often the case, when you look closely, you reveal unexpected details. As those surfaces that look white, compact and yet, if you stop to study them with our eyes, hidden ruts, cracks and crevices, gaps in which beats a lifetime, a network of micro you have not noticed that at the beginning.
Madagascar is an evocative name, the name of a picture postcard, with long white beaches and sea bright, dense forests and animal paradise ... And yet, as soon as we get inside, this picture shows you that, in its light and dark, lurk a thousand stories and a contradiction. It tells you not only lush, but treeless plateaus, not only of fine sand, but also a shortage of drinking water, not only of downhill runs in the dugout, but also "impossible to walk the streets where distances are measured in hours not kilometers ", not only of romantic cabins in the ocean, but also houses of earth from the walls so thin that you feel drawn by the pencil of a child. Tells you about a large island with the atmosphere of a continent, I said yes to a paradise, but hell.
They call the country in the developing world, but to which development is moving, this Madagascar?
When I was little we called them Third World countries, a definition which, in retrospect, it seems to have at least one advantage: it would evoke among alternative ways of life possible, including different ways to get back on top. Option number one, number two and number three, and although we are implicitly saying that one is more valid than the others, including less desirable maintain their own raison d'etre. Developing Countries, by contrast, seems to taste eschatological and universal, as if everyone were moving in a linear and unambiguous, to one great goal, but we have already achieved: the development, the one with them capitalized. Then what is it? Education, health, drinking water and electricity for all? Roads, technology, sales and marketing drive? Abundance, choices, consumption? As the anthropologist Arturo Escobar says, "everybody says the same basic truth, namely that the development is to open the way for the creation of conditions that characterize the rich societies: industrialization, agricultural modernization and urbanization." If we question the concept of development, seems to speak mostly about us, our West, of which other countries should hurry up and become a copy, so finally we will have new markets to sell and other mirrors, referring the reflection in our bellies, we confirm that we did the right thing, spreading prosperity and civilization in the world.
So here: I put my nose in on this gloss and I began to see the corners of faded color, some patch of black and accounts that do not add up to anything, so it makes me reflect on the creative power of the definitions, limits and the ambiguities of the concepts.
What we say when we say country in the developing world? First, a reality which we define by negation, an entity suspended indefinitely for a "not yet" that perhaps the time to submit criteria for a presumed universal logic that, for our part, we give enough to granted, without ever asking if there are other possible logics. Is not it true that when we name things, we carry on them a form of power, often imbued with ideology, under which, for reasons of clarity, objectify, leading the way in which they exist? Escobar is always saying, "development was the primary mechanism through which the Third World was imagined and imagined himself in this way precluding or marginalizing other ways of seeing and acting." And this has meant that what we now meet, when we move in developing countries, is a definite reality for the absence, by subtraction, in denial with respect to the comparison with ours. Object, on and off, commiseration, rejection, and welfarism.
But I want to play down! Anthropology alone already gives me enough fish to fry, just imagine you dress with the complicated social theories! Yet, when I reflect on this thing is because, if there is an advantage in being in anthropological apprenticeship is to be to deconstruct their own value judgments. Then, try to make a clean sweep, I met in my bag a piece of imagination that is referenced by Escobar. And talking to other vazaha I met, I became angry that they also had, and this prevented him from Madagascar to see what it really is. Our imagination prevents us from coming to a showdown with the complexity of reality, with the contradictions of a hell that is in heaven!
The reason I say all this is that sometimes I think that the murmur of the West there has historically prevented to hear what others have to say about what they are and the future they want. The idea that development of these countries is an invention of the West chase. For this they depend on us to achieve it. Maybe if the get rid of this negative image they have of themselves, these companies find their identity and begin to dream about their future. I know, invent new theories is not enough to change reality, but it makes us take the first step to rethink it. Vince once said: "The real poverty is the inability to have dreams." And maybe, I might add, also found to dream the dreams of others. As Luis said
Mallart: "¿Por qué no nos callamos a moment, proponer dejamos de temas de Conversación, y lo que ellos libremente escuchamos Tienen que decir sobre África-si es que les apetece-Hablar de África".
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