In a previous blog post, I discussed the issue of power imbalances between (a) photographers who document people in humanitarian disasters, and (b) the subjects of those photos. I myself am a photographer and videographer who engages in such work, and at the time of that last blog post, I had the pleasure (and luck) to be able to report that, "I have
found the experience [of photographing people receiving humanitarian aid] uniformly rewarding."
In the intervening months, however, I had a negative experience making a short documentary about a Kenyan NGO, and my experience provoked a good deal of additional thought about engagement with disadvantaged and marginalized groups.
The root of the trouble arose from the fact that, after photographing, videotaping and interviewing people participating in and administering the NGO's programming, I took almost a year to finish editing the video.
My overriding reason for the delay was that I needed about a week of free time to focus on the video in order to finish it, and I didn't find the time until I was about to leave Kenya, almost a year after I began the project. For six months of the year in question, I had a full time job and was researching a book on my weekends; and for the other six months I was writing a book.
Multiple times, I told one or another people from the NGO that the delay was simply because of my work schedule, and that I'd finish the documentary as soon as I had the time. My expectation was that, since I was volunteering, I could complete the video at my convenience.
My expectation did not accord with those of the NGO's founder. In a series of increasingly unpleasant phone calls, he told me that, in the past, people (foreign whites) who had worked with the NGO had not delivered on their promises, and he made clear that he expected me similarly to fail the NGO.
He also claimed to be under pressure to deliver the video from the parents of the children who participate in the NGO's programming, and he said he was going to subject me to the "same same" pressure that he experienced. He also made some statements that I considered extreme: he suggested that I should be giving him money for the opportunity to do volunteer work with his NGO, and he told me that his mother's life would be jeopardized if I didn't finish the video immediately.
Each of these calls with the NGO's founder made me feel appalled and miserable, and they eroded my motivation to finish the documentary. Indeed, I regretted that I'd ever become involved with the NGO.
Then, ten months after I'd initially begun the project, the founder told me that he didn't want my documentary, and I felt extraordinary relief. A month later, I completed the documentary and delivered it to another of the NGO's administrators.
I finished the documentary first, and foremost, because I'd committed to do so, regardless of the intervening unpleasantness with the NGO's founder. Also, the NGO's end beneficiaries were children, who were receiving drawing and painting instruction from the NGO, and I felt obligated to finish the project for them. In addition, I felt that I bore a big part of the responsibility for the breakdown in relations with the NGO's founder, and I didn't believe that my mistakes in communicating with the founder were an excuse for not finishing the work I'd undertaken.
I probably shouldn't have started this project if I couldn't finish it quickly (although I didn't initially realize how difficult it would be for me to finish it rapidly), but once time began elapsing I badly miscalculated how the NGO's founder would view the situation. When (as has happened) someone tells me that work is eating up their time for a volunteer project on my behalf, I nod understandingly. I might try to cajole them into a schedule for completing the work, but I'm friendly about it; I try to support them; I take opportunities to express my gratitude; I don't doubt that they'll do the work. And, if I do eventually conclude that the work might never get finished, I may grumble, but eventually I shrug my shoulders: I don't feel entitled to free work, and I don't feel like I can force someone to do work for free.
But this NGO's founder didn't seem to share that perspective. He acted like, if the project wasn't completed quickly, I would never do it. I don't know if he's ever had a full time job (his work with this NGO is on a volunteer basis), but he didn't seem to relate to my objection that I had paying work to do in the time he wanted me to be editing the documentary.
Possibly, he was inclined to disbelieve me because I'm white, and he's black. Certainly, he acted like he expected me to follow his commands because I'm a woman, and that my failure to comply with his orders was a blow to his ego.
Moreover, my status as a middle-class white American volunteering my time in a Kenyan slum didn't seem to earn me any goodwill. My status didn't seem to cause the founder to assume that someone in my position would be acting with good intentions. On the contrary, he appeared to think that anyone with resources owed him a share.
I had not anticipated his sense of entitlement, nor his willingness to make my life unpleasant. Also, I discovered experientially what I'd known intellectually: that, while he may be a marginalized or disadvantaged person, he is not without power. Moreover, his code for exercising that power diverged widely from mine. I felt a responsibility to act in a morally justifiable way in respect of him and his NGO; but he used tactics of coercion and manipulation against me.
