Chapter 3
Western Myths: Western responses to the work of Ambient TV and the introduction of technology to the developing world, how the attitudes of Orientalism continue.
Ambient TV provided the technical means through which the Akha could explore the potential of the Internet as a tool for conferencing over vast distances. Manu and Dara established a daily e-mail reporting link with Radio Chiang Mai’s Akha programme in Northern Thailand, transmitting the conference to Akha communities, research centres and villages throughout North Thailand, Laos and East Burma. An Akha net-radio archive was made through temporarily housing the Mountain Peoples Radio Station in a hotel in Jinghong, China as Dara transmitted through one laptop to Tarik, on another in Chiang-Mai.
Ayoe (at back, see footnote 53 ), Dara and another conference member during the Internet link-up.
Not only were the dispersed members of the Akha community, from refugees to academics united over vast distances but they could also explore web casting their radio programmes in the future. Through the teaching of HTML, in the hope of establishing a web forum, Manu and Dara wanted to help the Akha in creating an online record of their rapidly disappearing cultural history
Following a presentation of their work by Manu at The Lux, in London most responses were perfectly pragmatic; having just been shown video footage of how these people didn’t even have adequate healthcare, what be the use of three Westerners and their laptops? One member of the audience asked if introducing the Akha to Internet technology was if not corrupting then at least distasteful. Why couldn’t the Akha be left to exist has they always had done? Was Ambient TV simply exacerbating the very process of globalisation that so threatened the precious, ‘primitive’ and ancient culture of the Akha?
Globalisation though, has already arrived. Tourism plays a huge role in the economy of now highly capitalist Thailand. Yet despite being the major attraction as an ‘authentic’ hill tribe community, it has brought little financial or social benefit to the Akha. In Muang Sing, on the Lao-Chinese border, whilst guest houses and the bicycle hire shop continue to profit, the tourists who traipse through various peripheral villages leave the inhabitants with little but the trails of corrosion left by their footprints and a boost to the local opium trade. Then leaving with the residue of images, confirmation of an experience of ‘the real thing’, on their camera lenses. The impact, on villages as small as 50 or so inhabitants is surprisingly severe. In the villages that border Muang Sing, although many women make a small profit selling textiles, a child’s first English words are most likely to be "photo-ten-Bhat".
Jeremy Seabrook would see this as a prime example of the ‘aggressive necessities’ of unchecked capitalism. Yet his idea that ‘the market’ is something that isn’t deeply inherent within Akha local culture is as misguided as the sentiment that they can be protected in a bubble from global culture. As the Akha clearly won’t be left to exist as they always have done, it is their economic isolation that is the very problem. The Akha possess no level of influence within the global market, regardless of the impact the economic system of tourism has on their lives. Sustainable and ecological tourism could even conserve elements of their culture. In Thailand, local Akha cannot economically compete with Thai and foreign tourist companies and guides who are both badly informed and negative in their attitudes towards the Akha way of life. The Akha’s economic isolation, seemingly Seabrook’s only alternative, would only exacerbate what Manu describes as the ‘tourist zoos’ that have been created out of the villages the Akha inhabit. One danger of tourism is that it sustains the shell of a culture, the dresses and dances that appease both governments and tourists whilst the soul the Akha describe in chapter two is eroded within.
An official, traditional line up organised by the Chinese
Jeremy Seabrook views technology as a potential threat to local and indigenous culture. Arguing not only that the market place serves the growing self-consciousness of an industrialised humanity (fairly indisputable) but that the introduction of such technology leaves groups such as the Akha ‘vulnerable’ in the face of Americanisation. What to Seabrook is most damaging is how this instigates the rejection of "artefacts and goods of traditional culture":
"Each new thing that appears on the market locks up all previous ways of answering need, human effort, achievement and creative purpose. This lends the object a kind of vibrancy; all of which adds to the fascination which it then holds over those who can still remember, and are therefore, even more enthralled by, and dependant upon, the new thing that helps them to survive in a strange, alien, puzzling world over which they long ago forfeited the vestiges of control".
Whilst few deny the role of commodity fetishism within consumer culture, what seems particularly infuriating about Seabrook’s representation is the idea that both rural and urbanised Akha are totally wide eyed and mesmerised by the TVs, radios, motorbikes and potentially computers that they own. What perhaps is so patronising is the idea that the Akha have no awareness of the implications of technology. Ancient myths such as the explanation of how the Akha rejected the very idea of writing (and probably well before literacy was developed in the West) shows that they are capable of doing their own editing. The story goes that the first Spirit, Un Ma, gave the Akha an alphabet which on reflection they rejected through eating the buffalo hide they wrote on saying "it was better to keep their knowledge inside." This is why the Akha do not have any letters but a ‘splendid memory’7. Seabrook himself seems to be failing to make the distinction between primitive and backward, of which the Akha are clearly not, and oppressed and exploited, which, with even a name that for centuries has come to mean ‘slave’, they clearly are. The Akha are also capable of deciding for themselves if a technology is beneficial to their culture or not, the very issue is whether that technology is enforced externally or intelligently explored from within.
