Volume 56, No. 3, Fall 1997
Second Thoughts from the Second World: Interpreting Aid in Post-Communist Eastern Europe
Gerald W. Creed and Janine R. Wedel
Key words: foreign aid, development policy, transition, socialism, eastern Europe
While some aspects of the socialist past made aid essential to political and economic transition in eastern Europe after 1989, other socialist legacies seemed to undermine aid programs. As a result, aid ended up actually reproducing characteristics of socialist practice that it was intended to redress. This article accounts for such an outcome by outlining the special problems of aid in the post-communist context. It then draws on case studies of aid in Bulgaria and Russia to illustrate these suggestions. Attention to the east European case also suggests broader lessons for aid providers, notably the need to pay greater attention to local interpretations of the idiom of aid in the post-Cold War era, when competing spheres of influence no longer motivate aid efforts.
Face-To-Face at Arm's Length: Conflict Norms and Extra-Group Relations in Grassroots Dialogue Groups
Amy S. Hubbard
Key words: conflict resolution, inter-group relations, Jewish-Arab relations, Palestinian-Jewish dialogue, small groups, Middle East, US
Research has shown that internal relations in small groups are affected by members' relationship to the external world and the extent to which groups focus their efforts on extra-group relations. This article describes the conflict norms used to manage intra-group relations by members of a grassroots dialogue group in the United States whose members - US Jews, Palestinians, and others - came together to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the group's focus changed from internally-oriented conflict resolution to externally-oriented social movement mobilization, (a) adherence to these norms frustrated their attempts at mobilizing a peace movement in their home communities, and (b) intra-group relations became more problematic. This article demonstrates the importance of understanding the relationship between intra-group relations and members' extra-group relations with their home communities.
Offending and Defending US Rural Place: The Mega-Dump Battle in Western New York
Dennis Gaffin
Key words: development, space/place, rural US
This research article discusses the legal and cultural dimensions of a proposed solid waste mega-landfill in Farmersville, a rural Western New York community. The author argues that a corporation's and state environmental bureaucracy's development efforts and definitions of space dominate and decontextualize a local community's and region's own understandings and uses of space and land. This results in a colonial process of domination over large-scale local citizen and government opposition. Using ethnographic, legal, and documentary data, as well as the author's own citizen participation activities as a research basis, the article focuses on state notions of rural territory as legal space instead of cultural landscape. Locals' space is differently bounded, conceptualized and used as a place of and for community, morality, spirituality, and communality. Protracted bureaucratic procedures and still on-going legal battles between, on one side, local citizenry and legislators, and on the other, technocratic and corporate executives and attorneys, are ultimately traceable to the official ignoring of sociocultural issues in environmental impact assessments.
Environmentally Sustainable Development and Tourism: Lessons from Negril, Jamaica
Barbara Olsen
Key words: Ecology, environment, marketing, sustainable development, tourism, Jamaica
This article explores the challenges and opportunities for achieving environmentally sustainable development with the growth of tourism in Negril, Jamaica. In the absence of public policy for planned development, the community has experienced severe deterioration of its ecosystem. Fieldwork conducted in 1995 found the resident community and its advocacy NGOs mobilized to manage their natural resources supported by international funding for projects to protect the environment and build an infrastructure to sustain future growth. Hotel managers are increasingly reliant on "environmentally concerned" marketing strategies. Negril, Jamaica, as text, represents a microcosm where community activists seek to protect natural resources compromised by increased population pressure exacerbated by overdevelopment for tourism. For an environmentally sustainable development to occur, social, economic and ecological factors have to be accommodated simultaneously so all stakeholders can participate and prosper.
The Navajo Gaming Referendum: Reservations about Casinos Lead to Popular Rejection of Legalized Gambling
Eric Henderson and Scott Russell
Key words: Navajo Nation, Gaming, Elections, US
Numerous American Indian tribal governments have introduced legalized gambling to enhance revenues. There have been notable financial successes as well as some confrontations with state governments and the exacerbation of factionalism on some reservations. The largest tribal entity in the United States, the Navajo, has not established a gaming industry. In 1994 the Navajo Tribal Council, following a veto of enabling legislation, referred the issue to the voters. Navajo voters rejected the referendum in the November, 1994 tribal general election. This article examines the Navajo electorate's rejection of gaming. Results varied by voting district (chapter). Exit polling conducted in a half-dozen chapters is used to analyze the effects of sex and age on the outcome and to describe the voters' reasons for their vote.