I did not expect gratitude or accolades from him, but I believe I deserved to be treated with the same basic respect and courtesy that colleagues and friends have a right to expect. (Possibly I received the same treatment he shows others in his orbit; maybe I couldn't have done anything that would have made the situation easier.) Nonetheless, I think I should have acted differently:
I should have been more wary of volunteering as an individual without an association with an established NGO or other organization;
I should have managed expectations better, perhaps by giving the NGO a timetable of my projected delivery date;
I should have liaised with other members of the NGO when communication with the founder became difficult; and
I should have put aside everything and finished the video immediately before the breakdown in relations became hostile.
In writing this blog post, I am not trying to badmouth the NGO or its founder; nor am I indulging in any guilty white liberal confessional. My desire is to offer a fair account of a difficult exchange that probably could have and should have been less fraught, as well as to extract the lessons learned from that interaction and offer them for the benefit of others committed to engaging across divides (be they of culture, class, nationality, language, race, gender, etc.).
On the positive side, this uncomfortable experience hasn't dulled my desire to work in this sector. Rather, it has sharpened my sense of both the perils and necessity of continuing to engage.
(Photo of children participating in a drawing class given by the NGO taken by Maya Alexandri)
My parallel careers - novelist and communications specialist for humanitarian and aid organizations - have only one significant point of overlap: displaced people. Whether they are outside their home countries (refugees), or within their countries but unable to live in their homes (internally displaced people - IDPs), whether their dislocation is literal or metaphoric, displaced people claim my deepest reservoirs of empathy.
I think the reason for this is that displacement is the touchstone of the current historical moment. Modern trends - urbanization, gender equality, psychologizing (to name three almost at random) - usually displace people. The tendency in contemporary life is to create greater distance from tradition - by moving people from rural to urban settings, by introducing women into non-traditional roles, by inducing people to question their motives and understand themselves critically. (Even fundamentalism, which in its many varieties is typically a reaction to modernity, displaces people with its severity and extremity, despite its claims to reestablish "traditions.") Modern trends also increase the pace of change, requiring people to endure frequent displacement, followed by even-more frequent displacement.
My own life is a case study of the potential for displacement wrought by modern living. Professionally, I've had four professions in sixteen years. Geographically, during the same period, I've lived in five states in the U.S. and four countries. I've gone from being a misfit at home to a "foreigner" abroad. My identity is coalescing into that of a wanderer, a person whose country is her body and who can be said to belong fully only to the planet.
Although opportunities for humanitarian and aid work with displaced people are sadly common, my experience trying to sell my fiction to mainstream publishing houses suggests little interest in displaced people (who, in my fiction, are often expatriates). Given my view that displacement is a central concern in modernity's most sweeping, global trends, the lack of interest among commercial publishers disappoints as much as it seems to highlight a disconnect between the world of publishing and, well, the world.
So I was delighted to find a contradictory suggestion in Pankaj Mishra's recent The New Yorker review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's second memoir, Nomad. Mishra wrote:
The fate of the truly modern nomad is . . . a ceaseless inner conflict between ways of life and value systems; this very quality has made the nomad an emblematic figure of the contemporary age.
I couldn't agree more. If only Mishra were in charge of publishing decisions instead of whoever it is who's promoting vampires (and now angels) as the emblematic figures of contemporary literature!
(Image of refugee holding UNHCR papers from New Proposals website)
Thomas Nagel's recent review in The New York Review of Books of Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, does a fine job of demonstrating why moral philosophy in its academic form has always baffled me: the blasted hypotheticals.
You walk past a drowning kid. You can save the child, but you will have to wade into a shallow pond and muddy your trousers and ruin your shoes. Is it immoral to keep walking and leave the kid to die?
From this hypothetical and variations thereon, Singer distills a principle: "'If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.'" (p. 24.) Building on this principle, Singer develops the general rule that "those who are financially comfortable" should donate 5% of their annual earnings (or more, if they are rich) to aid organizations that alleviate poverty. (p. 25.)
While I agree with Singer that individuals have a moral responsibility for others less well off than themselves, and further that we should all be developing means of discharging that responsibility, I think the hypotheticals have led Singer astray. As economists have learned, abstract models that work in theory tend not to operate so cleanly in the real world. All of those "externalities" that economists - and moral philosophers - have ignored for the sake of elegant conceptualizing have a way of refusing to be ignored once the conceptual gets concrete.
