerome Ndiho arrived at one of the earliest workshops, they had never met – but they despised each other nevertheless.
“I had the feeling that he had helped create all the unhappiness of the country,” recalls Bikomagu. And Ndiho says he was shocked when he found they would be spending the week together. “You understand how I hated this man. We had been launching shells at each other!”
By the end of the week, they say, it was their colleagues who were shocked—that they had publicly agreed on several points about Burundi’s future.
Participants in a session for the High Command of Burundi’s National Police ranged from young Hutu rebels, who came of age fighting in the woods, to Tutsi leaders of the government’s Gendarmerie, a force that was notorious for helping massacre Hutus. Together for a week in a walled-off Catholic seminary, they learned techniques like “active listening” and brainstorming. During one exercise they argued over whether a woman in a drawing was old or young – only to discover the image was a composite of two women, one old and one young.
The moral: in a conflict, it’s possible that both sides are right. They simply have different perspectives.
The workshops include lessons on the importance of preparing your position before entering a negotiation, and on identifying the causes of a problem before trying to find its solution. The men spend one day doing a “social simulation.” Each person is assigned to an imaginary geographical region in an imaginary country and asked to operate in the region’s interest, but with the goal of making the whole society survive. Some regions are rich, others are poor; some have resources but few people, others have few resources buy many people. These imaginary societies often fail miserably. But in their discussions afterward, participants find plenty of useful parallels with real life.
The application of such techniques to Burundi’s devastating conflict can seem, at times, absurd. A leader of the famously intimidating Gendarmerie scurried between the red region and green region, begging for food tickets so he and his region-mates can survive. Fiercely proud military-types try to use active-listening phrases (“So what you’re telling me is …”), mustering all their patience to resist the urge to launch into their own arguments. But by the end of the workshops, participants seem quite moved by the experience. One former general claimed that with these tools, he could have averted one of the first battles of Burundi’s Civil War.
Howard Wolpe and his team have been asked to take the workshops to the war-ravaged Republic of Congo, where the situation is much less stable than in Burundi. The first challenge will be to get leaders there to buy into the process. Wolpe has to convince them that it’s in their interest to work together.
“I believe that fundamentally people will never alter the way they behave toward one another unless they see that as a matter of self interest,” he says. “We try to assist people to come to an appreciation, first, of their interdependence. That there’s value in collaboration, even with people they’d historically defined as enemies. But secondly, that they can do that. That it’s possible to rebuild trust, to rebuild the ability to communicate.”
– Marianne McCune
Thank you to the Burundi Leadership Training Program and to Burundi’s new National Police for allowing me full access to their week-long training.
Date
July 17, 2005Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Karen Michel
Worlds of Difference
Seeking the Middle Way
Karen Michel
Worlds of Difference
Seeking the Middle Way
For decades, the goal of the tiny Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan has been neither to keep pace with the rest of the world nor to hide from it, but rather to increase what the king calls “Gross National Happiness.”
Before going to Bhutan, I read as much as possible about the country and talked to folks who’d been there. The published articles agreed on two things: tourism was limited to 6,000 people a year and the country was Shangri-La. The people who’d visited agreed on nothing: being a Western Buddhist was an advantage/would be ridiculed; everything was expensive/everything was reasonable; adjusting to the altitude was difficult/the altitude was no big deal; and it was inevitable that the cold would get to you/wearing layers made everything easy.
Let me address the tourism assertion first: it’s a myth, wrong, false. In fact, tourist arrivals have been as high as 9,000 people in a recent year, and Bhutan encourages people to come: you just have to write a letter to the Minister of Protocol asking permission, and stating why you want to go. And you have to wire $200/day for the duration of your expected stay. (The idea is that this will keep “the backpackers” out.) The letter, I would learn, is pro forma, getting a visa doesn’t take long, and the $200/day covers your guide (mandatory), hotel, meals, permits (required for visiting monasteries and government compounds) and transportation, and is, therefore, not a bad deal at all.
As for Bhutan being Shangri-La, well, too many places in that part of the world claim the title. If you ask me, Bhutan is quite amazing; I’ll leave it at that. I prefer the notion that we all have our own vision and version of Shangri-La, whether influenced by James Michener or not.
What did matter, after all, is that I am a practicing Buddhist, of the Kagyu branch of Tibetan Buddhism; so are the Bhutanese. My guide, Pema Tshering, made a point of telling people that I was a Buddhist: it made a difference to him, and to – it seemed – everyone I met. It meant, among other things, that I was open to a society based in Buddhist principls, a place where generosity was expected, moderation (the middle way) always a goal, loving kindness and compassion a way of life, and stupas, monks and monasteries everywhere. It meant, critically, that – by Bhutanese lights – I knew how to behave in both the secular and sacred realms. And so I was able to meet with high lamas, go into inner sanctums of monasteries, receive blessings, have discussions on the dharma. I had access to aspects of life that, I was told, were generally unavailable to tourists.
was not really a tourist, of course, but a journalist. Yet I was traveling on a tourist visa. This made me nervous. Getting a journalist visa took much more time, and I didn’t have but a few weeks between assignment and anticipated arrival. I figured that having a small tape recorder was less obvious than a video camera, but still I was concerned: Bhutan maintains a tight control over its internal and external image. So before I left I met with Gyaltshen Penjor, the First Secretary of the Mission of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United Nations. He was friends with a friend of a friend, it turned out. And that, too, mattered.
I told him that I was going to Bhutan both as an academic interested in issues of media and cultural change (which was true) and as a journalist. “Should I be worried about that?” I asked him. He responded by querying me about my Buddhist beliefs. Why was I a Buddhist? For how long? What did that mean for my life? My answers satisfied him: he said I’d be fine, that I should use his name as necessary during my travels, that he wanted me to meet his brothers and to spend time with his mother in her village home.
After our meeting, I sent him an article I’d written several years before, “The Journalist in the Lotus,” about reconciling the practices of journalism and Buddhism. He said he wanted to talk with me more about the dharma when I returned.
During my too-brief stay in Bhutan, as I tried to understand the impact of recently-introduced media on a profoundly Buddhist culture, I thought often about the conflicting advice I’d been given by visitors, about the falsehoods in the (always gushy) Western press, and about how fortunate I was to have met Gyaltshen. I had a meal with members of his family in Thimphu, and spent an extraordinary afternoon with his mother in her village near Paro.
What I experienced in those 10 days in Bhutan will take me years to unravel; I hope I’ll be back before too long to add more to the skein.
– Karen Michel
Thanks to Valeria Vasilievski, Pema Tshering, Deki Wangmo, Gyaltshen Penjor, Bob Vye, Yeshey Dorji, Tshering Pema, and Hotel Dragon Roots.
Date
May 20, 2005Outlets
Living on EarthTags
Regions: Asia / Oceania -
Tatiana Schreiber
Worlds of Difference
Café Rebeldía
Tatiana Schreiber
Worlds of Difference
Café Rebeldía
The Mutvitz cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, sells a portion of its coffee on the growing global “solidarity market.” The farmers, who are part of the Zapatista rebel movement, see the coffee business as a way not just to move forward economically, but to strengthen their Mayan heritage.
Climbing into the mountains with members of the Mutvitz coffee cooperative, one is struck by how hard these farmers work. Most coffee growers in this part of Chiapas, Mexico, live in ejidos; that is, land held in common by the entire community, and worked by individual families. Generally the village is located in the center of the ejidal land, and the coffee fields (usually 2 to 10 acres each) are spread out around it, high in the moutains. Farmers must walk two, three, or more hours over extremely steep terrain just to get to their fields.
The members of Mutvitz (Mutvitz is a Tzotzil word that means “mountain of birds”) do not shrink from hard work. Determined to obtain a better price for their coffee, as well as to protect their own health and that of their land, they abide by all the practices required of them by CERTIMEX, the Mexican organic trade certifying agency. These practices include composting; terracing; using “living fences” of small trees and shrubs to protect their fields from neighboring farms where chemical fertilizers and pesticides may be applied; planting a variety of tree species within their coffee fields to enhance biodiversity; and draining the water used for washing the coffee beans into wells, so as to avoid sending the run-off to mountain streams.
Once, walking to a coffee field with a farmer in central Chiapas, we lost the trail and I followed as best I could as he hacked his way through thick tropical undergrowth using his trusty machete. When we finally arrived at the field, the farmer proudly showed me his work: he’d built individual terraces around each coffee tree to prevent the torrential rains from washing precious topsoil down the mountain. He’d gathered materials for compost – leaves, coffee pulp, animal manure and beneficial weeds – and, after months of turning the huge mounds, had applied several shovelfuls to each tree. He kept the area around each tree cleared of weeds using only his machete. He’d carefully regulated the amount of light by pruning the shade trees at regular intervals. His entire family was involved in the harvest, which requires many trips to the coffee field and back, carrying the 100 pound sacks of coffee fruit (the freshly harvested fruit is about the size and shape of a cherry) on their shoulders. The women often carried a child on their backs as well.
For coffee farmers, the work does not stop with the harvest. Newly picked coffee must be “wet processed” in the community. First, a hand cranked machine is used to depulp the beans, removing the outer fruit from the inner seed. Next, the beans must be soaked and stirred in several changes of water over several days to begin fermentation. Then the coffee is spread out on a concrete patio to dry in the sun. The beans must be raked and turned daily, and sometimes taken up and covered if rain comes. (In the Chiapas highlands it’s not uncommon to have rain ten months out of the year.) Finally the dried green coffee beans are selected, with only the best beans gathered for sale.
The sacks of beans are again hauled on farmers’ backs, hoisted into trucks and taken to the cooperative’s warehouse for further quality checking and weighing. Then they are reloaded onto trucks to go to the beneficio , or dry-processing facility, where the outer husk of the bean will be removed and the coffee will be roasted.
For all the work involved, Mutvitz members and other Chiapas coffee farmers I have met are always willing to take time out to notice what’s going on around them. On the way back from the field that day, I asked the farmer to identify for me all the various bird sounds we were hearing along the way. Appreciative of my interest, he named them all, and also stopped to point out to me something I’d never seen before – a tiny hummingbird nest hanging delicately from an inner branch of a tree. Chiapas is home to 39 of the 55 species of hummingbirds native to Mexico. The coffee farmers, working hard to preserve their livelihood and culture, are also protecting critical habitat for birds.
I once asked Mutvitz farmers how much they thought their work was really worth. What would be a really “fair” price? They could only laugh. Ten dollars a pound? A hundred dollars a pound? In the end it was impossible to put a value on their coffee, and all that it means, grown below a craggy promontory called Mutvitz, mountain of birds.
– Tatiana Schreiber
Date
May 15, 2005Outlets
Public Radio CollaborationTags
Regions: North America -
Chris Brookes
Worlds of Difference
A Map of the Sea
Chris Brookes
Worlds of Difference
A Map of the Sea
For centuries, the Newfoundland fishery was hailed as the greatest in the world. Then, in 1992, the cod disappeared. Now the islanders must find a way to keep that culture from going the way of the cod. An award-winning meditation on memory, fishing, music, and dance.
In Newfoundland today, there are two sounds that haunt me. The first one I heard twelve years ago. I was talking with the great traditional singer Anita Best about the sudden closure of the North Atlantic cod fishery. This cod stock was once the largest fish biomass on the planet. A year earlier Canadian fisheries scientists had belatedly woken up to signs that the cod were in serious trouble. A temporary fishing moratorium had been announced in hopes the stock would rebound. As Anita and I chatted then, one year into the moratorium, the signs were not good. People were beginning to think the unthinkable.
In public the talk was all about the economic impact. Thirty thousand fishery workers were out of work. But Anita’s concern was cultural. “I fear,” she said, “that the codfish off Newfoundland may be like the buffalo on the Great Plains. When they were wiped out the repercussion wasn’t only economic for the societies that depended on them. It pulled the rug from under their whole culture. And I really think we may have done it here, just like they did to the buffalo.”
I had asked her to sing a traditional song with the line “Lots of fish in Bonavist’ harbour,” and as I held my microphone her voice broke. “Please turn your tape off,” she said, and her body shook with a great wailing sob.
Today, the fish haven’t come back, and the cod fishery is still closed. Rural Newfoundlanders have left in droves. Some communities are turning to tourism for survival, and Petty Harbour is one of these. They’ve developed a four-year plan to attract tourists to come and see their 500-year-old fishing history. Central attractions will be a museum and fishery heritage interpretation center. Mayor Nat Hutchings says, “It’s a culture shock. I mean, your culture all your lifetime is the fishery. You’re living and breathing the fishery and all of a sudden, that’s gone. It’s like a death. But after awhile you start thinking I’ve got to do something. And that’s what Petty Harbour is doing. We’ve moved from fishing for cod, to fishing for tourists.”
Other rural communities have died. The 17th-century fishing community of Harbour Deep vanished from the map three years ago when the last of its residents left. But its ghost survives in the culture, because of a traditional “set dance” that Harbour Deep people had danced for longer than anyone could remember. It was unique to the place. Although the community has disappeared, the dance survives and is now stepped out by other feet – ironically including those of summer tourists looking for an “authentic” taste of Newfoundland outport life.
