THE DANGERS OF GOOD INTENTIONS

By Leticia Artiles and - - Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Nov 1 2007 (IPS) - Respect for the ways that other peoples think is an important issue and vital to designing strategies of communication. For it to be effective, the language, symbols, and logic of a message must be aligned with the world vision, beliefs, attitudes, and practices of the population you are trying to communicate with, writes Leticia Artiles, a Cuban anthropologist and co-ordinator of the Latin American Network of Gender and Collective Health of the Latin American Association of Social Medicine. In this article, the author writes that approaches to communication of western organisations trying to reach non-western cultures are still based on the concepts, designs, and advancement of particular groups and fail to include the \’\’real\’\’ thinking of the \’\’other\’\’ that they are trying to affect. Programmes that do not consider context, location, and gender relations will always miss their target. In this \’\’global\’\’ world where the market and consumption cuts across everything, where foundations and financial organisations put together the funding for intercultural projects to improve the conditions and quality of life of these groups, we should remember that \’\’the road to hell is paved with good intentions\’\’.

A few years ago, working in the Andes among the peasants and indigenous people of the area, I understood that I had a lot to learn before I could change the behaviour of others.

I was working on a programme to improve reproductive health in a population with a high frequency of pregnancies in which many women of childbearing age grew ill or died during pregnancy, while giving birth, or post partem. We tried to make the population understand that allowing more time between pregnancies would reduce illness, complications, and death for women and that there was a natural way to achieve this: because the process of lactation that is stimulated by nursing inhibits ovulation, as long as the mother nurses, her probability of getting pregnant again is reduced.

Shortly before a meeting that we had arranged with the community, I met a woman leading a three and a four-year-old by the hand and carrying a third child on her hip. What she said took me by surprise: ”But if my husband hears this, he won’t want me to nurse the baby because he wants a lot of babies so they can help him in the fields.”

What for us was good and healthy and considered an improvement in the quality of life jarred with the needs of their daily life: more babies, boys in particular, meant an important contribution to the work force on the land they lived off of.

Something similar happened during preparations for a health campaign against cholera. One of the posters proposed for the clinics showed a group of peasants burying a coffin, with the words: ”Let’s bury cholera.” In this case too the people the message was directed at had not been taken into account. They did not consider death the end but rather a ”beyond” where another phase of life lay. Thus for them, the line on the poster meant, ”Let’s give cholera another life.”

Similarly, a poster encouraging women to give birth in clinics showed a visibly pregnant indigenous woman with lines and stars radiating from her body meant to convey the pain she was in. But indigenous cosmology considers the stars and the firmament signs of life, if not the major forces guiding it. In other words, our picture of ”pain” meant something else entirely to the women it was meant to reach: faith, love, and life.

In my opinion, the communication approaches of western organisations trying to reach non-western cultures are still based on the concepts, designs, and advancement of particular groups and fail to include the ”real” as opposed to the ”formal” thinking of the ”other” that they are trying to affect. Programmes that do not consider context, location, and gender relations will always miss their target.

From an anthropological point of view, we must be able to give these ethnicities, or simply culturally different groups, the elements and tools necessary for them to build their own messages using their own cosmology and codes so they can bring about changes in their behaviour. Those of us that have the infrastructure necessary for processing and gathering information should use it to this end.

It isn’t a new problem. In 1947, a report of the Smithsonian Institution of the United States prepared with the Pan American Health Organisation recognised the need to include specialists in anthropology to design health programmes for intercultural populations.

In this ”global” world, where the market and consumption cut across everything and where foundations and financial organisations put together the funding for intercultural projects to improve the conditions and quality of life of these groups, we should remember that ”the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

We cannot let western ethnocentrism be a point of departure for our dealings with other cultures; our colonialist ways of thinking diminish the other, who is not taken into account. It is not enough to merely to incorporate the community we are trying to reach in the reception of messages; instead, its realities and interpretations of day-to-day life must be taken into account and allowed to shape how the message is formulated and represented. It is essential to recognise that disrespect for the thinking, the history, and the symbolic, cultural, and social capital of these communities is itself a form of violence. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)