One major externality in Singer's hypothetical is the response of the drowning kid. Singer treats the drowning kid as a prop that serves to highlight the moral decision-making of the affluent actor. But the needy, no less than those whose needs are met, are moral agents with responsibilities that they may choose to discharge or disregard. "Internalizing" this externality in Singer's hypothetical might look like the following:
You walk past a drowning kid. You can save the child, but the child will be ungrateful and, moreover, will steal your wallet while you are saving him or her. Is it immoral to keep walking and leave the kid to die?
You walk past a drowning kid. You can save the child, but the child will accuse you of implementing a non-sustainable intervention and of thereby preventing him or her from being able to survive without your assistance, a charge that will lead to your public humiliation and condemnation. Is it immoral to keep walking and leave the kid to die?
You walk past a drowning kid. You can save the child, but the child's brother will be furious at what he perceives to be foreign interference with his family and will subsequently blow up a bakery that foreigners in town frequent, with the result that several local youths die and several more people (including foreigners) are injured. Is it immoral to keep walking and leave the kid to die?
In posing these hypotheticals, my point is not to suggest that aid recipients are immoral, but to illustrate the over-simplistic nature of Singer's unilateral model for assessing moral responsibility and crafting general rules based thereupon. The financially well-off may have a moral responsibility to help those in need, even if they prove to be ungrateful, cheat them of small sums, accuse them of acting injudiciously, humiliate them, or use them as an excuse for outrageous crimes; but the affluent also have a moral responsibility to discharge their obligations in a way that will have the most positive possible outcome.
With his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Singer launched the animal rights movement, an impressive achievement that - despite its already numerous accomplishments - will continue to reverberate for generations to come. As between humans and non-human animals, of course, humans are the only moral agents, a situation in which Singer's conceptual model has much greater emotional and logical force. As between rich humans and poor humans, however, Singer's one-sided general rule both fails to persuade (the rich) and demeans (the poor). What is necessary, instead, is a general rule that takes into account the moral responsibilities of both the donor and the aid recipient. Only such an approach will have any chance of resulting in "the most positive possible outcome."
Such a rule cannot help but be more radical that Singer's current proposal. Any general rule designed to promote optimal discharge of moral responsibilities on both sides of the wealth-redistribution equation must involve the affluent in more direct engagement with poverty than mere check writing.
And while nobody today thinks that people who won't give 5% of their salary to charity are going face poverty more directly - by, for example, sharing the burdens of power outages and sub-par sanitation that result from volunteering in a developing country slum - nobody thought that the indiscriminate and cruel slaughter of animals was noteworthy in 1975 either.
At a recent humanitarian training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, I had the opportunity to reflect on the extent to which modern thinking can impair learning.
The training involved one Power Point presentation after another, most of which entailed some stultifying combination of semantics, theory and complicated visual depictions of behavior models. The training materials looked like they'd been held hostage in some business management consulting firm that demanded ransom in the form of adherence to its enthusiasm for inane diagrams supposedly representing conceptual analysis of real world phenomenon.
Earnestly attempting to stave off sleep by focusing on the slides, I recalled Walter Ong's explanation in his masterful book, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, that abstraction is a characteristic of thinking in literate (that is, modern) societies. Pre-modern, oral societies think more situationally:
Illiterate subjects [in one experiment] consistently though of the group [of drawings of a hammer, saw, log and hatchet] not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations - "situational thinking" - without adverting at all to the classification "tool" as applying to all but the log. . . . A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: "They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." . . . Asked why another person had rejected one item in another series of four that he felt all belonged together, he replied, "probably that kind of thinking runs in his blood."
(p. 51 (citations omitted).)
Of course, situational thinking isn't bad or less intelligent than abstract, categorical thinking. It's a different way of organizing information that, in certain contexts, is appropriate or even superior to abstract, categorical thinking.
One such situation, I have discovered, is during a training for hygiene promotion in emergencies.
Hygiene promotion involves persuading and cajoling people into washing their hands after using the toilet. Safe water and food handling, safe disposal of excreta and solid waste, and safe management of "vectors" (rats, flies, mosquitoes, etc.) is also part of the job.
The job can be difficult and anxiety-provoking because the subject matter can be embarrassing, and people are often unwilling to discuss or change intimate habits, especially with or at the behest of strangers or foreigners. In learning how to do the job, case studies, simulations and opportunities to work directly with relevant populations are helpful. But as any parent who has toilet trained a child can affirm, diagrams of models of behavior change don't offer much assistance in getting a kid to use a toilet.