The tapping of those feet is the other sound haunting me. A 500-year-old society trying to keep its feet after cataclysmic change. An economy once based on the greatest fishery in the world, now retooling to replay its memory to strangers.
– Chris Brookes
Date
January 28, 2005Outlets
Living on Earth -
Kate Davidson
Worlds of Difference
Saints and Indians
Kate Davidson
Worlds of Difference
Saints and Indians
Between 1954 and 2000, tens of thousands of Native American children went to live with Mormon families during the school year. For some, it was a chance to overcome the stresses of reservation life. For others, it was a repudiation of their identity. For everyone, it was a life-changing experience.
Between 1954 and 2000, tens of thousands of Native American children went to live with Mormon families during the school year. For some, it was a chance to overcome the stresses of reservation life. For others, it was a repudiation of their identity. For everyone, it was a life-changing experience.
This story was edited by Deborah George. Thanks to the Navajo educator and artist Pauline Begay for use of her song “Cradleboard Lullaby” in the piece. Her award-winning work is available from Cool Runnings Music.
Thanks also to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for providing archival material for this piece.
And many thanks to the Placement students and families who shared their stories and let me into their lives this year, little by little. That experience, for me, is the richest part of the project.
— Kate Davidson
Date
January 23, 2005Other Contributor(s)
Deborah GeorgeOutlets
All Things ConsideredTags
Regions: North America -
Alan Weisman, Nancy Hand
Worlds of Difference
Cotopaxi Pilgrimage
Alan Weisman, Nancy Hand
Worlds of Difference
Cotopaxi Pilgrimage
For the Tigua Indians of Ecuador, the spectacular 19,000-foot Cotopaxi volcano is both a sheltering spirit and a source of artistic inspiration. But the Tigua stopped visiting their sacred mountain when the government declared it a national park and began charging admission. Recently two Tigua painters led an improvised pilgrimage to the volcano’s glacier.
The painter Julio Toaquiza was forced to work on a cacao plantation as a young boy. If he wasn’t in the fields by 6:00 a.m., the boss would come to his house with a whip. There was no local school for Julio to attend back then. He was married at 14 and had 12 children. He learned to paint, he says, in a dream.
Julio’s was the last generation of Tigua to work under a whip. His children went to school. They helped with the family’s livestock and crops, rather than laboring at a plantation. And they learned to paint from their father.
Julio’s oldest son, Alfredo, believes the style of painting his father developed is part of a resurgence of ancient indigenous art forms that were interrupted when Europeans arrived in the Andes. “The trunk was cut, but the roots have sprung up in different places among different people,” he says. “Here in Cotopaxi, in Tigua, it sprung up on its own. It’s a new school of indigenous art, where we express the feeling, the thinking, the way of life of our people.”
Julio’s third son, Alfonso, sees his art as a way of preserving culture, and of sharing that culture with the larger world. “Pachamama, the earth spirit, has pushed us to show our way of life to different parts of the world. Our paintings reveal the hidden parts of the community.”
For Alfonso, the paintings also tell a more urgent story. “Many people are destroying the forest and we say, ‘Please, don’t destroy that.’ Pachamama is crying. She doesn’t want more destruction. We need people to begin to talk about this so that this land that was once a paradise can return to being a paradise. That’s the idea we are always dreaming of.”
After thirty years of painting scenes from the daily lives of his people as they live today – their work on the land, their ceremonies and celebrations – Julio has begun to paint about the past. “This is the slavery of the Tigua plantations,” he says, gesturing to a painting in progress. Instead of family plots of potatoes and small herds of llamas, the landscape is dotted with soldiers on horseback. The painting tells the story of a Tigua uprising against forced labor, and its violent suppression. It also tells the story of how much has changed in one man’s lifetime.
“Our children are educated now. They know what laws are. They know about rights,” Julio says. “This painting is so that my history, the history of Tigua and of our ancestors who lived in this place, can go out from here. I like to paint stories and send them out to the world.”
– Nancy Hand
Date
December 17, 2004Outlets
Living on Earth -
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Kinvara: A Spirit of Place
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Kinvara: A Spirit of Place
For much of the 20th century, the town of Kinvara, on Ireland’s west coast, was rich in charm but poor in just about everything else. Then the Celtic Tiger awoke. Today, Kinvara is crawling with developers and speculators. The boom has forced the townsfolk to ask tough questions about where they want their community to go.
In 1973, when Liadain O’Donovan first showed me around the “west country” of Ireland, we joked that you’d find more black-cassocked priests on the roads than utility poles. There were fewer cars on the back lanes than horse-drawn carts. Thatched cottages seemed still to be the standard. And the region’s greatest export was its children. As late as the 1980s as many as two-thirds of Irish high school graduates emigrated to survive.
Today, Ireland ranks as one of the ten richest countries in the world in per capita terms. Its economic growth rate is about 6 percent, unemployment is below 5 percent, its trade surplus is the highest in Europe. At the same time, the scandals of the 1990s, which revealed rampant child abuse by Catholic priests who until very recently ran nearly all the schools, have brought shame and massive disaffection from the Church. In the wake has come a radical transformation in everything having to do with daily life in Ireland.
To travel these days through the west country, in Galway and Clare counties, is to see a mad dash of unregulated new construction – from gaudy block and brick two-stories to hives of holiday cottages lined out along the seaside slopes. The churches have not disappeared, but no longer is it conceivable that the priest could, with a single nod, block the sale of a field or a house to a prospective buyer deemed morally suspect.
What diet fed the unrestrained growth of this so-called Celtic Tiger?
By most analysis, it was the convergence of three forces: the collapse of Church control over nearly every element of public and private life; a near 100-percent literacy rate, which was possibly the church schools’ greatest contribution; and the arrival of a high-tech information industry in the early 1990s, which turned Ireland into the primary manufacturing and sales center for American personal computer production in Europe.
Low manufacturing taxes and interest rates, combined with high language skills, lured American companies and stimulated enormous growth in service sector spending.
Results? Dublin now claims the most expensive real estate in Europe, where a simple two-story, four-room frame and stucco house can go for $1 million. Houses in Kinvara go for half a million (Phil Moylan, the owner of Winckle’s pub there, recently rejected an offer of 1.2 million euros). Locals and tourists alike now eat out and demand better food—a pleasant change from the boiled potatoes and roasted lamb gristle of 30 years ago. But prosperity has not come without its price. Ireland now suffers the highest alcoholism rate in western Europe. The newspapers are full of stories about drunken brawls and highway deaths. And little towns like Kinvara query themselves endlessly about the fate of the famous land of artists and poets.
– Frank Browning
Date
December 4, 2004Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Lorne Matalon
Worlds of Difference
The Reindeer People
Lorne Matalon
Worlds of Difference
The Reindeer People
About 40 percent of all Mongolians are nomads, but officials there say they want most of them to settle down. With their reindeer herds dwindling and government support disappearing, the Tsachin people have to decide whether to abandon their ancient way of life.
For thousands of years, reindeer herders have roamed the taiga of northern Mongolia, a hauntingly beautiful wilderness of mountains, forest, rock and ice which straddles the country’s border with Siberia. The herders, known as the Tsaschin, or Dukha, rely on their animals for transportation, and for the staples of their diet: milk, cheese, yogurt, and dried milk curds.
But disease and inbreeding have reduced the Tsachin’s herds from more than 2,000 in the 1970s to less than one-third of that today. And that, in turn, has threatened the Tsachin’s way of life.
“Reindeer are more than simply the animal which provides a livelihood in the taiga,” says Daniel Plumley of the Totem Peoples Project, an NGO based in New York state. “They represent the culture here. Without the reindeer, the culture would cease to exist.”
Through his NGO, Plumley has been raising funds for veterinary research. He has also been lobbying the Mongolian government to recognize the Tsachin – with just 44 families, Mongolia’s smallest nomadic group – as a unique society deserving of official support. State financial and veterinary assistance for the herders was withdrawn with the fall of communism in the early 1990s.
Never more endangered
Plumley says it’s in everyone’s best interest that the Tsachin survive in their native habitat. They are responsible stewards of the land, he says, with a deep knowledge of plants, weather and animals that they’ve accumulated over the centuries. “It is a culture which we in the West can learn from,” he says.
But the future of the Tsachin has never been more endangered. The government is urging them to settle down. The herds are dwindling. And the world around them is changing. Many Tsachin children go to school in towns, where they are exposed to television and consumer goods. They know that the nomadic life provides little in the way of cash, or opportunity for social advancement.
“One of my fears is that the young people may decide to leave the taiga, and that old people like me will end up alone,” says Sanjim, a Tsachin elder.
Breaking the cycle
Myagmar Nansalmaa, a veterinarian with the Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory in Ulaanbaatar, hopes that strengthening the herds will help prevent that from happening. She is one of several researchers who are currently investigating the health problems of the reindeer. Since the government ceased providing support for the Tsachin, Nansalmaa has been traveling to the taiga during her own vacation time.
There she has teamed up with Plumley, Jerry Haigh of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Morgan Keay, a wildlife biologist based in Boulder, Colorado.
The researchers have found that a significant portion of the reindeer population is plagued by Brucella suis, bacteria that cause a serious form of brucellosis. The infectious disease attacks the reindeer’s reproductive system, causing stillbirths or abnormally small offspring. The bacteria also trigger bursitis, a swelling of the joints that is particularly debilitating for nomadic animals. Nansalmaa believes the blood parasite anaplasma has also infected the herd.
The poor health of the herd sets a vicious cycle in motion. As the animals’ health declines, life in the taiga becomes more difficult. Herders are tempted to settle in towns, or to move to lower altitudes. Some have brought their reindeer to a lake where, for a fee, they pose with their reindeer for tourists.
“Remaining in one place is unsuitable for animals used to constant movement,” Nansalmaa says. “And hotter temperatures in the summer leave the animals vulnerable to insects, and to the parasites the insects carry, making them weak just as winter arrives.”
Strengthening the stock
Inbreeding may be the greatest concern, Nansalmaa says. Inbreeding causes bone deformities, vulnerability to disease, and lameness, a frequently fatal affliction. Wolves can easily kill weak or slow reindeer when they fall behind the herd.
“In 1962 and again in the late 1980s, the government of Mongolia brought in reindeer from a Siberian herd to replenish the genetic stock of the reindeer in the taiga,” Nansalmaa says. “But with state support for herders ending, inbreeding began, and its negative consequences were soon apparent.”
The herder Bayandalai owns 97 reindeer – the largest herd in the taiga. “The reindeer our ancestors used to herd were healthy,” he says wistfully. “Today I have only one wish, and that is for the government to bring in reindeer from Siberia, Scandinavia, or Canada. If not reindeer, then reindeer semen.”
“Artificial insemination is a key to regenerating the size and genetic quality of the herd,” says Haigh, the Saskatchewan veterinarian. Haigh and his colleagues have identified donor bulls in Canada, and hope to begin an insemination program in the coming months.
“Herders here represent one of the last truly nomadic cultures on Earth,” says Myagmar Nansalmaa. “We want to help the taiga people live a full life, just as their ancestors did.”
– Lorne Matalon
Thanks to the herders of the East and West Taiga of Mongolia and their families; to translators Ganhuyag Demid, Gerelt Od Dash, Bayar Lhavgasuren, Binderiya Dondov, and Badamtsetseg Tsedennya; to Peter Marsh (American Center for Mongolian Studies), Stevan Buxt (PACT), Morgan Keay (Itgel Foundation), Daniel Plumley (Totem Peoples Project), Myagmar Nansalmaa (Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory), Anna Sirena (Russian Academy of Sciences); and special thanks to Allan Coukell for his companionship and collaboration.
Date
November 26, 2004Other Contributor(s)
Allan CoukellOutlets
NPRTags
Regions: Asia / Oceania -
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
The Face of the Shaman
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
The Face of the Shaman
For thousands of years, the Mongolian shaman has been the intermediary between the human and spirit worlds. Shamanism was suppressed for 70 years under communism. Now it’s back in the open, competing for customers in a market that’s crowded with alternatives.
Talk to Ghoste. That’s what everyone says. There are three shamans here among the nomadic reindeer herders of northern Mongolia. Or maybe six, depending whom you believe. But Ghoste is the real deal, the most powerful. They say you should talk to Ghoste, and then in the same breath, they say “but Ghoste doesn’t like to talk.”
Soyun is the oldest shaman, at 100. She’s a tiny woman, ancient, with bad knees. She struggles in her oortz, or teepee, to move between her sleeping platform and the kettle of salty milk-tea on the stove. When she steps outside, which isn’t often, she walks with the aid of two crooked sticks.
But they say that when Soyun performs her full shamanic ritual, those long nights, when she pounds the drum until the trance begins and the spirits – the ongots – enter her body, they say then she leaps and dances like a child.
Her drum is kept behind a curtain, in the place of honor opposite the door of the tent. She will not show it to a visitor. In fact, she is tired of all the questions. Talk to Ghoste, she says, talk to Ghoste.
Soyun was born across the border in Tuva, which is part of Siberia, and though the children now all speak Mongolian, Soyun still prefers the Tuvan language. During Mongolia’s communist period, her own daughter, Tsend, briefly made a living in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, as a singer of Tuvan folk songs.
