Globalizing flows of Aid in Haiti

            Just over a year has passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit near the town of Léogâne, twenty-five kilometers west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The results have been devastating: estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people dead (over 10% of the city’s population), over a million individuals living in tent cities, and massive destruction of public identities, including electricity and, more importantly, fresh water (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Due to the mass contamination of water, from both the devastation of the earthquake as well as the mishandling of the water from local streams, cholera swept across the region, using river streams for transport and breaching water infrastructures, further compromising the sanitation and the trouble in Haiti.

            At the same time that darkness engulfed Haiti, it became the spotlight of international media attention. Humanitarian aid and news broadcasting turned wide-eyed to see the events that were to follow in Haiti in the next couple months. However, as much of the mainstream telecommunications systems were destroyed in the earthquake and tremors, external media sources relied on social and digital media users who lived in Haiti. Facebook and Twitter users as well as bloggers provided first hand eyewitness updates as to what was happening on ground zero (Brainard 2010). Thus social media was successful in garnering initial worldwide attention and focusing it in on the problems Haiti faced. Humanitarian aid was one of the first private sectors on ground zero, providing roughly $1.4 billion dollars from 200 organizations all across the world. “Hope for Haiti Now”, for example, a live album featuring famous artists such as Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and Neil Young vied to send all its proceeds to relief efforts in Haiti.

            However, like all news, the thrill of breaking headlines, of people dying tragic deaths, become all too familiar with the world and the story loses popularity. As Haiti began to hunker down to begin large-scale economic changes, the spotlight shifted away from the constant struggles of daily Haitian life that to the media was a thing of the past (as we know, clearly it is not), to more sensational news concerning the present implying a future, a model characteristic of media broadcasters (Vansina). This unspoken future of the news is something that is often not covered by the media, and lost in the masses of analysis. Yet this money that we have donated in the present implies something will be done in the future. Then where has all this aid gone, the money that we have donated to ‘save Haiti’? Yes, it has left my pockets and gone into the hands of aid agencies like Oxfam or World Vision who have allotted it accordingly, but what has the money been actually used for? A report published by the Disaster Accountability Project (2011)– a non-profit organization aimed at improving disaster management systems and ensuring transparency in the occurrences on ground zero of the disaster – attempted to see how much of the roughly $1.4 billion in aid was being disbursed and how it was used by each organization. First of all, the Disaster Accountability Project found that only approximately $750,000, roughly half of the total aid received has been dispensed. There is a large amount of money that is sitting in banks and not being used for directly for rebuilding infrastructure and getting fresh water supplies to halt the spread of cholera. Secondly, and even more pressing, of the 197 organizations that actively solicited money for the purposes of relief in Haiti, only six had publicly available factual guidelines as to what would be done with the money while 128 organizations had little to no public reports stating what the donations would have been used for (Disaster Accountability Project). In theory, this money could be diverted for any number of reasons for any number of causes to any number of people, not for the causes that the donor wished it to. Often, as Gourevitch (2010) argues is the case in Biafra, financial aid can be taken by these humanitarian organizations and dispensed to journalists to report on the catastrophe. Instead of working for objective news agencies, these journalists work under these international organizations, often unconsciously ascribing to the companies’ ideologies. They are in a bind, attempting to “present themselves as objective outsiders [but] suddenly become the disciples of aid workers. They accept uncritically the humanitarian aid agencies’ claims to neutrality, elevating the trustworthiness and expertise of aid workers above journalistic skepticism” (Gourevitch). Thus, the journalists’ fall victim to the subjective positions of the humanitarian agencies, losing their critical analytical objective edge.

            Furthermore, in humanitarians’ cries for aid, they have turned the heads of those at the World Bank, currently assessing Haiti to see how they can ‘help’. As Jamaica suffered the wrath of the World Bank-imposed structural adjustment policies in the early 1980s, it will be no surprise that Haiti’s already and increasingly suffering economy – due to widespread malnourishment, HIV/AIDS epidemic, and relatively high tuberculosis rates supplemented by the outbreak of cholera and mass economic destruction – will be pushed even farther away from its pre-2010 position. Ultimately, I argue that the media can only do so much. By garnering immediate worldwide attention to the devastation is the media’s duty. Their efforts in soliciting aid, drawing out the facts as they come in, and recommending suggestions to government officials have been beneficial. However, much is out of the media’s realm of possibility. It is and will be ultimately up to the government to create jobs out of cleaning up and rebuilding the economy, installing efficient water systems to begin the sanitation effort, and figure out an efficient way of distributing the gridlocked aid where it is needed. No media source or news network is capable in fixing these problems.