This retreat into business-consulting-speak may be a simple result of hiring too many engineers to do water and sanitation-related work in emergencies. Engineers are notoriously poor communicators.
But this silly and ineffective abstraction about hygiene promotion may also have another cause: anxiety about discussing embarrassing and, potentially, demeaning issues. Making a behavior model about hand washing may seem, to some, more important work than actually communicating with others about hand washing; certainly, there's less risk of personal exposure and humiliation.
Sadly, such a perspective simply leads to wasted efforts. No matter how advanced the society in which we live, we are all practitioners of primitive functions, like defecating. Modern thinking is powerless to change ancient facts.
The Code of Conduct of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies decrees, in its tenth and final point, that, "In our information, publicity and advertising
activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human
beings, not hopeless objects."
The principle distills general anxiety about interactions between
powerful storytellers and powerless subjects. Such anxiety is neither
new nor unjustified. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban describes the Farm Security Administration's (FSA) photographic propaganda work as follows:
the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the
viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify
its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief
of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers.
Obviously, storytellers engaging in such interactions should act with a
consciousness of the risks and an acceptance of responsibility for the
outcome. Nonetheless, despite the risks, such interactions are not
merely worth undertaking, but critical.
Without such interactions, of course, fund-raising for relief efforts
is much harder. But that explanation does not make such interactions critical.
Rather, such interactions are critical because engagement with the
world, and everything in it, is a moral responsibility. Yet a paradox
exists: engagement with any "other" or "unknown" is difficult to
achieve without doing more harm than good.
If war and enslavement is on the negative end of the spectrum of
engagements with "others," and colonialism is somewhat more towards the
center of the spectrum but still on the negative side of the balance,
then photographing the dispossessed for humanitarian purposes (or
engaging in any type of storytelling about disadvantaged peoples) must
be on the positive end (although, again, not without its risks).
Indeed, undertaking the empathetic leap to tell the story of an "other"
(in whatever medium) is possibly our safest and most promising tool for
engagement.
Full disclosure: I take photos for humanitarian purposes (examples right and below). I have
found the experience uniformly rewarding. Usually I am able to ask
permission before I take photos, and where possible I know the
subject's name and rudiments of his or her life. Very often, the subjects
request that I take the photo, either verbally or by appearing before
the camera and posing.
Although I cannot speak for the subjects of my photos, what feedback I
have received has been positive. In my experience taking such
pictures, I have typically been photographing individuals who have
either never been photographed before, or who have been photographed
only rarely. Some have indicated to me that being photographed gives
them a sense of importance as well as excitement to join that part of
humanity that has appeared in photographs. Many smile or laugh upon
seeing their photos. I have felt the satisfaction of having made a
contribution to my subjects' enjoyment of their lives.
In the case of photos I have taken, the subjects have only rarely seen
the end products in which their pictures appear (brochures, online
stories, etc.). In the instances in which they have seen themselves in
fund raising and knowledge awareness materials, they have been pleased.
That said, I have never taken a photograph that has been worth
any amount of money or garnered any fame. Such events tend to change the
calculus. Florence Thompson, depicted in Dorothea Lange's photograph
"Migrant Mother" (first photograph above), ultimately objected to
circulation of the photograph for reasons that appear to have to do
with the class disparity between herself and Lange (although Lange
didn't own the copyright to the photo and made no money off its
reprints).
And although the female subject of Kevin Carter's photograph of a
starving Sudanese child and a hovering vulture (right) never complained, Carter
was harshly condemned for snapping pictures instead of helping the
little girl more directly. After winning the Pulitzer in 1994 for the
photograph, Carter committed suicide.
But iconic imagery is a bad baseline for the vast majority of
interactions involving powerful storytellers and powerless subjects.
When images become iconic, they represent concepts greater than either
the subject or the photographer, and control of the image transitions
from model and photographer to the public.
Although the fallout of that shift in power may usually be worse for the less empowered subject (e.g., Florence Thompson) than for the more empowered photographer (e.g.,
Dorothea Lange), the fundamental problem is not that the photographer
somehow exploited the subject at the time of the photograph, but that
exposure (through fame or otherwise) is terrible to bear. Few have the
capacity for it: Florence Thompson didn't; but neither did Kevin Carter.
Blaming the photographer for this outcome is neither productive nor fair. A photographer (or any storyteller) has a very limited tool at his or
her disposal. A means of telling a story may be our safest and most
promising means of engagement, but it does not include protection from
the aftermath of that story's circulation, nor does it include a
guarantee of reward should the story prove profitable.