Tsend is about seventy now, and nearly blind. She has long returned to the taiga, high in the mountains where the reindeer herders live. Tsend, like her mother and her grandmother before that, is a shaman.
One bright and frigid morning, Tsend came out of her oortz, in her long green tunic and bare feet, to welcome some visitors. It had snowed the night before, and the visitors, having just ridden over a high mountain saddle, were swathed in gloves and wool hats and layers of synthetics. Tsend laughed about the cold. Her face is permanently etched with a squint and a smile. Bare feet, she said, are good for your health.
A shaman is a conduit to the spirit world. Shamanism is among humanity’s oldest religions. Not everyone can become a shaman, and Tsend’s story is typical. She was seven years old, when she became ill, falling to the ground with seizures. Her grandmother performed a shaman ceremony for her, dressing Tsend in her own costume. After that, Tsend developed the ability. Now her grandmother, Urel, is Tsend’s most important spirit.
To go to the spirits, the shaman needs some kind of transportation. Tsend sometimes travels by playing the mouth harp, but that, she says, can take her only so far. The most powerful transportation is the drum. A drum is like a horse. It can take you anywhere.
She does her ritual only once each season, or when someone comes to her with an illness or some other problem. When that happens, a shaman cannot refuse. Tsend agrees to play her mouth harp, but says it is not the right phase of the moon to show the drum.
Only about 200 nomadic reindeer herders remain in northern Mongolia. Geographically, they are divided into two distinct groups, known as the East and West Taiga. Tsend lives in the East; her mother and Ghoste in the West. She is happy to hear that her mother is well. Of Ghoste, she says, “he’s very strong.”
Ghoste is a striking man, about 50, with a broad face and high cheekbones. His eyes contain a glint of mischief, but also something a little frightening. He lives a little apart, higher up the mountain than the other reindeer herders. “Probably people think, because I live all alone in the wilderness,” he says, “that I am a wild man.” But he explains that this way is better for the reindeer. Later, he will say privately that it also helps him avoid the curiosity of outsiders. For several days, he avoids visitors. Eventually, though, he agrees to talk.
His tent is barer than most of the others. Reindeer skins and old pieces of canvas cover the floor. Tea is poured and a bowl of reindeer cheese offered around. A basin of bones and meat bubbles on the stove. Ghoste smokes constantly, rolling his cigarettes in pieces of torn newspaper.
“It is not easy being a shaman,” he says. A shaman receives many people who are struggling with sickness. “I cannot refuse. If I do, the spirits get weaker.” Ghoste says he has a responsibility for the people in the community, people who come and ask for help and believe with their hearts. If they believe, it will work for them.
He says the shaman’s job is to help people who have lost their hemur, or good fortune. The shaman can call it back for them. “I can’t cheat anyone or it would harm my family,” he says. “That is what happened in my life.” Ghoste is divorced. His son is dead.
“Once someone who was becoming unconscious came to me for help. I helped them, but they didn’t give me any offerings. That was bad for me, being the mediator in between. That’s why my son died.”
There are things Ghoste will not talk about: the ritual, his spirits. And, of course, he cannot show the drum. “This is not play,” he says. “Some people treat it like theater.”
It is customary and polite to give a gift to a person who has shown hospitality. So, the interview concluded, a few small things are produced, including a bottle of vodka. The translator leaves. The visitor goes outside to stretch, and then, a few minutes later, ducks back from the bright day into the dim tent, to say goodbye.
But instead, Ghoste motions him to return. Ghoste pats the ground in front of the green curtain. The visitor sits. In silence, the drum is produced. The shaman costume is unpacked: bundle after bundle of cloth strips, a feathered headdress, solid iron bells or clappers that hang across his shoulder blades. The skin drum is round, large, open on one side. Ghoste grins, and plays it ever so softly, like a heartbeat: thump thump, thump thump.
– Allan Coukell
Thanks to translators Binderiya Dondov, Badamtsetseg Tsedennyam, and Hosbayar Enkhtaivan (translators); Professor Gurbadar Purvee (Mongol Business Institute), Daniel Plumley (Totem Peoples Project), Judith Hangartner (Institute for Ethnology, University of Berne), and Nansalmaa Myagmar (Mongolian State Veterinary Laboratory).
Date
November 25, 2004Other Contributor(s)
Lorne MatalonOutlets
NPR -
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
The Zapotec Bible
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
The Zapotec Bible
In the indigenous Mexican village of Yaganiza, Rebecca Long is slowly translating the New Testament into the local language. But her presence, like the group she works with, has not been without controversy. A complex story about language, religion, tradition, and trust.
The Catholic church is more than the physical center of the pueblo of Yaganiza, high in the Sierra Norte of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Catholicism is intricately woven into the identity of this indigenous Zapotec village. Local traditions from long before Spanish conquerors arrived have been incorporated into Catholic ritual. Cemented into the church wall are stones from a pre-Hispanic building with Zapotec markings on them. For centuries, the town has required all residents to help take care of the church and take part in its ceremonies. In Yaganiza and pueblos like it, residents will tell you that the Church is the glue that holds the community together.
So ten years ago, when one of Yaganiza’s 900 inhabitants refused to help pay for an upcoming fiesta, town officials balked. The man argued that because he was an evangelical Christian, he shouldn’t have to contribute to a celebration that includes heavy drinking, raucous dancing and Catholic ceremonies – all anathema to his religion. Soon other evangelicals joined his cause, and 40 families were saying they, too, would not pay for fiestas or do town service in the Catholic church. Town Hall responded by throwing the men in jail and depriving their families of basic services: clean water, access to collective land and use of the village mill.
“According to the Mexican constitution, we can’t obligate anyone to believe in what we believe, but that wasn’t the situation,” says local indigenous rights activist Abel Montes. “We weren’t defending the Catholic religion. We were fighting for the harmony of the internal life of the community.”
Rebecca Long, of the Dallas-based group SIL International (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics), waited until after the controversy died down to come to Yaganiza and begin translating the New Testament into the local variant of Zapoteco. SIL International aims to increase native language literacy worldwide, but evangelical Christianity is what motivates its translators: the group has completed 500 translations of the New Testament and 1,000 more are in progress. Long wanted to make the words of the Bible accessible to those in Yaganiza who don’t speak Spanish – but she says she did not want to fuel the conflict between evangelicals and Catholics. So only after Yaganiza’s evangelicals reluctantly signed a promise to comply with the pueblo’s traditional obligations did Long make her way to the community.
Her presence has been controversial since the moment she arrived.
“It does threaten the status quo,” Long admits. “We don’t have anything like this in our own culture, where everybody from this town has lived here for generation after generation after generation. It’s their land, it’s their town, it’s their language.”
Seventy-year-old Elena Caballero is thrilled that Rebecca Long has come to town. Caballero is a member of Yaganiza’s Pentecostal church. She says Long’s translations of biblical texts have been invaluable to her: not only does she now understand what God is telling her, she says, but she knows what she wants to say to God. But some of Caballero’s Catholic neighbors feel differently. The local Catholic priest, who only speaks Spanish, says he wouldn’t mind his parishioners having copies of the Bible in their own language, even though Catholic doctrine discourages individuals from interpreting the Bible on their own. What he objects to, he says, is the lessons evangelicals take from the Bible.
“Here we understand the word of God, but as a way of creating community,” he says, “to strengthen customs that they are letting disappear.”
But the Zapoteco language has been under pressure since long before the Evangelicals arrived. Decades ago, teachers punished students who spoke the language in the classroom. In Yaganiza and in indigenous pueblos across the country, public schools aimed to drum Spanish into the minds of indigenous children in an effort to unify the country. There are pueblos not far from Yaganiza in which hardly anyone can remember the local dialect.
Education policies have changed in recent years; now officials encourage bilingual instruction. But materials are in short supply. Rebecca Long has collected and published local folk tales, riddles and songs. Yet the schools have not taken advantage of her work. Local school director Salvador Galindo says this makes him sad. He and other officials are struggling to find the resources to write and publish children’s texts in local dialects. But most are suspicious of Rebecca Long and SIL International. They fear that the group is trying to convert residents to evangelical Christianity. And they are wary of outsiders threatening the town’s traditions.
All kinds of people with all kinds of ideas come to Oaxaca’s mountain pueblos. One Pentecostal preacher traveled from miles away to lecture on the evils of short hair; some locals return from stints in the United States determined to transform the way the villages are run. They all force the communities to weigh which traditions are worth keeping and which they can let go. While Rebecca Long is helping to save one of Yaganiza’s most cherished traditions, her very presence endangers others. And that means more difficult choices for Yaganiza.
– Marianne McCune
Date
October 23, 2004Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Competing for Souls
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Competing for Souls
Korea’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse has been accompanied by an equally dramatic spiritual shift. With Christians now dominant in political and economic life, Buddhists wonder whether they have a role to play in the country’s future.
It shouldn’t have been that disconcerting to hear an evangelical Protestant minister extol God’s goodness for guiding the Pilgrims safely to America, where they could establish a Christian ethic that would one day shape the moral values of a nation. Granted, the church was stadium-sized, the 100-person choir was accompanied by a 32-piece orchestra and the service was being televised to millions, but we Americans are used to television ministries that have somehow managed to hybridize Puritan-inspired religion and Hollywood spectaculars. Except this wasn’t America: it was Korea, known in theology circles as home to the purest Buddhism in Asia.
The pre-Thanksgiving Sunday service that I and 25,000 other attendees were witnessing took place in the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul, South Korea, which, at 800,000 members (many of whom were watching via simultaneous transmission in satellite churches around the country) calls itself the biggest church in the world. Evangelical Christianity took hold here following the Korean War, when many Koreans studied in the United States, sometimes on church scholarships, and returned influenced by Western ideas. In recent decades, as South Korea’s social philosophy segued from the ancestor worship of Confucianism to free market capitalism, the country has undergone a spiritual conversion, and is now nearly fifty percent Christian. Christians and Buddhists alike told me, with pride and concern respectively, that to get elected these days, South Korean politicians have to be Christian. Although Korean Protestant churches maintain strong ties with their American evangelical counterparts, in this now-prosperous country they aren’t dependent on them. In fact Yoido Full Gospel actually sends missionaries to the United States, and maintains its own Bible college in Orange County, California.
Korea’s religious transformation hasn’t been painless. In the 1990s, temples were burned and Buddha statues were beheaded as a Christian president openly equated Buddhist and Satanic images. The conflict is no longer so open. But Korean Buddhists today worry about being overwhelmed in a society where commercialism and religion grow increasingly indistinguishable. Downtown Seoul’s Jogye-sa Temple, center of the largest sect of Korean Buddhism, has recently been surrounded by 25-story buildings that in the past would never have been permitted. The glass from one of the highest skyscrapers reflects light so intensely into an adjacent temple that monks can’t meditate, even with their eyes closed. The building’s Swedish architect was horrified to learn this – in his country, reflective angles are carefully controlled to avoid violating a church’s holy sanctum. But here, a Buddhist monk told me, no one even bothered to consult them. “It’s like we no longer exist.”
– Alan Weisman
Date
October 12, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Julian Crandall Hollick
Worlds of Difference
Occitan Rock
Julian Crandall Hollick
Worlds of Difference
Occitan Rock
Since Napoleon declared it the official language of the republic, French has been at the core of national identity. Now some southerners are challenging that notion, using a blend of reggae, Brazilian rhythms, and the musical forms of the medieval troubadors.
Before 1789, France was a loose community of regions, each with its own languages and dialects: Alsatian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and perhaps 70 more. Occitan was the family of languages from Occitanie, the region that stretched from Bordeaux and the Pyrenées in the southwest to the Alps and northern Italy in the southeast. It and its several variants were linked to a rich creative history, particularly in literature and song.
Then came the French Revolution, and then Napoleon, and a new constitution that declared France “one people, one nation, one language.” Occitan all but disappeared.
But not completely. More than 200 years later, Occitan is still spoken in the French countryside and in the north of Italy, where it’s recognized as an official regional language. (A 2001 attempt by the French culture ministry to recognize regional languages was rejected by the country’s constitutional council.) No one really knows how many people use Occitan regularly because the French government has never done a survey. Unofficial estimates suggest that several hundred thousand speak one or another form of Occitan as a private, or “intimate” language, at home and among close friends. Almost nowhere in France is it used in the workplace.
Even the Occitan accent is effectively banned from public life. If one wants to get ahead in the French civil service, one must drop one’s Occitan or Provençal inflections. (Provençal is perhaps the most widely used variant of Occitan.) Today just a handful of private secondary schools offer classes in Occitan. A few cultural groups, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning 19th century Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, quietly promote the language and literature.
The most visible – and audible – proponents of Occitan today are not linguists or history buffs, but contemporary musicians. These are no purists: their music blends modern folk music, the music of the medieval troubadors, Brazilian rhythms and, most notably, Jamaican reggae. The two groups featured in this piece – the Fabulous Trobadors from Toulouse and Massilia Sound System from Marseille – play highly danceable music whose often-humorous (and often-political) lyrics mix French with Occitan, so as not to alienate French-speaking audiences. Other groups add a dose of Beur, the popular Arabic spoken by North Africans all over France.
