I find myself stuck downtown in the rain so I have decided to bore you with one of my current moral dilemmas. A mere year in Guinea has sufficed to convince me that no one, myself most certainly included, knows anything about anything. Its a liberating realization. It has allowed me first to stop pretending I know anything and feeling guilty when I don't, and second, to stop trying to fit Guinea/Africa into broader theories of development or international relations and instead just let it wash over me. The factors governing how cultures interact and develop seem to me so unbelievably complicated that parsing, grouping, prioritizing, or even understanding them seems better suited to poetry than to action plans and white papers. Even language constrains understanding. How many development experts or academics speak Puular? Using French as the default language has class and cultural implications and effects that govern who you talk to, about what, and what priorities they are likely to have. I bring these things up by way of introduction to a different idea; I am seriously uncomfortable anytime I feel like my presence is contributing to the process by which we make little Americans out of Africans. There has never been such a thing as a pure culture, or a pure environment. Genes and cultural traits have been mixing since time immemorial and I do not mean to suggest that the influence of one culture upon another is inherently negative. I think fear of cultural mixing comes from the mistaken belief that our cultures are distinct entities, and therefore endanger of being diluted. It would be more productive to look at cultural groupings like an assembly of twigs in a river bunched up behind a submerged rock or fallen tree. Some rivers flow faster than others, and whatever is holding the twigs in place can be different sizes, but on a long enough time scale an river will cycle out most of the twigs and new ones will take their place. However, I see significant differences between the cultural exchange occurring now and how I perceive cultural exchange to have taken place in the past. Today the power differential between peoples is so vast that the river analogy no longer applies. A few centuries ago I imagine villages and and people groupings and even emerging nation states spreading culture through the standard conduits of war, technology, language, etc....and people adopting the technologies and mannerisms that improved their lives and casting aside those that did not. Even among dominated or colonized people the occupier never exerted sufficient control over the interior to physically snuff out indigenous culture, nor did they have the tools of mass communication necessary to suffocate the native culture through images and broadcasts and the like. Today the economic power differential between the west and Africa is so vast that perhaps for the first time, one people group is succeeding (unconsciously) in eradicating a native culture and replacing it with their own, as opposed to the old model of mutual, if often unequal, exchange.
The anecdotal evidence for this is abundant. Young people don't just have the reformist urge common to young people everywhere, they actually want to be French or American. In one of Rachel's (my second closest neighbor) classes a tenth grade student wrote the following in an imaginary letter to an American penpal-- "I wish my ancestors were slaves so that today I could be American" This is a result of his ignorance of slavery, not just his desire to be American, but this type of sentiment is not uncommon. Take skin bleaching. Beutiful African women rubbing poison on their skin to look whiter...to me these are signs of cultural dominance. Even traditional family values are being subverted to psudo-western ideals--mostly those shown in 50cent videos. I would even posit that the nations yearning for democracy is a product of Western cultural infiltration. Why do some Guineans want democracy? Is it because they feel like they will have a voice, their 'human rights' are more likely to be respected, and they think that democartic institutions will lead to less corruption and more economic development? Maybe. Or do they link who and what they see on TV in Democratic countries with the idea of democracy, or perhaps because Western dominated institutions have been pitching democracy not only as a cure all but also as a pre-req for aid. Maybe. Probally some of both. But if there were democratic elections in Guinea they would almost certainly break down along ethnic lines and I am unsure if that type of democracy would truly be a stable platform for development.

My questions are the following; given the present geo-political situation, is it possible for America to offer aid and/or advice without overwhelming the recipient countries with American culture?

How does an aid worker of any type actively encourage the preservation of indigenous sources of meaning while being honest about their own ideas? Eg; Being white, educated, American, and comparatively affluent gives me an undue amount of influence when it comes to discussing certain topics....yet, my opinion is no more valid or likeley to lead to happiness then their own. How then does one engage in those converstations?

It is possible that this entire discourse is demeaning and does not give the people around me enough credit for being perfectly capable of filtering information for themselves, and I hope thats the case. However, I do think that the current wealth and ubiquitousness of western ideas is overpowering those filtering systems.

Feel free to weigh in. I'm off to lunch...