Cultural Production

On Friday, August 7th we had our discussion on our readings that touched upon cultural production and national identity.I want to share some of the things I learned from Alba regarding the Nicaraguense and what they consider to be their cultural identity.
The two main themes that Alba wanted us to focus on for our charla on Friday was culture, and power. One of the questions she wanted us to think about was how is culture defined and who defines it, and who has the power. Aside from my passion for studying substance abuse as an illness and promoting awareness to others, I´m extremely interested in studying cultures and comparing them. I´m a social work major and I think it is an important topic to study, and unfortunately I think its understudied and not taken into account when it comes to working with families in the field. As Alba has said many times here on this trip, ¨everything is interconnected, you cannot separate one thing from another¨. Often immigrants who come to the United States and do not know about what is culturally acceptable in our country nor what is legal/illegal; wind up finding themselves loosing their children to child protective services because the cultures are different. For example, my social work professor told me she had a client who was from Jamaica, and according to her there are not laws that prohibit hitting your children, and so her clients child was taken away. There may be laws now in Jamaica, but its just an example of how its important to understand the cultural background of a family before taking extreme actions that may be irreversable.
According to my cultural anthropology teacher, the definition of culture is a group of people who share a common language, and relatively common values, or norms. Of course within every culture there is a possibility to have a subculture, which deviates from the beliefs and/or language that the culture shares. When it comes to who actually acts out these values and puts them into effect, it is usually the people, however government plays a big role as well in some cultures. In ours, there is a clear separation of church and state that does not exist here, so in a way the government is also defining the culture. When it comes to who has the power, its most often the government, which is often split up into different ideological parties, who fight to have the power. However, government is not the only entity with power, and I´m not sure if it exists here and I´d love to find out, but in the United States a lot of the power is held by the elite upper class, and by lobbyists who buy corrupt politicians to do their bidding.
In the reading ¨Liberating Nonviolence and Institutionalized Violence: Making Peace with Liberation Theology¨, written by John Dear, religion is the central theme and it discusses its relationship to poverty. On page two, he writes ¨Liberation theology cannot simply be pondered in the classroom; it is lived among the poor who seek justice. This praxis for justice combines ´both the goal and criterion´of liberation theology¨. He is not the only person to have argued this, in fact, the argument exists in other fields of study as well. In cultural anthropologists, those who merely observed cultures were referred to as ¨armchair anthropologists¨ while others chose to partake in participant observation, there are those that go out into the field of social psychology that disagree with methods of their colleagues that observe behavior in labs. The notion of having to see how a person lives within the context of their culture in order to understand them originated from England, and was started by daughters of pastors. They began to realize that it was necerssary to live with the poor in order to know what type of help they needed. Therefore, social work; which beliefs that poverty is the responsibility of the community to help others and does not believe it is each individuals responsibility, is really rooted in religion. Before shelters as we know it emerged, people went to churches to seek refuge. With religion having such a presence here, I wonder how come there arent shelters here and food programs for those that need it.
For our charla, Alba played music for us that spoke of the sentiments of the people. They are not sad songs, they are not saying woe is me, and I wonder if that has something to do with the lack of community programs here. Is it that they are too proud to be helped? Is it something else? I´ll leave that up to others to think about. But one thing I do believe, is that all people living in poor conditions do not want our pity, they dont want us feeling bad for them, they certainly dont want us taking their picture without even asking them so we can put it on the internet or show our families ¨look where I went and how the conditions were¨, I believe they want to be treated as human beings, and not as non humans.