The result is a music that borrows cheerfully across centuries and borders – but that signals an increasingly serious disenchantment with the suppression of regional identities, languages and cultures.
– Julian Crandall Hollick
Date
August 21, 2004Outlets
All Things Considered -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
The Free Monks
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
The Free Monks
In Greece, the Orthodox Church has always presented itself as the guardian of national identity. But some think it’s not doing enough to protect the country from western domination. We meet a rock band made up of black-robed monks whose music rails against globalization and the “New World Order.”
In Greece, national identity has been a hot topic since long before the country declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821, and the Greek Orthodox Church has always been at the center of the discussion. The Church took a leading role in the war of independence, and has considered itself the guardian of Greek identity ever since. Until recently, few Greeks challenged that.
In the last few years, things have gotten a little more complicated. Greece is now part of the European Union (EU); immigration is gradually increasing; Greeks travel abroad and use the Internet; tourism and mass media have exposed almost everyone to foreigners and their ways. For a country that takes great pride in its ethnos (the word means “nation”), the outside world is both a temptation and a threat. Not surprisingly, Greeks are divided on how to move forward.
The Orthodox Church has always been resistant to change – especially change that comes from outside. That resistance has hardened under the leadership of Archbishop Christodoulos, who has been highly vocal in his opposition to the forces of western-led globalization.
The archbishop was particularly visible during a recent controversy over national identity cards. The previous government, which was socialist, wanted to replace the old cards with new ones that would comply with EU standards. That meant, among other things, eliminating any mention of religious affiliation.
Archbishop Christodoulos led the battle against the proposal, ultimately collecting three million signatures out of a total population of just under 11 million. The government prevailed, but the popular view was that the prime minister had caved in to foreign pressure and foreign ideas.
Fr. Nektarios Moulatsiotis, founder of the Free Monks music group (and of the monastery of Saints Augustine and Seraphim Sarof), has made it his mission to keep young Greeks from caving in. He turned to popular culture after working for years in youth recreation programs and summer camps and seeing the power that the media had over teenagers. He hosts regular call-in shows on TV and radio, and publishes two magazines (one for youth, one for adults). Each of these efforts is part of a larger campaign to reach out to the nation’s youth through the mass media.
Christian media (and Christian Rock) may be old news in the US, but in Greece the idea is revolutionary. For generations, the Church has been seen as benign and dignified, appreciated for its stability, its historic importance, and its role in celebrating rituals like baptisms, weddings and funerals. Because nearly all Greeks are born Orthodox (more than 95% of the population is baptized), the Church has seen little need to reach out to youth. The belief has been that if teens need help, they will come and seek it.
Citing new threats to the Greek ethnos, Fr. Nektarios blasts priests for their complacency, accusing them of being more interested in collecting their paychecks (priests and bishops are state employees) than in defending the Church and the nation.
But his message to youth is even stronger. The Free Monks’ songs are not just about the redeeming power of God’s love or the importance of Christian values. Lyrics speak of Satan disguised as western culture, of the brainwashing of Greeks by multinational corporations, of the dangers of electronic surveillance, of a global conspiracy to steal away souls. Whether young people are internalizing the message or not, they are buying the albums. Although the media frenzy has died down since Free Monks’ debut in 2000, the group has remained a fixture on the Greek pop scene.
– Jonathan Miller
Thanks to: Lina Molokotos Liederman, Effie Fokas, Maria Paravantes, Fr. Athinagoras, Matthew Brunwasser, Faidra Papavasiliou.
Date
August 16, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Roma Love Story
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Roma Love Story
In May 2004, eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union, whose laws forbid child marriage. Some Roma see this as a death sentence for their culture. But not Gyula and Marika Vámosi of Pecs, Hungary.
Returning from almost any journalistic raid – which is what I always feel I’m conducting when I enter the private lives of people I don’t know, bearing a microphone – it’s the unrecorded sounds and gestures that linger longest.
Rolling by train through the flat Hungarian countryside from baroque, sophisticated, once imperial, now global Budapest, I see tiny village after tiny village beside the railway stops. Small wooden, stone or stucco houses; thick, dark windows. One church steeple, invariably Catholic. An electric line, loping across immense fields, tilled by the sorts of enormous tractors you see in Kansas or Nebraska.
One day Gyula Vámosi and I drove to one of those villages a half hour outside his home city of Pecs. We were trying to find a young Roma woman who had been abandoned by her husband. The houses seemed to be in good condition. There were maybe 45 or 50. I asked Gyula what these people did. They are farmers, he answered. I told him I didn’t understand how that could be possible – there were too many houses, too many people for the number of farms. Big fields and big tractors mean only a few people are actually working the land.
It’s hard to explain, he said. Once upon a time, the farmers all lived in the village and had little plots. This was before the war, before the Soviet era. Then the farms were collectivized. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, many of the old farmers got their land back, but most didn’t really want to farm anymore. And anyway, the big tractors had already come, and you can’t go back to the old ways. So now a lot of the people in the village have a cooperative share in the farms, from which they get, say, so many bushels of wheat, so many tons of sugar beets.
And what might a household do with seven tons of wheat? Well, they don’t actually get the wheat, he said. A kind of informal barter market opens up. I’ll trade my seven tons of wheat to a bigger “farmer” who will give me a credit he has with a plumber. If I don’t need any plumbing, the plumber will trade my plumbing credit for a credit he has with a car mechanic, who can fix my car or maybe get me a used car from his brother, who sells them.
And the Roma, can they take part in all this? Gyula raised his eyebrows. No… and yes. The Roma, of course, never got to own farms, even if they lived in the villages. That’s still true, but you know how markets are. Then he returned to the theme he struck again and again during our days together. We don’t ask, we Roma, for anything special. Just to stop the discrimination so we can live like anybody else.
In the meantime many, maybe most, Romas live in a world that’s betwixt and between. Not fully Hungarian, not fully traditional. Not always official, not always underground. Often they make money doing what others would prefer not to do. Gyula’s father-in-law became a successful dealer in junk and scrap metal, a respectable business. But other junk metal dealers find it easier to work the chopped-up car parts game in certain large American cities.
Talking to Gyula about all this brought me back to something Marika, his wife, had told me about child marriage. By the time the boys are 17 or 18, and working two jobs, with their wives at home feeding three babies, they simply give up. They drink. They go away. They find some kind of “easy work” – buying and selling whatever it is that wealthier Hungarians would like to have, leaving teenage mothers in little places that look like farm towns but have no farmers.
– Frank Browning
Date
August 28, 2004Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Return of the Hellenes
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Return of the Hellenes
More than 95% of all Greeks are Orthodox. But recently there’s been a revival of interest in the pre-Christian past. For some, that means taking another look at ancient Greek ideals like reason and democratic debate. For others, it means worshiping the Olympian gods. All say their eyes are on the future.
Modern Greeks tend to be proud of their past, and with good reason. Ancient Greece produced an astonishing array of philosophers, scientists, architects, planners, poets, and dramatists. It also produced a memorable cast of celestial beings, whose exploits have entertained and enlightened countless generations around the world.
It’s an oddly double-sided legacy. While the great thinkers engaged in rational debate about the nature of things, the gods used trickery and force to get what they wanted. While Plato and Aristotle tried to determine how humans should behave, the gods often acted like, well, humans: petty, jealous, capricious, and cruel.
Eastern Orthodoxy, which became Greece’s official religion in the 4th century, drew from both these traditions. It incorporated aspects of paganism (allowing cults of the Virgin Mary and of many saints, along with the veneration of religious icons); it also claimed some concepts of classical philosophy as central to its dogma. For the Church, Orthodoxy (it means “right belief”) is therefore the ultimate expression of Greek civilization. And indeed, for more than 1,500 years, most Greeks have viewed their legacy through an Orthodox prism.
In the last few years, though, some have come to distrust that prism, and to say so in public. While Church membership is still extremely high (more than 95% of all Greeks are at least nominally Orthodox) and the leadership is still deeply involved in state affairs, there has been a resurgence of popular interest in the pre-Christian past. With it has come a small explosion of pagan groups, philosophical societies, Spartan schools, “Hellenist” magazines, and performances of classical theater.
Zissis Papadimitriou, a sociologist at the University of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, says foreign travel, international integration, and economic pressure have ironically fueled the renewed interest in antiquity. “Because of globalization, because of the European Union, the Greek people are in a period of transformation,” he says. “So they are seeking a new identity – a Greek identity.”
Papadimitriou says national identity has long been a political football in Greece, and the Orthodox Church has always been right in the middle of the game. The Church played a crucial role in the battle for Greek independence in the 19th century, and still works hard to connect itself in people’s minds with the very concept of “Greekness,” based on what it calls “Helleno-Christianity.” The political right has often called on Greece’s glorious past to rally public opinion against foreign influence.
But Papadimitriou says the new Hellenism is different. Although the revivalists are diverse – some are New Agers, others atheists, others humanists – the overall impulse isn’t nationalist, he says, but cosmopolitan. “As a country, as a people, we are too small to be important economically. We have to play a cultural role in the world, and to play this role we have to have a very strong identity.”
Like many of those propelling the revival, Tryphon Olympios became fascinated with classical Greece – and with his own Greek identity – when he moved overseas. Olympios, founder of the “Return of the Hellenes Movement” (an umbrella group for revivalists of many stripes), fled to Sweden under Greece’s military junta and taught philosophy at university in Stockholm for 18 years. Although he presides over neo-pagan rituals, he says he is not religious. His philosophical work deals with the future, not the past. He says ancient Greece provides a model of a world where freedom of thought – and freedom of religion – is paramount.
“We want to develop a free individual, free from superstitions and free from dogmas. No one tries to impose on you how to worship your god or practice your faith.”
One of the most visible facets of the revivalist movement has been the campaign for recognition for the Dodecatheon, or “Religion of the Twelve Gods.” The campaign has hardly been successful: polytheists have twice applied to the Greek religion ministry for official status, and twice they have been ignored. Coverage of the movement in the popular press has not been flattering. (The word many Greeks use when asked about the pagans is “funny.”) But the movement has been attracting attention.
Not everyone who practices the old religion is a true believer. Many Hellenes see pagan-inspired ritual not as an expression of religious conviction, but as a way to bring people together – and to provide a platform for their complaints about the Church.
“If people want to believe in the gods they can, but we don’t believe that,” says Marina Tontis, a computer programmer who attends the “Return of the Hellenes” gathering on Mount Olympus each year. “The difference between philosophy and religion is that philosophy is open to all ideas, and religion is based on dogma.”
Tontis, who spent eight years in Chicago, helped found a philosophical club in Thessaloniki. The Apollonian Society meets twice a week in a former storefront. It has no sign, but the door is open during meetings and anyone is free to join. Apollo is their favored deity, and the group can talk for hours about cosmology and mythology, but they are not believers. “We support the investigation of our cultural background,” Tontis says. “To find messages, good messages, to bring to today’s world.”
– Jonathan Miller
Thanks to: Matthew Brunwasser, Jamil Said, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Barry Strauss, Aristoteles Mentzos, Faidra Papavasiliou.
Date
August 5, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Resurrecting the Zápara
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Resurrecting the Zápara
The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.
Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador’s Zápara Indians, was terrified. Not of New York’s massive buildings that towered far beyond the tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn’t dream.
To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It was in a dream that Bartolo’s shaman father saw that his people, down to just a few dozen, weren’t supposed to vanish after all, as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father, now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation’s helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.
The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash – not a lot, but enough to be tempting and disruptive.
After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. “In my dream,” he recalled, “there was a man with two faces, one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy. When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul.”
When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream to wishful thinking.
After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador’s Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru. All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a new threat hanging over their heads?
That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the last sector of Ecuador’s jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people’s future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.
It seems impossible – until you meet them. We came away from the Zápara recalling that there’s a name for those people who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.
They’re called dreamers.
– Alan Weisman and Nancy Hand
Date
July 30, 2004Other Contributor(s)
Nancy HandOutlets
Living on Earth -
Dmae Roberts
Worlds of Difference
Tell Me Wai
Dmae Roberts
Worlds of Difference
Tell Me Wai
Musicians Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor learned to speak Maori in college, after the New Zealand government made it an official national language. Now they’re part of a new generation of Maoris who have decided to move their culture forward rather than leave it behind.
I’ve been interested in Maori culture since I saw my first Tiki jade pendant and wondered about the story behind the symbolic carving. The movie “Whale Rider” further sharpened my desire to visit New Zealand and learn more about the Maoris.
In 2003, I spent a month in beautiful Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand means “land of the long white cloud”). I toured Maori towns and went to traditional performances and concerts. What stood out was the palpable sense of pride felt by both performers and audiences. It seemed a new pride, fresh and hopeful. And in fact I learned that it was new, having emerged largely after the Maori language became “official” in 1987.
I was especially impressed by how the revival of the language and the resurgence of interest in Maori traditions had not just boosted the morale of the Maoris, but of white New Zealanders as well. Everywhere in New Zealand, Maori is present alongside English in street signs, in advertising and on television. Every New Zealander I met used the Maori phrase kia ora – an all-purpose greeting, goodbye, and exclamation.
