The American Cowboy

Reflecting on Lilie Chouliaraki’s article, “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering”, I can’t help but think about the proliferation of D.I.Y foreign aid projects/documentaries.  Some more high-profile examples of this are: Tom’s shoes, Oprah’s School for Girls, Villa Angelina, Invisible Children, and Three Cups of Tea. Some would say, “well doing something is better than nothing”, but I have a hard time swallowing this line of reasoning.  It seems to me that this type of media and development romanticizes helping other people.  It brings to mind a cowboy mentality that Americans have in regards to “saving” others–that simply by watching, reading, or buying a pair of shoes they’ve done their part to bring about world peace.

Don’t get me wrong, I do to some degree think it’s better than nothing, but simultaneously it seems to be a somewhat cavalier understanding of world issues.  I mean, yeah, it’s great that you feel good because you bought a pair of Tom’s or donated to some local cause, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to fix the larger issues (of course).  I think that this type of foreign aid and the portrayal of others just makes Westerners feel better about themselves–that they are making a huge difference in someone’s life.  It distracts them from the larger issues at hand.

These forms of projects often use what Chouliaraki calls symbolic power, which “refers to the capacity of the media to selectively combine resources of language and image in order to present distant suffering as a cause of emotion, reflection, and action for Western media audiences” (329).

I’m torn because I know that this is how progress begins, but something about the DIY development trend seems capitalistic.  Do the means justify the end?  I don’t know.

I often think about this concept: why should an inexperienced American (on whatever subject) go into a foreign community and tell them the “right” way to do whatever.  I battle this idea with my own experience in the Peace Corps.  There I was with an unsophisticated understanding of teaching English, supposedly with the purpose of showing my fellow Ukrainian teachers the right way to teach.  C’mon, what the hell did I know?  My intentions were good, yes.  But does this send the wrong message?  The same can be said with Teach for America.  We would never send inexperienced educators into the classrooms of the wealthiest white neighborhoods.  However, this is an acceptable practice in  school districts or America’s marginalized citizens.

While these two examples are slightly different, I think the concepts overlap in that they both are Band-Aids to larger structural issues and are good examples of the symbolic power of media, both domestically and transnationally.