Social Impact Research: Integrating the Technical, Political and Planning Paradigms
Marcus B. Lane, Helen Ross and Allan P. Dale
Key words: Social impact assessment, Australian Aboriginal peoples, participation, planning, Coronation Hill
In recent years, the impact assessment literature has established the need to develop appropriate methods for use within the political paradigm of SIA. However, practitioners must remain mindful of the need to retain an essential core of technical SIA research, and find ways of integrating this with the participatory and political components of the process. Research methods to integrate SIA with planning are equally necessary. A controversial mining proposal in Australia's Northern Territory, contested by mining, conservation and Aboriginal interests, provided the opportunity to test a new SIA method to combine the use of participatory/political and technical procedures and to integrate these two theoretical paradigms with a planning approach based on the potential for bargaining and negotiation. The method is detailed and assessed to provide a practical framework within which SIA practitioners can successfully achieve these ends.
Doubting the Experts: AIDS Misconceptions among Runaway Adolescents
Elisa J. Sobo, Gregory D. Zimet, Teena Zimmerman, and Heather Cecil
Key words: adolescents, HIV/AIDS, conspiracy, sex behavior, runaways, USA
Many homeless and runaway adolescents may be at a high risk for HIV infection. Ideas about the severity of AIDS, possible modes of transmission, and the integrity of those who provide information about HIV/AIDS come into play as youths make safer sex decisions. Information on youths' ideas about these issues can be used to improve the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS education programs that target them. We interviewed 98 adolescents at Cleveland, Ohio's 2 youth shelters over a one-year span in 1992/93. When asked directly, two-fifths of the youths said that HIV/AIDS information is being held back from us; one-fifth reported that their beliefs differed from the experts'. However, analysis of interview discourse suggested that the number of doubters actually may be much greater, and that doubting the experts may be a logical reaction to discrepancies in the HIV/AIDS information received as well as to historical and contemporary social and political factors. Interview responses also suggested that youths' generally high HIV/AIDS knowledge scores may reflect rote memorization rather than comprehension; the new information may be internalized in ways that fit with preexisting AIDS understandings.
Privatizing the Private Family Farmer: NAFTA and the Transformation of the Mexican Dairy Sector
James H. McDonald
Key words: commercial family farming, dairy industry, economic change, free-trade, agricultural policy, Mexico
This article explores a much neglected class of rural producers in Mexico, commercial family farmers, whose position in a globalizing political economy is treated as either unproblematic or ignored altogether in the agrarian literature. I contend that these small-scale capitalist farmers, as well as their peasant and ejidal counterparts, are being "privatized" under Mexico's new neoliberal agricultural policies, culminating with the passage and implementation of NAFTA. While it might seem logical that capitalist farmers oriented toward commercial production would be pre-adapted for the new free-market model, they are instead subject to new rules for operating in an increasingly hostile, competitive market. In 1993 small commercial dairy farmers in North-Central Guanajuato began to seek new organizational forms with which to achieve better market integration and increase profits during a period marked by falling milk prices, increasingly scarce and expensive credit, removal of subsidies, and rising costs of production. Noteworthy among their strategies was the formation of marketing cooperatives. An analytical framework drawn from the new institutional economics is employed to understand and explain the cooperative strategy and why it succeeded in one case and failed in another. A third case, sketched briefly, outlines the initial attempts by an ejido to form a cooperative and create a joint venture with external interests. The article concludes by suggesting several policy recommendations to support Mexico's faltering dairy sector.