It is against that backdrop that I discovered WAI. The name means “water” in Maori. Many contemporary New Zealand groups sing in Maori, but WAI does it expressly with the mission of passing on the language on to the young. I heard their CD and knew I had to contact them.
Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor welcomed me into their home on Titahi Bay near Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. They told me that they’d only learned to speak Maori in college. They had been part of the English-language music scene before they decided to sing strictly in the language of their ancestors. When I asked Mina to identify herself she launched into a long recitation of the names of those ancestors, ending with her own name as the latest descendant.
Maaka took a 200-year-old conch shell that had been soaking in the bathtub and played it like a trumpet. As I was to learn when I saw WAI perform in Seattle, they use the shell to begin their shows. Then comes the electronica, which seems to grow organically from beats of the poi – balls on strings that they swing so they hit each other in rhythmic patterns.
Whenever I heard traditional Maori singing in New Zealand, the music reached deep inside me – the plaintive calls to ancestors, the retelling of old stories that seemed somehow to insist on their continued relevance, even their urgency. WAI’s music has that sense of urgency to me. It seems to say, “Here I am. Remember me. I’m alive.”
– Dmae Roberts
Date
July 26, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Vera Frankl
Worlds of Difference
Connecting the Hebrides, Part 2
Vera Frankl
Worlds of Difference
Connecting the Hebrides, Part 2
Scotland’s Outer Hebrides are home to some of the purest Gaelic culture on earth – but they’re a tough place to make a living. That may be changing. In the second part of a two-part series, Vera Frankl looks at how the Internet is transforming the economy and helping keep the culture alive.
Scotland’s Outer Hebrides are home to some of the purest Gaelic culture on earth – but they’re a tough place to make a living. That may be changing. In the second part of a two-part series, Vera Frankl looks at how the Internet is transforming the economy and keeping the culture alive.
Vera’s reporter’s notebook accompanies Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1.
Date
July 6, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Vera Frankl
Worlds of Difference
Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1
Vera Frankl
Worlds of Difference
Connecting the Hebrides, Part 1
In the first part of a two-part series about change in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, Vera Frankl visits “crofters” (small-scale farmers) who are finally taking control of their land after centuries of working for absentee landlords.
Driving down the two-lane road that links north and south Lewis, I panicked. It looked and felt like driving through a moonscape – flat, featureless moorland and peat bog, with not a human being nor a house in sight. The road signs, written in Gaelic, with English translations in much smaller characters, just added to my sense of dislocation. It made me want to drive very, very fast – if only in the hope of seeing a tree. I could have saved myself the effort. On this island, I was to find out, there are none.
The monotony of the landscape was broken by an occasional cluster of small grey houses, dominated by churches so large they looked completely out of place. Their appearance spoke volumes: this island, like most in the Outer Hebrides, is a stronghold of Presbyterianism. The Sabbath is so strictly observed that no one, I was told, would risk hanging out their washing on a Sunday. It’s only a few years since planes from the Scottish mainland, forty miles away, were granted permission to land here on the Sabbath. Ferry companies are still fighting for the same privilege.
I live in London, but being on the Isle of Lewis felt very much like being in a foreign land, and in a way it was. A foreign land battered for much of the year by lashing gales and driving rain. Only in summer, when the days are long and (sometimes) the sun shines, can a visitor truly appreciate its stark beauty: vast skies, endless white beaches and silence, pierced only by the sound of wheeling seagulls. But as one person put it, it takes a certain intestinal fortitude to live here. Even in company, the sense of solitude and isolation can be overwhelming.
This string of islands some 150 miles long, forty miles off the Scottish coast in the North Atlantic, is of course part of Great Britain. But the islands’ remoteness – and until recently, their inaccessibility – has ensured that they retain a character all their own. The Gaelic and Norse history of the communities here is ancient and unique; many still grow up with Gaelic as their first language. The music that they make also celebrates this uniqueness – tunes hundreds of years old, played on the bagpipes, the accordion, the tin whistle, the fiddle and a small harp known as the clarsach. Not to mention the utterly haunting sound of unaccompanied Gaelic singing.
But decades of depopulation and unemployment have taken their toll on these islands, undermining the viability of both the economy and the culture. The challenge they face now is to open up to the world outside and embrace the future. Not all the islanders are ready for that. But it may be the only way of conserving what they value most about their way of life.
– Vera Frankl
Date
July 5, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Ladino Transformation
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Ladino Transformation
Bulgaria’s Jews are survivors, but the language they have spoken for centuries is in trouble. Sandy Tolan visits with some of Bulgaria’s last Ladino speakers as they try to keep the tongue from going silent.
Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit the country you’ll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children and head for – where? You’ve heard that you will be safe in a faraway place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.
So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria, along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a name of its own: Ladino.
In 2003, I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in tracing her story I’d come to understand how it was that she came to be born – how most of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised to find that I could communicate in Spanish – not perfectly, as many of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of March, 1943 – how they and their families avoided the trains bound for Treblinka.
One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino, which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and proverbs, and to teach the next generation – sprightly 60-somethings – what they know. Often they’re joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi, whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations of a long, deep history.
If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria, where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold. Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the 1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the hope is that the language won’t die there – that the tongue may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.
– Sandy Tolan
Date
July 5, 2004Other Contributor(s)
Melissa RobbinsOutlets
All Things Considered -
Victoria Mauleón
Worlds of Difference
Basque Family Ties
Victoria Mauleón
Worlds of Difference
Basque Family Ties
American filmmaker Victoria Mauleón has always avoided political topics on her yearly visits to her father’s family near Pamplona. This time she packed a microphone.
My heart flutters as I swerve along the one-lane road leading to Arroniz, the medieval village where my father was born. I’ve spent almost every summer of my life here, in this town, population 500, where half the people share my last name. But this is the first time I’ve come with an ulterior motive: I want to get my family, divided for generations on the issue of Basque nationalism, to talk about what it means for them to be Basque.
I round the final hairpin turn and smile at the first site of Arroniz, its rows of stone houses hugging the slopes of a steep mountain. I drive along the only paved road, flanked by the few bars that comprise the town’s cultural center. I turn and climb the hill toward Carasol, my family’s ancestral home. When I step out of the car, the sweet familiar scent of sage greets me. A swarm of sparrows circles above. I call our street the “widows’ row,” because the only people left are a half-dozen whiskered ladies, always dressed in black. They’ve known my family forever. They call me “La Americana.” As soon as they see me, they squeeze me and kiss me and fill me in on the town gossip.
Carasol is vacant most of the year, but today my cousins, my Uncle Pedro and Aunt Yosune and I will fill the place with the scents and sounds of a chuletada – lamb chops roasted over dried grape vines. I’ve always known that this branch of the family believed in an independent Basque state. But this is the first time all of us have sat down to talk politics. We are all shocked when our uncle Pedro declares his support of the terrorist group ETA. For the first time, my cousin Samuel expresses his sadness over his inability to learn Basque, thanks to repression by the former dictator, Francisco Franco.
Also for the first time, my cousin Juan Mari talks about having to overcome negative stereotypes about the Basque people.
As we talk, it dawns on met that we are speaking Spanish, but this place somehow doesn’t feel like Spain. Yet I can’t quite figure out what defines these people, this setting, even me, as Basque. Here is part of our conversation:
Pedro: I personally consider myself Basque. I’m not Spanish.
Juan Mari: I, of course, also consider myself Basque.
Samuel: I also consider myself Basque. And I have nothing against Spaniards or anyone, or Americans.
Yosune: I also consider myself, like he just said. And I have nothing against Spaniards or anyone, but I consider myself Basque, Basque, Basque.
Samuel: (sings a Basque song) It means I’m Basque and I’m proud.
Yosune: When people hear this, they’re going to think these guys are…
Juan Mari: They’re going to say, ‘Vicky, are you sure you feel safe over there, because it sounds like they’re all terrorists.’ (laughs)
Victoria: (laughs) I feel very, very safe. My most daunting interview is with my aunt Mari Carmen and her husband Jose Mari. Mari Carmen is my father’s youngest sister, and when she married the pro-Franco heir to a canned asparagus empire, she alienated her brothers, most of them landless laborers. And although over the years, my uncles have put aside their differences long enough to celebrate weddings, communions and chuletadas together, there’s always been an underlying resentment.
I sit down for a meal with Mari Carmen, Jose Mari and Uncle Pedro. About a minute into our discussion Uncle Pedro gets up and quietly excuses himself. It strikes me that for my uncles’ generation, people in opposing ideological camps can share a meal together, but they can’t talk politics without one or both of them walking away. But Pedro’s absence enables Jose Mari to speak more freely. I can only imagine how Pedro would have reacted upon hearing his brother-in-law call Basques “hicks,” or call the influx of Basque-speaking people into Pamplona an “invasion,” or compare the Basque independence movement to Hitler.
Years ago, Jose Mari and I hiked to the top of Monjardín, a Roman-era fortress. We looked out over the miles of vineyards, olive orchards and wheat fields, and he said, “You’ll never see a more beautiful place than Navarra.” Now, sitting at the table listening to him, I realize his condemnation of the separatist movement comes from the fear that they’ll take his beloved Navarra away.
Like his father Pedro, my cousin Txema (pronounced Chema) always embraced the idea of Basque independence. So I’m surprised when he says the fight for statehood is unrealistic and unwise. He’s now the minister of culture for a left-leaning political party, Batzarre, and Txema explains the party’s approach to ending violence in the region.
When I meet up with my cousin Armando in Madrid, Armando says he’s “sickened and saddened” by “the fear and the blackmail” that make discussion of the issues so difficult. “That’s the problem: not only has this fight been radicalized between the ETA and the governing powers, but it’s also been radicalized between everyday people.”
But we both take comfort in the direction our family is going. We cousins embrace dialogue, compromise, tolerance. My aunt Yosune’s sons have even joined with my aunt Mari Carmen’s sons to open a hotel – Hotel Mauleón. That’s something our parents’ generation would never have dreamed of doing.
On my way to the airport, I get that choked-up feeling I get every time I leave my family. I feel I’m being yanked apart from people who share more than just my pale skin, my black hair, my last name, my blood. What does it mean to be Basque? What’s the best way forward? I think about how the fight over these questions has ripped so many families apart. While our parents still bear the scars of this struggle, for my generation, the scars seem to be fading. And while this discovery might not have given me the answers I was looking for, it has given me hope.
– Victoria Mauleón
Date
July 3, 2004Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Maasai Schools
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Maasai Schools
The Maasai people of Kenya have long considered public education as a trick designed to rob them of their culture. Now many see the schools as a key to survival – and as a way to change some aspects of their culture that need changing.
From Afghanistan to Arizona, schools are at the center of nearly every struggle over cultural identity. Governments use schools to instill common values, to prepare young people to contribute economically, to create citizens. Minority groups often see them as machines designed to strip their people of their language, their traditions, their beliefs.
Until recently, that was the prevailing view among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania. The Maasai (numbering about 400,000) are traditionally cattle herders who follow their animals on seasonal migrations. They are proud of their warriors, or ilmuran, and fiercely defensive of their independence. When the British ruled East Africa, the Maasai used passive resistance to ensure that their culture remained intact – refusing to take up agriculture, to settle in towns, or to send their children to school.
Now the Maasai are finding that passive resistance isn’t enough. Agriculture and urbanization have eaten up much of their grazing land. Communications and roads have exposed young Maasai to the temptations and opportunities of the outside world. Many are now questioning traditional practices such as polygamy, early marriage, and female circumcision (also known as female genital mutilation, or FGM).
Some Maasai worry that change is coming too fast. “The foundation of our culture is respect and unity,” says Oloiboni Ole Pareiyo, a 65-year-old herder. “What is happening with modernity is that it is undermining the very principle on which the culture is founded.”
Others disagree. They say the only way to survive as a people is to adapt to changing realities. Education, they argue, need not be seen as a surrender to mainstream culture, but rather as a way to fix those aspects of their own culture that need fixing – particularly in the treatment of women and girls. In the end, they say, their culture will be stronger.
Minority groups in many parts of the world have tried to reconcile these sorts of differences by establishing “bicultural” models of education, where modern skills are taught alongside traditional concepts and practices. The idea is not to force young people to choose between two systems, but rather to help them see that western-style modernity and tradition can coexist – and even reinforce one another.
Koitamet Olekina, executive director of the nonprofit Maasai Education Discovery, says his organization hopes to bring elders into the schools and incorporate cultural teachings into the public school curriculum (an idea that the government, concerned about divisions between the country’s 40 ethnic groups, has resisted). He is also pushing for flexibility in the school calendar, to respect the rhythms of the herding life. But staying away from school, he says, is not an option. The only way the Maasai can defend their interests is if they can find ways to succeed economically and politically. That means mastering modern skills.
For Kenya, emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, modern education is a top priority. In 2003, incoming President Mwai Kibaki made primary education compulsory and free. Despite a range of problems (including teacher shortages and a lack of classroom space), that year saw a significant jump in the number of Maasai students attending rural schools.