References

Brainard, Curtis

2010  “New” Media Crucial in Aftermath of Haitian Earthquake. The News Frontier, The Observatory,  January 13^th. http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/new_media_crucial_in_aftermath.php, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Disaster Accountability Project

2011  One Year Follow Up Report on The Transparency of Relief Organizations Responding to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. http://www.scribd.com/doc/46320380/OneYear-Followup-Report-Transparency-of-Relief-Organizations-Responding-to-2010-Haiti-Earthquake, accessed January 28^th, 2011.

Gourevitch, Philip

2010  Alms Dealers. New Yorker, October. 11^th. 102-109.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation

2010  U.S. Global Health Policy: Health in Haiti and the U.S. Government Involvement. http://www.kff.org/globalhealth/upload/8053.pdf, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Vansina, Jan

1985  Oral Tradition as Process. In Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin, Pp. 3-32. 

Constructing Identities with Graffiti

            Depending on who you talk to, graffiti can be a form of vandalism, yet at the same time a piece of art. This blog sees it as a creative form of self-expression and a tool of identity-construction that comes in various forms. Ranging from chalk on the sidewalk to wall murals spanning several stories, graffiti – from the Italian world graffiare, “to scratch” – sometimes evokes authorship in the “tag” of a particular fashion, while other times anonymity.

These notions are expressed in the multitude of graffiti frequently found on the engineering Cairn in a strip of Main Mall at UBC. The iconic monument has been symbolic of UBC’s engineering faculty since the mid-1960s, erected by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) in 1966 in appreciation of “the humble diversified and continuing contribution to campus life by the engineers”. The six-foot tall white pyramid with an enormous “E” on each side has been an object with a semi-permanent residence, but an enduring legacy of tradition. It has been moved many times around the campus, finally landing in the middle of Main Mall outside many engineering buildings. In the almost fifty years since its birth, the Cairn’s colours have been painted thousands of times by almost every faculty, AMS club, or student housing society. Though, after every defacing – occurring most of the time at night when no one is around – the engineers confidently repaint the Cairn in its white and red, adding layer by layer, year after year.

The defacing and subsequent repainting of the Cairn has been a ritualized experience of many of the students at UBC, with no real legal or social repercussions dealt to the infringers, even when their mark is left. Rodriguez and Clair (1999) sees similar acts of graffiti “frequently reflect[ing] tensions and conflicts among diverse groups”. As a place of diversity – in academic interests as well as ethnicity and race – it is no surprise that graffiti occurs specifically on the Cairn, as the Cairn historically has not been well-received by neither campus government or student society. Furthermore, they posit that “marginalized individuals perform acts that are intended to oppress other marginalized individuals” (1). In this case, each social group carries out these public defacements of the Cairn in inter-faculty competition. It is personified by these graffiti acts and yet the engineers, seemingly unphased, repaint the Cairn again and again.

The ways in which the engineers respond to the defacing of their Cairn is interesting. Even when distinctive residence or faculty marks are left – as seen in the “G” for Geology Cairn – the Engineers do not vandalize their structures; rather, they dutifully repaint the colours and return to business as usual. In this passive resistance to other social bodies, the engineers derive resilience, one they pride themselves on. By repainting the Cairn in their colours, they are reclaiming what is theirs, proving to the student society that engineers are resilient. By doing so, the Cairn functions to all the social units on campus as a temporary poster board for campus identification ad differentiation. Students know that whatever graffiti is painted is only returned back to its original state with virtually zero consequences. With no repercussions and almost no public backlash from the engineering community, it seems that they have embraced the fact that the Cairn is repeatedly painted over. In an almost desired way, the constant restoration encourages and facilitates the public defacement of the Cairn so that on the one hand, social clubs produce temporary representations of self-identification on the campus they belong to while on the other hand, develop the resilient quality the engineers have become to embrace.

