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30143: Bick: RE: 30131: Mdmdread (reply) Re: 30078: Kathleen (reply to Paul Bick) (fwd)





From: Paul BICK <paulbick@msn.com>


Right - my original point was that there is a vast difference between exposure to culture (a good thing) and a tourist industry - which provides exposure to the tourist industry (and does absolutely nothing to alleviate poverty, by the way).

Like most people on this list, I imagine, my first trip to Haiti was also a revelation. Part of the revelation was that there was actually a "there" there, as the saying goes. There is no "there" left in most of the Caribbean - which has largely become a generic series of tour-boat docks and interchangable high-walled resort enclaves. A palm tree is a palm tree is a palm tree...

Yet, we all recognized a different kind of .. authenticity.. in Haiti, right? Something we might call "soul." But in that recognition, of course, is a danger of romanticizing poverty - its so easy (for Americans especially) to conflate "poverty" and "authenticity," which seems a logical step on the road to commodifying poverty itself, the same way we commidfy every romantic notion.

The "misery tour" concept was simply a device to cast these ideas in a new light.






Paul Bick
Department of Anthropology
The University of Illinois at Chicago
Behavioral Sciences Building #2128
1007 West Harrison Street
Chicago, IL 60607

847-863-8725





From: Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>
To: "Bob Corbett's Haiti list" <haiti@lists.webster.edu>
Subject: 30131: Mdmdread (reply) Re: 30078: Kathleen (reply to Paul Bick) (fwd)
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 08:08:08 -0600 (CST)



From: Mdmdread@aol.com

Some twenty years ago I spent time in Cite Soleil with a group of artisans
from whom I bought handicrafts, which I then sold for them at a non-for-profit
store in the States. I'd also take groups of 'tourists' to see the shop and
workspace there.

Some might say that is voyeurism, but I thought those trips served several
purposes -- the first being that they brought income into Cite Soleil because
they bought handicrafts from the store, so the money went directly back to the
 artisans. Another was that it provided these people a chance to see  the
conditions that artists had to work under/in/with in order to produce their
goods. And it was a way to understand a part of Haitian life that otherwise might
be closed off to them.

I don't know what most of those people did with that experience after they
left Haiti and returned home. But when I was first introduced to Haiti, it
changed my life, and I'm forever grateful that someone allowed me to see a side
of Haiti that otherwise might have remained an academic one.
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