But primary education is only part of the picture, particularly when it comes to preparing students for a modernizing economy. Secondary schools (many of them residential) are still too costly and too distant for most Maasai families. When children are away at school, they cannot help with herding or other daily responsibilities. And for many parents, sending a daughter to secondary school is considered a poor investment, given that she will live with her husband’s kin once she is married. As a result, the number of Maasais with secondary school or college diplomas is still very small.
Maasai journalist Michael Ole Tiampati is a great believer in education. He left his village for one of Kenya’s most competitive high schools, and has traveled and worked in America and Europe. Yet he also takes part in traditional age-group ceremonies and says becoming a respected elder is a major life goal. Rather than see education as a threat, he says, the Maasai have to see it as way to move the culture forward. But he acknowledges the danger.
“Enlightenment, not bombardment is what we need,” he says. “The Maasai need knowledge to manage the situation that is facing us. We know in the back of our minds that there is no escape. The noose is tightening.”
– Jonathan Miller
Date
June 7, 2004Outlets
Morning Edition -
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
The Imaginary Village
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
The Imaginary Village
In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. More than 50 years later, the villages of Palestine remain intact in the imaginations of refugees and their descendants.
I’ve been traveling to the Holy Land for about ten years now, and early on in my journeys I came across something deeper, quieter, and more melancholy than the noise and blood and rage of endlessly recurring headlines. I could see it in the faces of aging women in exile, transfixed before the television screen on Christmas Day, gazing at the Church of the Nativity, just at the end of Star Street, where they were born. I could hear it in the voices of grandfathers remembering a family lemon tree, or the silk and indigo of the Wednesday market, or the truckloads of zetuns bound for the olive press at harvest time.
This was longing: an attachment to land and village going back to 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes in the new state of Israel.
In my trips to the West Bank, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, I would come to understand that this sense of longing could not be disconnected from the current violence, or from the “peace process” that never leads to peace.
Indeed, the longing for 1948 seems the one main thing unexamined in the countless words of copy and miles of videotape spilled over the Arab-Israeli conflict.
For the elderly refugee living in a camp in southern Lebanon, who can gaze upon the lights of his native land, or for the middle-aged exile in Nebraska whose mother still holds the key to a stone house that no longer exists, the longing forges into political and human aspiration, embodied in a phrase that is never far from Palestinian lips: the right of return. Yet the longing also creates a physical and psychic disembodiment. For many refugees, the memories, even passed onto the third generation removed from the village, seem more vivid and real than the camps where their families have lived for more than 50 years.
“My home,” a young man in a camp near Beirut told me, “is the homeland I have never seen.”
Despite several UN resolutions, and after years of ambiguous language, the United States has now endorsed Israel’s long-standing position: that a Palestinian return to the 1948 homeland is no longer an option. And indeed, that homeland is, in some ways, imaginary. Yet the aspiration is real, and as deep and abiding as it has ever been.
– Sandy Tolan
Thanks to Jay Allison and our friends at Transom.org. Original music composed and performed by Mohsen Subhi Abdelhamid.
Date
June 5, 2004Other Contributor(s)
Melissa RobbinsOutlets
Transom.org -
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
Mezcal Dreams
Marianne McCune
Worlds of Difference
Mezcal Dreams
Mexican migrants to the U.S. send back billions of dollars to their families every year, but their absence comes at a price. Marianne McCune reports on one tiny pueblo that is brewing up plans to keep its people from leaving.
When Americans debate how to regulate the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans crossing the border to work in the U.S. each year, they sometimes forget the toll migration takes back home. That toll is especially high in rural areas, where families are divided, villages are deserted and cherished traditions are gradually slipping away.
But in the tiny pueblo of Zoochila, in Mexico’s southeastern sierra, a group of would-be entrepreneurs is brewing up a reason to keep their friends and neighbors from leaving.
“The idea is to create a source of work so that people don’t have to go,” explains Francisco Siguenza, the pueblo’s volunteer treasurer. Instead of exporting workers to America, Siguenza and about 20 other Zoochilan men hope to send thousands of bottles of top-quality, hand-made mezcal – a fiery local liquor made from the spiky maguey plant.
It may sound like a simple plan, but it is full of hubris. The forces driving the Mexican migration have been building for decades. Since World War II, tens of millions of Mexicans have been drawn to the U.S. by the promise of jobs and economic opportunity. Communities throughout Mexico have come to depend on the dollars the migrants send back. About half of Zoochila’s 300 families are now based in America, most of them in Los Angeles.
Erasmo Luna Mateos lived in L.A. for about 20 years before returning to Zoochila. But he’s one of the few who have come home for good. “Once people get used to making money over there, it’s hard for them to come back,” he admits.
Visit Zoochila during its annual fiesta and you’d think the town was booming. There are bull-wrangling competitions, basketball matches and native dance performances. Local bands parade up and down the dusty streets. Returnees from LA videotape everything and dance the local jarabe into the wee hours. Their cash and the local mezcal make for a festive blend.
But when the celebration is over the picture looks very different. Sturdy new houses stand empty in their lots. The handsome town hall has been restored, but the all-volunteer government is stretched perilously thin. Residents fear that Zoochila, like other nearby mountain villages, could become a ghost town.
Members of Zoochila’s mezcal collective know it won’t be easy to compete with more established producers for a piece of the export market. One of the few companies that sells traditional, single-pueblo mezcal in the United States has only just begun to have some success. “I’ve devoted nine years to building a market,” says Ron Coooper, owner of the export company Del Maguey. “It’s overwhelming.”
Zoochilans are well aware of how time-consuming and expensive it is to produce a distinctive liquor of consistently high quality. And they know that they’ll need to do more than just break even if they want to lure their townsfolk back from America. But they’ve done the math and they believe they can succeed.
Erasmo Luna’s daughter, Mercedes, has also done the math. She says she probably couldn’t have gone to high school if her father hadn’t been sending money home. But she insists that 20 years without him wasn’t worth it. “Who cares if we didn’t have money?” she says. “We wanted our Papa to take care of us, to hug us.”
– Marianne McCune
Date
April 21, 2004Outlets
All Things Considered -
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
North End Neighborhood
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
North End Neighborhood
Boston’s North End is bursting with Old World charm. But a proposed commercial development has newcomers and old-timers at odds over the type of neighborhood they want to live in. Their positions aren’t what you might expect.
When the Molinari brothers agreed to show a visitor around their historic neighborhood, they could have chosen to meet at Caffe Vittoria, with its marble countertops and towering Pavoni espresso machine. Or at Maria’s, a bare-bones bakery with marzipan in the window and the best sfogliatelle in Boston. They could have chosen any of more than 100 Italian cafés, pastry shops and restaurants within a five-block radius. But they didn’t. They picked Starbucks.
The Molinaris (Richard, 56, and Ben, 58) have lived most of their lives in Boston’s North End, and as they walk through the neighborhood they point to some of its invisible history. The condominium where they live today was an abandoned warehouse where they played as boys. Up the street is a wine store owned by an aunt. At the Sacred Heart Church, they stop to greet Father Vincenzo Rosato. “The church was like just another room in our house,” says Ben. “And it still is!”
They remember the stoop where their grandfather used to sit in the evenings, singing and playing the mandolin. (He was a successful silversmith, as was the North End’s most famous resident, Paul Revere.) They point to the house where their mother was born, across the street from the birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose grandparents came from Ireland long before the Italians started arriving. For more than 200 years, the North End of Boston was the classic American immigrant ghetto. Its narrow streets and brick tenements were home to wave upon wave of working class immigrants – English, African, Irish, Jewish and, beginning the late 1800s, Italian. When Richard and Ben Molinari were boys, the North End was known to outsiders as “Little Italy.” But to residents, a street wasn’t simply “Italian”, but Genovese, Sicilian, Milanese, or Neopolitan.
Most of the Italians are gone now, driven out by gentrification and soaring real estate values. And while their legacy is visible everywhere – in colorful pastry shops, noisy restaurants and boutique grocery stores – it’s a prettified version of the way things used to be. An “Italian stage set,” Richard says.
Newer residents talk about the North End’s distinctive character, its Old World charm. Older residents shrug when they hear that. Back when it was their neighborhood, there were only a handful of restaurants. But for them, the North End has never been about restaurants or shops, let alone about authenticity or character. It’s about the connections between people. The shared history, the church, the thousand kindnesses and petty grudges that bind neighbors together. Today the North End may look something like it looked 50 years ago, but it’s a different place.
The Molinaris don’t blame anyone for that. They say the changes started long ago, part of a natural process for an immigrant neighborhood. “People come searching for a better life,” Ben says, “and they move in the direction of acquiring more things, bigger houses and so on.” Sitting in Starbucks, talking about the old days, the brothers’ conversation begins to sound less like a lament for a vanishing neighborhood, and more like a tribute to the way things are supposed to work in America. But then Ben pauses. “A lot of the good was jettisoned in the move toward wealth. It’s hard to hold onto your values. You have to look back as well as forward.”
– Allan Coukell
Date
April 13, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Reese Erlich
Worlds of Difference
Singapore Renewal
Reese Erlich
Worlds of Difference
Singapore Renewal
Singapore’s Chinatown used to be a crowded and chaotic place. Then the government renewed the life right out of it. Authorities are working to restore the neighborhood’s authenticity, but with little success. Little India, meanwhile, has retained its character. Is there a lesson here?
A generation ago, Singapore’s Chinatown was a crowded and chaotic place. Then the authorities launched a massive urban renewal campaign. They razed derelict buildings, modernized services and cracked down on informal businesses. Part of their justification was to make the district more attractive to tourists. But tourists stayed away, complaining that the place had lost its soul.
For the last two decades, officials have been working to bring back Chinatown’s authentic feel. Architecturally the project has been a success, but it hasn’t restored the old vitality. Critics say the streets today feel more like a shopping mall than a living neighborhood.
Little India is a very different story. You can still see the original shophouses built by the British, with commercial space on the bottom floor and living quarters above. Because the Indian community still comes here to shop, Little India remains a vibrant mix of neighborhood stores, restaurants, and temples.
Is there a lesson to be learned here?
Date
March 2, 2004Outlets
Common Ground Radio -
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 2
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 2
Exploring the rapidly changing worlds of France’s Muslims and Jews. In the second part of a two-part series, we meet the Chefegs, a Muslim family from the suburbs of Paris.
In France, the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity apply to individuals, not groups. And indeed for more than 200 years, members of ethnic and religious minorities have tried to integrate as completely as possible.
But today, French Muslims and Jews are under tremendous pressure to declare their differences.
In the second part of a two-part series, Frank Browning takes us into the world of the Chefegs, Muslims from the suburbs of Paris. For a fuller description, see Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1.
Date
February 19, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1
Frank Browning
Worlds of Difference
Rethinking France’s Republican Deal, Part 1
Exploring the rapidly changing worlds of France’s Muslims and Jews. In the first part of a two-part series, we meet the Alters, a Jewish family from Toulouse.
In France, the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity do not extend to ethnic or religious groups. The legal system does not recognize minority rights, and there is little patience for concepts such as affirmative action or identity politics. And indeed for more than 200 years, immigrants and ethnic minorities have tried to integrate as quickly and completely as possible.
Today, though, Muslims and Jews are under tremendous pressure to declare their differences. The sources of this pressure are myriad, from the Israel-Palestine crisis and the global “war on terrorism” to simmering domestic issues of poverty and race. Religious fundamentalists (Muslim and Jewish, French and foreign) are urging young people to renounce the secular, assimilationist ways of their parents. Intellectuals are challenging one another to proclaim their Jewishness or Muslimness—to stop hiding behind their Frenchness, to take sides.
The “Republican Deal”
In the late 18th century, the “Republican deal” (recognition of individual rights, no recognition of the rights of communities) offered French Jews something they had never had before—the full benefits and protections of citizenship. For the French government, which had fought for centuries to suppress religious and regional identity movements, it was a way of settling once and for all the question of divided loyalty among its people, whether Bretons or Basques or Roman Catholics. Indeed, the period just after the revolution saw the seizing of church lands, and the beheading of priests and bishops.
By the early 20th century, France had removed the Church from running the public schools, and banned school prayer and crucifixes from school property. Meanwhile, French Jews (more commonly known as “Israelites”) enjoyed the most secure position they had ever known in Europe. Although Jewish identity did not disappear, it became private, nearly invisible. The ideals of the Republic melded easily with the universalist creed of the Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., Jews of central or eastern European origin) under the rubric of laicite : a commitment to secularism in all elements of public life.
The New French
Then came the Sixties. France, enjoying possibly the greatest boom in its history, needed workers. They came by the boatload, from the readiest source on hand—the old French colonies and protectorates of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Most assumed they would return home after a few years. But their attitude changed when they began having children – children who, little by little, were becoming French. By 1980, huge, austere housing complexes had sprouted in the outskirts of Paris, Marseilles and Lyon, filled largely with North Africans. Meanwhile, large numbers of Sephardic Jews (i.e., Jews of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern origin) moved from North Africa to France, bringing with them a much more public form of Judaism than that practiced by the Ashkenazis.
The economic boom subsided, jobs declined, and disaffection grew among the recent immigrants. A generation of North Africans grew up being told that they were French citizens, but finding few opportunities after their schooling was finished. The government had few answers. To the republicanists, American notions of “affirmative action” smacked of the sort of divisive group rights that the laic principle had sought to eliminate.