            Talking to some engineers, I have received mixed remarks on the dynamics of the Cairn. Though one student thinks it’s funny that many people paint the Cairn in their own faculty colours or other pictures, the student sees that “to disrespect my monument on campus feels like they are disrespecting me and my peers”. Another student says if other faculties had monuments similar to the Cairn, students, maybe even engineers, would deface it as well in enjoyable acts of rivalry and competition. A graduate student in chemical engineering says, “it promotes a good-natured spirit of competition amongst faculties and programs… If you look at the big picture, it’s more about other groups challenging this clique by taking something away, and having the engineers respond by taking it back and reestablishing their engineering pride”.

Thus, in these graffiti acts we have a group of anonymous individuals often painting identifiable markings on the Cairn, with little to no recourse to halt more acts from happening. The dynamics between this anonymity and authorship are mixed together in the act of painting the Cairn, creating a systematically and almost mutually supported channeled output for the betterment of campus life. It seems to me that this is the ideal situation, no?

References

Begnal, Michael H. (1985) Graffiti as Intentional and Patterned Communication. Communication Quarterly 2:155.

The Engineers’ Cairn. (2010). The Engineers’ Cairn. http://heustory.apsc.ubc.ca/wiki/index.php/The_Engineers’_Cairn, accessed February 7^th, 2010.

Rodriguez, Amardo and Robin Patric Clair. (1999). Graffiti as communication: Exploring the discursive tensions of anonymous texts. Southern Communication Journal 65(1):1-15.

Globalization, may I introduce you to Mediation

            The media and its facets have transformed the self-representation and reflexive experience. The distance between information and its implications, and the general public has been bridged in many more ways than one. Television and the Internet serve as two far-reaching mediums of mediation that have emerged at the forefront of globalization, allowing people to have seemingly endless amounts of information at one’s fingertips at any second.

William Mazzarella (2004) sees various forms of capital, especially information, that have been projected into society as assets of media that need to be addressed. Looking to see how information is mediated through the media, he sees many screens and filters that information passes through – from which content is captured on film, to how it is framed, to how will it be represented – before a person receives it, be it on the social activists’ webpages, worldwide newspapers, or the six o'clock news. “Transnational imaginaries” often oppose “regional commitments and interests” (352), where corporate goals quash local considerations. Without media, many of these cases would pass unknowingly, or uncriticized, by the global populace. Thus, we have empowered the media as facilitators of knowledge, as bringers of ‘truth’, deciding what we should know and how we should come to understand it. Mazzarella pushes this further in a different direction, that commercial media sources have made people “cognitively and affectively dependent on external processes of mediation, whereas previously stable and locally rooted ‘schemas’ have sufficed to make sense of the world” (2004). We are no longer stopping to look around and critically judge for ourselves the problems of the world; rather, we are looking for answers found in Google search results or in CNN headlines, created by the meeting of globalization and mediation.

Nevertheless, Mazzarella sees media and mediation as an avenue to look at the ‘other’, at the “places at which we come to be who we are through the detour of something alien to ourselves” (356). As a self-reflexive process, we compare our culture to that which we see in the media. By looking here, we begin to understand more about what the culture we live in. Relatively speaking, the meeting of globalization and mediation has allowed us to look at the ways in which other cultures function and compare them to ours.

Through the media, for example, the Kayapo Indians residing in the Brazilian Amazon basin were able to assert their identity and their struggle for land claims in the face of imposing World Bank and Brazilian government-backed hydroelectric companies. Proposals for six hydroelectric damns along the Xingu river had been put forth that would devastate the Kayapo’s native land through population displacement and disruption of migratory fish routes (which the Kayapo depended on), destroying much of the Amazon rainforest along the way. Filming widespread demonstrations featuring Kayapo leaders and Western celebrities – Sting, and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick – to draw even more media attention, the Kayapo held press conferences with world news media, international human and indigenous rights organizations, as well as World Bank and Brazilian governmental officials to demonstrate what was at stake. Ultimately, the Kayapo managed to stave off the hydroelectric companies by asserting their identity to protect and secure not only their land, but their legal control over their resources as well (Turner 2003).

