Simplicity

On Friday, everyone in class gave presentations on industrial agriculture in various countries - Ethiopia, Brazil, the US, India, and China. I began to think about one thing over and over again. Simplification. We do this all the time. When we talk about a country, we refer to its culture as ubiquitous. "Chinese people do this", "People from Brazil like to eat this". It's a very easy thing to do, and can be very informative. However, I think that there can be some danger in over simplifying a society.

Stereotypes of Americans include that they love fast food and are glamorous and are sexually promiscuous. None of those are true for me...or most of the people that I know. Sure it can be true for some people. How much of what we know about other countries is what we have heard from others as overarching themes of the country's culture? How much of what we know about other countries is actually us having been there or talked to a significant amount of people from that country. Wouldn't someone talking to me get a much different impression of Americanism than talking to someone from Wisconsin or from Alabama or from California?

When we talk about a group, a culture, a country, it is so easy to label them ubiquitously. That's not necessarily a bad thing - we can't possibly have direct experience with every aspect of every group. Labeling helps us learn and grow and distinguish one thing from another. However, cultures and religions and countries and PEOPLE are so much more complex. I think that we need to remember that. Labeling a group of people without recognizing that there is so much more depth can be destructive.

For example, in my presentation I talked about Structural Adjustment Programs. SAPs were put in place by the IMF and the World Bank to reschedule the debt in African and South American countries. Conditionalities were imposed on these countries including severe austerity measures, privatization of business and market liberalization. The problem was that not all of the countries these programs were imposed on were the same. They were very different countries with very different economies and needs and regulations. But labeling all of them as third world developing nations that desperately need help is so dangerous. These programs had very poor outcomes that created long term destruction in many of the countries.

Learning about the complexity of cultures and countries and people makes me want to learn and to travel. I want to directly experience the world and want to learn for the rest of my life. I want to complicate the world so as to better understand it.