The current unrest was spurred by two seminal events: the second Palestinian Intifada , launched in 2000, protesting Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; and the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Angry over their worsening situation in France, frustrated by the prospect of becoming (as their parents had been) day laborers and street sweepers, many young French North Africans took the Intifada as a symbol of pride and self-determination. Fanned by sermons from extreme Islamist leaders, some came to see the “House of Israel” as a prime symbolic target.
The Pressure Mounts
Anti-Semitic incidents rose sharply from 2000 to 2002. Graffiti appeared, some children wearing yarmulkes were attacked, and a few Jewish schools and synagogues were burned. Ironically, these attacks became campaign fodder for the extreme rightist and one-time neo-Nazi leader Jean-Marie LePen. Not only an anti-Semite, LePen campaigned to send the Muslims back to Africa. In the presidential race of 2002, he won 20 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, the global resurgence of Islamic identity began to resonate among middle class immigrants who, for the most part, had kept their religion quiet. More adult women began to don the headscarf, or foulard . Some of their husbands refused to let them be treated by male gynecologists and surgeons. And some of their daughters decided to wear the foulard to school. The “Republican deal” was of little interest to young men and women who felt they were being treated as second class citizens anyway.
President Jacques Chirac responded by appointing a commission to examine the question of Muslim integration. It produced 26 recommendations, from special job training to safer housing to more aggressive social support programs in predominantly Muslim schools. The commission also recommended two new school holidays, one Jewish and one Muslim, as counterweights to the many holidays of Christian origin. And it recommended an absolute ban on “ostensible” religious symbols (including headscarves, large crosses and yarmulkes ) in the public schools. So far only the headscarf ban has received serious attention by the Chirac administration.
– Frank Browning
Date
February 18, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Reese Erlich
Worlds of Difference
Higher Ground: Borneo Resettlement
Reese Erlich
Worlds of Difference
Higher Ground: Borneo Resettlement
In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead.
In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead. Why does this model community work better than the official ones?
Date
February 17, 2004Outlets
Common Ground Radio -
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
Bringing Home the Bones
Allan Coukell
Worlds of Difference
Bringing Home the Bones
Members of the Haida nation retrieve ancestral remains from a museum in Chicago and carry them home for proper burial in the Queen Charlotte Islands, off Canada’s Pacific coast. It’s a journey full of pain and healing – and part of a worldwide movement among native groups to reclaim what is theirs.
The remains of 48 people sit in cedar boxes at the front of the Anglican Church in the village of Massett, at the northern end of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands. “Maybe we don’t know who these people are,” says the Reverend Lily Bell, “but we know they are our people.”
“Yes,” nods 83-year-old Ethel Jones, seated where she can see the boxes. Nonny (grandmother) Ethel’s life spans perhaps the most dramatic period of cultural change in the thousands of years since the Haida settled on this rainy archipelago.
Nonny Ethel was born during a period of decline. She grew up speaking only Haida, but by the middle of the 20th century, she had seen the language and many traditions all but abandoned. Now, seated among the bones of her ancestors, she wonders if she may be witnessing the return of what was lost.
Until the late 1800s, at least 10,000 Haida lived in large settlements scattered throughout these islands. An abundance of salmon, halibut and shellfish provided the material support for a culture that produced massive cedar houses, intricately carved and painted artifacts, and monumental totem poles that recorded family history and legend. Then smallpox came, killing nine out of ten Haida in the space of a few years. All but two of the villages were emptied. Museum collectors arrived to buy or steal artifacts and pillage graves.
The remains that will be reburied today were returned by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where they spent more than one hundred years in boxes and drawers. Another 84 bodies will be interred tomorrow. Other museums have also returned remains, more than 400 so far. More are yet to come. To describe the repatriations, the Haida use the word Yaghudangang, “to pay respect”. It is an important concept in a culture where respect for one’s elders and ancestors is inseparable from self-respect.
For the Haida, the repatriations are part of a much larger cultural and political resurgence. Driven by education, a renaissance in carving and other arts (and a new appreciation for Haida art on the part of outsiders), the movement has been gathering speed since the 1970s.Protests and negotiations in the 1980s led to protected status for much of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haida, who never signed a treaty with England or Canada, are still pursuing a legal case against the government, seeking the recognition of full aboriginal title over the archipelago.
And Nonny Ethel, along with other elders, now spends much of her time in the schools, teaching the language to a new generation. “In the old days, we snuck to speak it,” she says. “That’s why I’m in school trying to teach to the younger people. I think it will survive.”
Note that this story aired in two separate parts on NPR’s Day to Day.
Date
January 15 & 16, 2004Outlets
NPR -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Andean Harvest
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Andean Harvest
Peasant farmers in Peru’s central highlands grow hundreds of varieties of potatoes. Now they’re being encouraged to sell them to high-end consumers. But potatoes are more than just food in the Andes – they’re part of a complex spiritual, biological, and cultural universe. Will the market change that?
The anthropologist Richard Chase Smith describes indigenous culture in the Americas as “a tapestry woven from the vicissitudes of history, place, and daily life.” In the Andes, where daily life sometimes seems like it has been stripped to its bare essentials, that tapestry is far more intricate – and far stronger – than it may first appear.
Andean culture is a dense weave of the ancient and modern, the mystical and scientific. When planting or harvesting, farmers pay close attention not just to the weather, but also to the moon and stars. They say prayers to Catholic saints and make offerings to Pachamama, the earth mother. They consult with wise persons qualified to read the signs of nature. They listen to visitors: travelers, aid workers, scientists, pesticide salesmen. They watch to see what farmers in other communities are doing.
And before they make any major decisions, they meet with their neighbors and talk.
The system is extraordinary both for its complexity and its stability – and biodiversity is at its heart. Farmers in the Andes grow as many as 3,000 different kinds of potatoes, and hundreds of types of other crops. Diversity is not just a source of variety, or testimony to the staggering range of microclimates and ecological zones – it’s also a proven tool against diseases, pests, and other scourges.
Indeed a major reason for the great famine in Ireland in the 19th century was the fact that farmers there planted only one potato variety, which offered no resistance to phytophthera infestans, the “late blight” pathogen. The Irish disaster remains a powerful metaphor for the dangers of monoculture, both biological and human.
Lately the world has come to appreciate the value of agricultural biodiversity, as well as of the traditional knowledge of those who maintain it. Not surprisingly, there has been much talk within development circles about how to convert those assets into cash. But many farmers in the Andes are wary.
“They fear the possibility of losing their portfolio of native varieties,” explains Peruvian economist Manuel Glave. “Because they feel – and they know it is a fact – that the market does not demand 50 varieties. The market tends to demand a more homogeneous product.”
The market can also be fickle. For decades, Andean farmers were advised to replace their native potatoes with more marketable “improved” or “modern” varieties, particularly at lower altitudes. Tens of thousands did as they were told, then watched the prices fall so low that some years they can’t afford to harvest what they’ve sown.
But peasant farmers know that standing still is not an option. Even the most isolated Andean communities are fast becoming incorporated into the cash economy. How they manage the transition may determine whether their ancient tapestry will be torn to shreds, or made even more resilient and lovely.
– Jonathan Miller
Date
January 11, 2004Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Welsh Renaissance
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
Welsh Renaissance
Languages around the world are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. But Welsh is making a comeback, and children are leading the way. Now the challenge is to move Welsh from the classroom to the living room. Meet the Steel family of Clydach.
Along the border between England and Wales stand some of Great Britain’s most imposing castles. They are testimony to centuries of conflict between the two countries. The cannons have long been silent, and motorists cross the frontier today without encountering so much as a sign of welcome or good-bye. But in Wales, pride of place and pride of culture are still very much alive.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the effort to promote the Welsh language. In the 1890s, at least 70% of the people of Wales spoke Welsh. By the middle of the 20th century, the national language (known as Cymraeg, related to Cornish and Breton) appeared to be dying. It was still dominant in some areas (mainly to the west and north), but virtually everyone in Wales spoke English, and everything from road signs to traffic tickets were written in the imperial language. Students were punished for speaking Welsh in school, and the mass media flooded the country with English pop culture.
Linguists assumed that Welsh would go the way of Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland – the focus of much nationalist rhetoric, but spoken on a daily basis only in the poorest and most isolated areas.
Today the revival of Welsh is shaping up to be one of the world’s most impressive linguistic success stories. The census of 2001 showed, for the first time, an increase in Welsh speakers both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. The rise was especially marked among the young, and in traditionally English-speaking areas in the south and east.
“We can now say, hand on heart, that the language is in the ownership of people throughout Wales,” says John Walter Jones of the Welsh Language Board. “It is not something that is being ghettoized and left in a corner. It is there throughout society.”
Language activist Heini Gruffudd credits a century of grassroots campaigning for the resurgence of Welsh. As a young man, Gruffudd would dismantle English road signs in the dead of night. Other activists would ride their bicycles down the wrong side of the street, then refuse to pay their fines until the tickets were translated into Cymraeg.
Over time, the tactics became less symbolic and more practical. In 1971, parents founded the Nursery School Movement (Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin), and began setting up Welsh pre-schools and childcare centers. Today Welsh-medium education is solidly mainstream. About 25% of all primary-age children are enrolled in Welsh immersion schools. Studies show that these schools don’t just provide students with a strong foundation in the national language – graduates also do better in English.
Government has played its part. Laws enacted by Britain in 1967 gave Welsh official status in the courts. In 1993, parliament passed a much stronger Welsh Language Act, creating the language board and erasing the remaining legal inequities. Today the board supports innovative programs like “Twf” – a word that means “growth” in Welsh, and also stands for “Taking Welsh to Families.” In Twf (pronounced “toove”), parents are encouraged to speak Welsh with their children. That’s a challenge in a country where the great majority of young adults are native English speakers.
The Language Board claims that in homes in which both parents speak Welsh, there is a 92% chance that the children will also speak the language. Where only one parent speaks Welsh, the rate for the children drops to about 50%. Jones says English-speaking parents must come to believe that raising bilingual children makes educational and – especially – economic sense. Marketing materials produced by the language board tout the intellectual advantages of multilingualism, and point out that more and more companies require Welsh proficiency of their employees. But learning a new language is a serious commitment, and not everyone is sure it’s worth the effort.
No one in Wales expects Welsh to replace English. Nor does anyone claim that an ability to speak or understand a second language necessarily means that people will use it in everyday life. There may be Welsh classes and plays and poetry readings and road signs, but walk down the street in Cardiff or Swansea and you will rarely hear anything other than English.
“It’s a gradual thing,” says Jones. “You don’t invest in a language today and see the results tomorrow. Language does take time. We lost it over two or three generations. We’re going to regain it in two or three generations.”
– Jonathan Miller
Date
December 25, 2003Outlets
NPR -
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?
Alan Weisman
Worlds of Difference
Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?
The island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, is known for its misty beauty, quaint architecture, and distinctive cuisine. Now Chile’s government is proposing to build the longest bridge in Latin America to connect Chiloé to the mainland. Islanders aren’t sure they want to be connected.
Few human constructs are as innately graceful and pleasing as bridges. Literally and metaphorically, they connect us. Yet natives of Chiloé, an island the size of Puerto Rico off the coast of southern Chile, wonder lately if there may be such a thing as too much connection.
Isolated from the mainland by a turbulent channel, Chiloé developed its own proud culture, whose music, myths, and charming architecture today entice thousands of tourists each summer. However, Chile’s government now wants to celebrate its 2010 bicentennial by building the longest bridge in Latin America, joining Chiloé to the continent. Many islanders fear this would replace the romantic sea change that visitors undergo during the twenty-minute ferry passage with a non-eventful, three-minute car ride.
Worse, they claim, it would also end their uniqueness. They reject the rationale that a bridge means they’ll now have quicker access to emergency medical services on the mainland, arguing that it would be far cheaper simply to build Chiloé a decent hospital. The real reason for turning their island into a peninsula, they say, is development: The government has proclaimed that the bridge will make Chiloé the gateway to vast, hitherto inaccessible stretches of southern Chile, to extract lumber – and, especially, to cultivate an exotic fish.
Chile, which has no native salmon, is now the world’s second biggest salmon producer; with this bridge it could become number one. Marine biologists, already worried over the environmental strains of intensive fish farming, have further doubts about turning Chile’s entire southern coast into a giant salmon factory. Local stocks of sardines, mackerel, and anchovies used to make feed for farmed salmon, they warn, are already dangerously overdrawn. What, they ask, is the sense of building more fish farms, if there’s nothing left to feed them?
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos has promised that no public funds will be spent on the bridge. Instead, the first forty years’ toll revenues will go to the bridge’s private financiers. Industry projections, however, suggest that tolls could take more than a century to recoup construction costs, so no one is yet willing to undertake the $300 million project without guaranteed government subsidies. In turn, President Lagos, a former Minister of Public Works who won’t abandon the dream for this grand national monument, keeps postponing the construction bidding until a financing plan emerges.