Fishers' Organizations and Modes of Co-Management: The Case of San Miguel Bay, Philippines
William D. Sunderlin and Maharlina Luz G. Gorospe
Key words: co-management, devolution, fishers' organizations, gear conflict, Philippines
Recent writings have claimed that fisheries management can be improved through joint regulation by government bodies and resource users, and through partial devolution of management authority from government to fishers' organizations. The Philippines appears to provide an optimal institutional setting for the emergence of fisheries co-management. The government has enacted legislation to assist fishers' organizations in taking on a larger management role and there has been a proliferation of fishers' organizations interested in taking on increased responsibility for resource management. The case of San Miguel Bay shows a situation in which two parallel modes of co-management have emerged. The formal mode draws largely on government initiative and is pluralistic. The informal mode draws on the initiative of fishers' organizations and civilian action, and is oriented to the interests of small-scale fishers. Effective long-term co-management requires above all addressing gear conflict and the marginalization of small-scale fishers, and integrating the efforts of the two modes.
Alternative Trading Organizations: Shifting Paradigm in a Culture of Social Responsibility
Mary A. Littrell and Marsha A. Dickson
Key words: alternative trade, organizational culture, marketing, microenterprise, crafts
Alternative Trading Organizations (ATO) are nonprofit businesses that market crafts, gifts, and food from developing countries through mail-order catalogs and retail stores in many regions of the world. Combining functions of exporters and retailers, ATOs work directly with producer groups on product design, quality control, management, and shipping. This article profiles ATO organizational culture through three emergent themes: social responsibility for artisans, creative tension toward emerging behavioral norms, and organizational analysis for change. The ATO profile points to an emerging paradigm shift as ATOs integrate, within a culture of social responsibility, dual emphases on artisan producer groups and on North American consumers. The profile is intended both to document the organizational culture of ATOs and to serve as a baseline for further analytical and comparative analysis of ATOs operating in a variety of settings and across time. Challenges for the future of alternative trade are identified by assessing the profile within the broader socio-economic framework of the highly competitive, international market for handcrafts. Questions for further research are identified.
Is Awareness Enough? The Contradictions of Self-Care in a Chronic Disease Clinic
Christiana E. Miewald
Key words: urban, chronic disease, health education, political-economy, US
Applied medical anthropology has focused much of its attention on processes and interactions within clinical settings. In the case of chronic diseases such as diabetes or hypertension, which require patients to engage in self-care practices, the production of health extends beyond the boundaries of these biomedical spaces and into the lifeworld of the patient. This article explores the intersections and contradictions between biomedical and community spaces that emerged within a chronic disease clinic. Biomedical space, it is argued, privileges White, middle class ideals of self-control and individualism while devalorizing worldviews, such as those prominent in marginalized neighborhoods where social interdependence is vital. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the author found that while one such biomedical space - the Community Health Awareness and Monitoring Program (CHAMP) - has been able to provide a relatively open and egalitarian medical environment for its participants, its practices and philosophy rely on White, middle-class norms of patient motivation and self-care. This emphasis on health education essentially masks the economic, political and racial inequalities beyond the clinic that create barriers to self-care. The article concludes with the suggestion that applied medical anthropology must be aware of the power relations that exist both inside and outside the clinic.
Primary Health Care and its Unfulfilled Promise of Community Participation: Lessons From a Salvadoran War Zone
Sandy Smith-Nonini
Key words: community participation, primary health care, Central America, participatory development
Primary health care (PHC) as initially conceived required "community participation." This aspect was considered essential if beneficiaries of aid programs were to understand the causes of their health problems and become "agents of their own development." Participatory development was designed to privilege equity and democratic process. Nevertheless, this concept has been notoriously difficult for most large-scale, national PHC programs to put into practice. This article evaluates community participation in a PHC program with a strong community base which developed in repopulated villages of a former war zone in Chalatenango, El Salvador; and compares this NGO-supported health initiative with El Salvador's USAID-designed community health promoter program. This analysis privileges process-oriented criteria and highlights the key role of lay health promoters, while identifying other components of the NGO program that enhance community participatory in rural Chalatenango, in contrast to the national program which offers inadequate support to promoters, restricts their activities, and discourages community organization. Most barriers to more responsive national-level PHC in Latin America are political in nature; these findings challenge the prevailing pessimism about the potential for lay providers and participatory approaches.
Commentary: Rapid Assessment Procedures: A Review and Critique
Kari Jo Harris, Norge W. Jerome, and Stephen B. Fawcett