As for ‘artefacts and goods of traditional culture’ being highlighted as the core of what is under threat within the Akha way of life, you’d be hard pressed to find a more materialistic set of values about what needs to be ‘preserved’. Perhaps Seabrook would find this photograph, taken by Manu as a prime illustration of his point.
"N-aya asked me to take a picture of her family. Her husband put on his black silk turban and she called for the children to come. Everybody was ready when she quickly went back into the house. She wanted her transistor radio to be in the photo as well".
For it is not the black box that releases sound that is of importance here, it is hardly as if the radio has become fetishised or embued with some sort of totemistic value but is important because of what it represents beyond the consumerist pleasure of ownership of any commodity; as the final chapter will reveal, contact with and an entire community.
Seabrook’s romanticism commodifies the Akha. The idea that ‘tribal’ and therefore inherently ancient societies exist untouched by Western civilization is in itself a myth as colonialist as Edward Said’s polemical criticism in Orientalism. ‘Orientalism’, as Said argues is inherent within any Western representation of the East, which doesn’t offer a ‘true’ representation but is a ‘colonising’ knowledge created to confirm the West’s own distinct identity.
As one of many examples of colonialist anthropology, the work Hugo Adolf Bernatzik details supposedly different tribal and physical characteristics with all the colonialist zeal of charting an alien territory: One Akha man is of ‘interest’ simply as an:
"Europoid type with Orientaloid features…the primitive shell of the ear and weak development of the musculature of the lower jaw are characteristic".
A post-colonial analysis would describe this piece of pseudo-science and more bluntly, racism, as classic Orientalist anthropology. As a ‘type’ this man is denied the circumstances through which you can represent yourself; there is nothing here to be ‘represented’. The physical characteristics that are being defined in such Cartesian terms are also the senses of communication. He is not only metaphorically silenced, but through the labelling of his ears as a ‘primitive shell’, deafened to Berzanik’s insults.
Misrepresentations, from governments, anthropologists, and tourists have very real consequences. The need of the Akha’s conference to re-evaluate traditional concepts had a practical value beyond being simply an academic exercise. Much research has been used against the Akha. Incorrect translations of Customary Law and thinking, especially regarding "animism" and "spirit adoration" have all contributed to the derogatory process of the Akha being labelled "primitives", from the authorities to anthropologists.
Seabrook reveals the extent to which nineteenth century Romanticism is deeply embedded in Western Scholarship. Even Post-colonial theory can become problematic and essentialist in terms of it’s perspective: presenting Western societies as ‘modern’ and in antithesis, non-Western societies as ‘traditional’, or as it has been described, "a sort of primitive grace from which the modern world has fallen". Sverker Finnstrom not only deconstructs post-colonial theories euro-centric heritage but cites of the Nyole of eastern Uganda, to challenge yet another misconception. Modernisation, even on the scale of introducing a cash crop soon becomes localised and even assimilated into ‘tradition’:
"As Whyte … writes, in 1970 the Nyole, especially the younger people, referred to their cotton cash cropping as a traditional way of subsistence. Cotton was thought of as an indigenous crop, part of the Nyole cultural system of agriculture, even though it was introduced by the British colonisers as late as the time of World War 1. Thus tradition is not primarily the things of long ago, or exclusively referring to the heritage of precolonial times. Rather, in the eyes of the younger Nyole, tradition refers to habits, the things which are done… Thus, modernisation and the global marketing essentially mingles with tradition when it comes to processes of every-day life and identity formation".
It seems that this example of the Nyole perception of cotton production as a cultural system, just like N-aya’s attachment to her transistor radio in Manu’s photograph, illustrates the reality of the interconnectedness between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Tradition is as relevant to the modernised present as much as the past.
Spivak not only reinstates the need to be wary of a blinkered perspective that only discusses the Third World in relation to its colonial past but also cautions against the other extreme, that a "nostalgia for lost origins" can be counterproductive to understanding the ‘social realities’ of which imperialism has come to form an inextricable part. The formerly oppressed cannot be isolated from the institutions that now allow them a voice. Stuart Hall writes how once colonised, you cannot simply turn back, and yet:
"The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past’, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the mother, is always-already ‘after the break’."
So the Akha cannot simply go back. The reality of history cannot be isolated from the process of finding solutions, let alone a ‘voice’. Globalisation is already intrinsic to both Akha history and contemporary culture. It’s also all too easy for those in left wing academia to associate with the ‘tribal’ and the ‘marginalized’ in the nineteenth century romantic tradition of perceiving the artist and academic as an outsider, struggling against mainstream bourgeois society. In another prime example, the excitement induced by the cyberspace struggle of the Zapatista’s in Mexico potentially eclipsed their very basic requests for development and modernisation, schools and hospitals. As far as the Akha are concerned, hopefully attempting to ‘go back’ isn’t on the agenda but rather ensuring that there will be no ‘lost origins’, or voices, for future generations to need to recover.