Opponents say that a bridge makes no cultural, fiscal, or ecological sense—that it no longer symbolizes connection, but a profound disconnect between human pride and human wisdom. Yet many fear the president will renege on his promise not to subsidize, and build it anyway. Chiloé lore tells how local mythic spirits have dealt with hubris in the past: vanquishing the perpetrators with the likes of floods and earthquakes. In such an act of revenge, a legendary sea serpent named Quaiquaí originally separated Chiloé from the mainland. Since the bridge, if built, will be anchored to a notoriously unstable sea bottom, a question heard on Chiloé these days is: Might Quaiquaí strike again?
– Alan Weisman
Date
September 26, 2003Outlets
Living on EarthTags
Themes: Culture, EnvironmentRegions: South AmericaMedia: AudioOther Contributors: Alan Weisman -
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Camisea: A Light in the Jungle
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Camisea: A Light in the Jungle
For the native peoples of the Amazon, petroleum development has often been an environmental and cultural nightmare. But in Camisea, a huge natural gas deposit in eastern Peru, the oil companies say they’re committed to getting it right. The Machiguenga people aren’t yet convinced.
Long ago, in the hot, moist folds of the Amazon, a people walked and walked to keep the sun from setting. According to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Machiguenga believed if they ever stopped walking, the sun would fall from the sky. Then the missionaries came with new beliefs. Soon after, settlers arrived from the coast and the highlands. And now another wave, this time of businessmen who tell of a new kind of sun, below the ground, waiting to be transformed into light and money.
For a consortium of seven energy companies, including Hunt Oil of Texas, the vast natural gas deposit at Camisea represents potentially large profits through exports to the U.S., where demand is rising, and the conversion of vehicles and factories in Peru to natural gas. Officials in Peru say the Camisea field, one of the largest in the Americas, could mean energy independence for the nation. For the 10,000 Machiguenga navigating their way along the “River of the Moon,” the Camisea gas project means change, and the unknown.
Environmentalists and human rights organizations warn of irreparable damage to the Amazon and its people if the project moves forward as planned. They cite previous petroleum projects in Peru and Ecuador as reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, in Camisea. The energy companies respond that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, and that Camisea can be a model of how to do things right. It’s a debate that could affect the future of rainforest oil development around the world. And the Machiguenga are caught in the middle.
Date
August 1, 2003Outlets
Morning Edition -
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
To Perpetuate Life as it was Meant to Be
Jonathan Miller
Worlds of Difference
To Perpetuate Life as it was Meant to Be
By almost every measure, native Hawaiians are the worst off of Hawaii’s many ethnic groups. One of the biggest problems is drug abuse. Ho’omau Ke Ola is a community treatment program that looks to island traditions for a way forward.
Fourteen people stand together on a shady path in a tropical forest. Half are men and half are women; they wear flip-flops, tee-shirts and shorts. They take a deep breath in unison, close their eyes, and begin to sing. The song is breathy and low, a tumble of words coming quiet at first, then building momentum.
The song is a request for permission to enter an ancient shrine, or heiau – a cluster of bamboo buildings built on low stone platforms among the trees. Just a few minutes from here are fast food restaurants, tumbledown houses and beaches full of partiers and surfers. But these people aren’t thinking about those places now. They’re thinking about their kupuna, or ancestors, and hoping for a sign that their own presence here is wanted.
When they’re done with their chant, a breeze comes from nowhere and rustles the leaves. “Did you feel that?” asks Momi Cruz Losano, the cheerful woman who has brought them here. “You didn’t believe it, did you?”
The singers are drug addicts, most of them sent by the courts or social service agencies to live, study, and heal at Ho’omau Ke Ola. Ho’omau Ke Ola is a non-profit, residential and outpatient substance abuse treatment program based in Waianae, on the west (or leeward) coast of Oahu. Waianae is one of the most depressed communities in Hawaii. The center was founded by community members in 1987 to help confront an enormous drug problem in the area, particularly among native Hawaiians. From the outset, it used traditional Hawaiian teachings as part of its therapeutic program. This spring Ho’omau Ke Ola went a step further, converting the cultural component into the program’s central feature.
The clients study Hawaiian history and genealogy, cooking and craft-making, storytelling and navigation. They work at a local demonstration farm, and take intensive language lessons. And they learn key concepts of Hawaiian philosophy and spirituality: the importance of ohana (family), malama ‘aina (care for the land), kuleana (responsibility), and pono (balance). The idea, program officials say, is to help the clients see that they are connected to something larger than themselves – that they are heirs to a sophisticated civilization, and that that civilization has lessons to teach them about making their way in the modern world.
Program director Jim Lutte, who spent 15 years with substance abuse programs in Pennsylvania, says the approach works. “Even though they’re in a treatment setting and they’re from different families, they’re from the same area and they consider themselves ohana, which means family. There seems to be a sense of safeness to take emotional risks that you don’t usually see in traditional programs.”
The biggest challenge for clients is to apply what they learn in treatment to their lives on the outside. Lutte says it helps that family, feasting, and fellowship are central to everyday life in Hawaii. “It’s not like they go through treatment and they have all this cultural awareness and now they’re back out in society and it’s not applicable. They actually fit in better when they go through this, because this is part of the way people live here.”
But for generations, people in Waianae have also lived with drugs, alcohol, poverty, violence, and despair. Those are difficult cycles to break. The drug of choice in Waianae – crystal methamphetamine, or “ice” – is extremely addictive. Like substance abuse programs everywhere that serve low-income clients, Ho’omau Ke Ola is chronically underfunded. Federal and state grants, which used to fund up to six months of residential treatment, now cover only 60-75 days – rarely enough for full recovery. Not to mention that the number of clients Ho’omau Ke Ola does serve is only a tiny fraction of the thousands of Hawaiians in need of help.
While treating addiction under these conditions is hard enough, there is an even more ambitious idea behind the center’s work. Ho’omau Ke Ola is part of a broader movement that seeks not just to help Hawaiians cope in society, but to make that society more sustainable and humane. All over the islands, natives and non-natives are studying the old ways – from farming and fishing to building canoes and dancing hula. The goal is not to escape the modern world, they say, but to change it.
“There’s no magic bullet,” says Eric Enos, director of Ka’ala Farm, a “cultural learning center” where Ho’omau Ke Ola’s clients come once a week to work in the taro patches, move rocks or clear brush. “Drugs are what you turn to when there’s a vacuum to fill. When you’re full of purpose, when life has a meaning, then you’re filling yourself up with something else, something positive. And when you’re filled with positive things then the junk doesn’t have as much room to enter.”
– Jonathan Miller
Date
July 17, 2003Outlets
Morning Edition -
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Sarvodaya: An Alternate Path
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
Sarvodaya: An Alternate Path
Can development based on spiritual values, local activism, and volunteer labor compete with a global system built on western market economics? From Sri Lanka, Sandy Tolan reports on a movement that seeks to improve the lot of millions of poor people with self-help programs steeped in Buddhist principles.
A global debate has emerged from the street protests of Seattle and Genoa and Prague. From the anarchist tree houses in the Pacific Northwest to the six-star hotels in Davos, globalization has come under scrutiny as never before. Defenders of the global economy acknowledge the need to address poverty, but insist globalization can wear a human face. Detractors say the system is rigged against poor countries; that there must be an alternative vision that puts people before profits.
In Sri Lanka, a tiny island nation off the southern coast of India, some say this vision has existed for decades. Sarvodaya is a village-based movement designed as a viable alternative to globalization.
Too often, says Sarvodaya’s founder, Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, “development results in a few people earning lots of money while millions of people are getting marginalized. That kind of system cannot sustain.” So, beginning 45 years ago, “Dr. Ari” began traveling to the villages, slowly establishing a movement he came to call “Sarvodaya Shramadana” – a “village awakening,” with the “gift of labor.”
“We said development is an awakening process,” Dr. Ari says. “Within a couple of years this expanded into so many other educational institutions in the country, and this became an independent national movement; a movement where your gift of labor, your land, your money, your skills, are for the well-being of all.”
To see Sarvodaya in action is to see, for example, a score of teenage villagers shoveling rocks in the rain – their “gift of labor” part of the village’s assessment of its needs: in his case, a new wall for the village temple. Other basic projects include building schools and water lines.
But in an increasingly connected world, with the global influence of material goods, the pressure from financial institutions such as the IMF to keep wages low in Sri Lanka, and the pull on Sri Lankan women to seek work as housemaids in the Middle East, such an effort faces immense challenges.
“The pressures we have from the international financial system makes it next to impossible to think of a commonwealth of village republics, which is our idea,” says Dr. Ari. “Our ideal is decentralized political and economic power to the maximum to the village. Bring it down to the village. To bring a village to that level of economic self-sufficiency or to become independent, you have to use the existing financial network. And still not become a part of it. That is the most difficult thing.”
Yet Dr. Ari’s ardent followers – of which there are many – would say that despite the obstacles, what Sarvodaya has achieved in reducing poverty and restoring dignity in the villages is remarkable.
“As Dr. Ari always says, there is a critical mass of spiritual consciousness that has been created by Sarvodaya,” says Krishna, who left the lucrative world of advertising to work for Sarvodaya (and who doesn’t use a last name). “So the effects of that critical mass have shed upon me. And I am absolutely happy here. Because I know that nothing can go wrong here. Because we are committed to the upliftment of human beings, and to awaken the human spirit.”
– Sandy Tolan
Date
July 13, 2003Outlets
Weekend Edition -
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
An Exodus Of Women
Sandy Tolan
Worlds of Difference
An Exodus Of Women
Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan women work abroad as housemaids, mainly in the Middle East. Their remittances are a cornerstone of their country’s economy, and a desperately needed source of income for their families. But their absence is keenly felt.
In a sitting room in a wealthy neighborhood of Amman, the Jordanian capital, three Sri Lankan maids – Mala, Manike, and Coomari – sit on plump couches, sipping sweet Arabic tea. Madame Shama is serving, for a change – and translating from the housemaids’ acquired Arabic. The women are here to explain why they’ve traveled thousands of miles to work for a hundred dollars a month. In a word: family.
“I love them so much and I was so desperate to make anything possible for them to live better and eat better and learn better,” says Coomari. “And I thought, it’s only two years. Maybe it will be worth it.”
By almost any measure, the housemaids’ salaries are tiny – some as little as 30 cents an hour, plus room and board, for 14-hour days of cooking and cleaning. Yet these women have been able to save for new homes in their villages. Their income now makes up the largest share of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange. And as services that used to be taken for granted now keep their families alive, the women see themselves differently.
But there is so much that a desert kingdom cannot provide: carnations and bougainvilleas beneath a canopy of jackfruit trees; coconut oil burning from the shrine of the Buddha; the smell of curry and fresh fish. The sound of the ocean. And the touch of their children, who they will not see for years at a time.
“What hurts me a lot is that my daughter thinks my mother is her mother,” says Coomari. “When they tell her, ‘No, your mother is in Jordan,’ she says, ‘No, this is my mother.’ She doesn’t even know me.”
With so many mothers providing security from thousands of miles away, Sri Lankan society is undergoing a powerful shift – especially in the villages.“I’m trying to do what mother was doing,” says T. Ajit, the father of three boys, and husband of a housemaid working in the Middle East. As he spoke, from a small house in a village two hours from the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, his sons looked on silently, bouncing a tennis ball on the cement floor.
The adjustments have challenged traditional gender roles about breadwinning and childrearing, and have given rise to countless – and often exaggerated – stories of abuse, both to the Sri Lankan women in Arab societies and among their children at home.
“All the social ills that assail the households, they put it down to the migration of the women,” says Myrtle Perera of the Marga Institute, a think-tank in Colombo. “The violence of youth, the alcoholism of men, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy – everything is put down to women going to the Middle East, migrating for employment.”
Yet there is no disputing that in relative terms, the migration has brought real wealth to the villages. “We found that the majority of the women who migrated and came back, over sixty percent of their households had benefited remarkably – education, housing, living standards,” says Perera.
At the same time, it is much easier to find people who reflect a deeply troubled sense that this global migration is tearing at the fabric of Sri Lankan society. One thing everyone agrees on: Good or bad, this mass migration of poor rural women – a product of an integrated global economy coupled with Middle Eastern oil wealth – is changing Sri Lankan society.
– Sandy Tolan
Date
June 24, 2003Outlets
All Things ConsideredTags
Regions: Asia / OceaniaMedia: AudioOther Contributors: Sandy TolanOther Tags: Sri Lanka, migrant labor -
Jonathan Miller
Special Projects
Mapping a Lost Territory
Jonathan Miller
Special Projects
Mapping a Lost Territory
In the highland jungle of Peru, two men rush to preserve the geography, history, music, and myths of a now-scattered people using digital mapping technology and collective memory. The story served as a pilot for the “Worlds of Difference” series.
In the highland jungle of Peru, two men are trying to preserve a culture that’s been forced to scatter by encroaching development. One is an indigenous keeper of the region’s lore. The other is an anthropologist who uses satellite mapping and the latest digital information technologies.
This story served as a pilot for the “Worlds of Difference” project, and was broadcast on NPR as “The Anthropologist and the Tribesman.”
Date
June 3, 2001Outlets
All Things ConsideredTags
Themes: Culture, EnvironmentRegions: South AmericaMedia: AudioOther Contributors: Jonathan Miller