What is interesting is that it is one of the first cases in which the “combination of political, economic, environmental, and ideological pressures with revolutionary new media technologies that has enabled native peoples to take their case directly to the peoples and governments of the world” (Turner 2003). The Kayapo cut out the middlemen – NGOs, human rights tribunals – and took it amongst themselves to assert their identity and struggle to the world. What is also interesting, though not immediately apparent, is that this is telling of our own culture. In their preparation for the political demonstrations, the Kayapo consulted local British Columbian governments as well as First Nations groups to assess broader implications of our hydroelectric damns. Thus, we are looking at this “dual relation… of simultaneous self-distancing and self-recognition” (Mazzarella); the Kayapo are apart from Western society at the same time a part of it. Due to the collision of globalization and mediation, as evident in the Kayapo’s demonstrations, these apparently alienated places, places that the ‘other’ resides in, are not as distant as we once thought.

References

Mazzarella, William. (2004). Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual review of Anthropology 33:345-367.

Turner, Terence. (2003). The Kayapo Resistance. In Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, Spradley, James and David McCurdy (eds). Pp. 387-404. Allyn and Bacon: Boston. 

Process Reproduction - The Pussycat Dolls Analyzed

            For as long as we can remember, we have been looking for more efficient ways of doing things: a shift towards mass producing mono crops for diverse and populous townships; harnessing the glowing incandescent fire to cook our food with; centralizing our lives around sedentary land plots. It is the latter from which early twentieth century scholar Walter Benjamin (1936) speaks of as a “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” the will to have the world’s resources at the tip of our fingers. This is the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a time that sees the reproduction various art forms and how it alters the experience of (re)viewing the same objects in a new context. What concerns us here is technical or process reproduction, a reproduction that, in a way, remixes the original work of art in a new creative way, creating a new product that often is recognizable to the original, but not always. This latter form of reproduction can, for example, simply be copying note off the board onto a sheet of paper, or singing a song that has been performed by your favorite artist. Though according to Benjamin, this reproduction loses its aura: the originality that differentiates the piece of art from others in all aspects or representation, materials of reproduction, and experience of viewing.

An example of process reproduction is found in the reproduction of the Pussycat Dolls’ sexy spin off of “Jai Ho,” originally performed at the end of the movie Slumdog Millionaire by the cast. The original, performed by A.R. Rahman, involves the main actors of the movie and others performing a choreographed dance in a Mumbai train station supplemented with intermittent clips from the movie. It is interesting to first note that this is in fact a process reproduction already, seeing as how the original that played as the Slumdog Millionaire credits rolled did not include these ‘flash backs’ to the movie itself. By doing this, it changes the aura, or involves, the “shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crises and renewal of mankind” (Benjamin 1936). The Pussycat Dolls’ appropriation of this song yields a dramatically different result. Some alternations are obvious: the main cast and backup dancers are replaced by scantily clad women in pan-Indian clothing and an L.A. suburban populace; approximately 33 million more Youtube hits on the Pussycat Dolls version; the lead singer pronounces “Jai Ho” more like (phonetically) “dʒεΙ ho.” Event though this new version includes the voice of A.R. Rahman, this process reproduction includes new material shaping a new feeling, a new aura, associated with viewing the music video. Firstly, the entire music video – the mock subway and Indian market – has most likely been filmed in an Interscope Records warehouse in Los Angeles. Thus, the aura is altered as I recognize this shift in subject position and context. Secondly, the ‘covert’ insertion of American electronic companies Nokia and Beats headphones into the video manipulates our senses dial in on these commodities. As an individual within the target age bracket of the music video, I catch myself drifting off thinking whether or not my headphones are sufficient or I should upgrade to a Nokia smartphone. Finally, in the Pussycat Dolls’ recreation, each individual video segment in the music video is unquestionably longer, allowing other human senses to play a part in engaging with it. There is more emphasis on the visual now than on the audio. This allows the viewer to spend more time absorbing more of what is going on in the video itself (ironically), rather than the lyrics or melodies of the song.

In these three examples, we are seeing an increasing distance between the A.R. Rahman original production of Jai Ho, positioned at the end of Slumdog Millionaire (albeit sort of out of place to begin with), and the recreation of it by the Pussycat Dolls. But does this hinder the creativity of the twenty-first century arts? I don’t think so. The last decade has been seen as the remix decade, ripe with recreations and new ways of stimulating ourselves with older material: Marvel comic books are being made into movies; music artists add samples from classic rock songs creating a new and entirely different song. These endless occurrences of mechanical and process reproductions are central to the arts, as many painters/artists/authors/directors are sampling other materials and adding their own personal spin. Today, this is the role art plays in the age of reproduction.

References

Benjamin, Walter. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press