Even a storyteller's responsibility for the outcome of the interaction with the "other" cannot extend beyond circumstances in the storyteller's personal control. When an image becomes iconic, the photographer has lost whatever control he or she had over the image's use and message and cannot be accountable for the actions of unrelated third parties or the public at large.
We can condemn the storyteller for not doing enough (e.g.,
snapping pictures instead of feeding the child). But ultimately such
criticisms are hypocritical. The storyteller, after all, was (among other tasks)
fulfilling a moral obligation to engage the world, while most often the
critic was doing substantially less.
Moreover, the storyteller's engagement produced a lasting contribution
to our collective imagination and awareness. We are richer for the
storyteller's efforts.
Rather than criticizing the storyteller, then,
perhaps efforts should be directed to compensating (or feeding) the
subject of the story. Or critics should get off their asses and try
engaging the world themselves.
(Dorothea Lange's photo "Migrant Mother" from Wikimedia Commons; Kevin Carter's photo of a collapsed Sudanese girl and a waiting vulture from the Pulitzer Prize website)
At a recent training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, we reviewed the SPHERE standards that set baselines for conditions in refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. In particular, we focused on SPHERE's choice of a rights-based approach to humanitarian relief. The first principle of humanitarian relief is the right to life with dignity.
In general, I am not a supporter of rights-based approaches to any aspect of existence if the right does not have a reliable enforcement mechanism. If rights cannot be enforced, then they are empty gestures.
In addition, rights are rigid. By casting certain problems in terms of rights, the potential for negotiated, flexible solutions are reduced. Rights cannot be compromised; but, of course, comprise is the only reasonable solution to many intractable problems.
Moreover, having a right with no means of enforcement doesn't improve the life of the rights holder. On the contrary, it may reduce the right holder's resiliency. Fixating on rights can make a rights holder as rigid and inflexible as the right itself. But a resilient person is not inflexible: he or she is able to get his or her needs met, irrespective of rights or the unfairness of their denial.
These general objections seem particularly forceful in the specific situation of humanitarian relief. According to the SPHERE standards, for example, in order to enable a person to realize his or her right to life with dignity, humanitarian responses must provide 15 liters of water per person, per day, for cleaning, washing and cooking, as well as 250g of bathing soap, per person, per month. People must have access to toilets, and no more than 20 people must be sharing a particular toilet.
Without question, these minimum provisions are necessary to prevent the epidemic spread of disease in camps, a situation that not only visits tragedy on an already-traumatized population, but that also places the wider society at risk. In my view, such a rationale is sufficient - and better - than a rights based approach for the same activities.
Under the rights based approach, humanitarian work is hamstrung. In order for rights to be realized, and to embody an existence beyond rhetoric, an enforcement mechanism must exist. But the SPHERE standards are voluntary, and an enforcement mechanism would be profoundly detrimental. Liability for failure to follow the SPHERE standards would create too high a disincentive for humanitarian agencies.
Similarly, rights cannot be compromised. But the SPHERE standards must often be compromised because conditions in refugee and IDP camps are variable and typically dismal. Supply lines, for example, may be so severely impaired that soap or other necessaries cannot
be transported to the camp. In that event, have humanitarians violated the right to life with dignity of the camp's occupants?
Finally, a rights based approach seems likely to undermine the resiliency of the afflicted population. As this briefest sampling of the SPHERE standards shows, the vast majority of the world's people would be better off inside camps than outside. Under such conditions, what motivation does a camp occupant have to recover from trauma and return to everyday life?
Rights, in my view, are beside the point. Resiliency is what allows emergency-stricken individuals to rejuvenate and return to a state in which they are contributing to their communities and to society. A humanitarian response that supports the resiliency of the members of the afflicted community by reducing the incidence of disease in camps is one that needs no further justification.
Certainly, a right to life with dignity is a beautiful concept. But that none of us is safe while any of us is in danger is an unavoidable fact.
Mark Danner deserves our gratitude. In two articles in The New York Review of Books, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites," and "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means," he has tarried where few of us would care even to glimpse. In careful, thoughtful and measured prose, he has parsed the facts of US government torture - often of innocent people - and the ramifications of these actions.
His conclusion is that:
[t]he only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the "politics of fear" is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved.
. . . .
What is needed is not more disclosures but a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer.
This is the only way we can begin to come to a true consensus about torture.
"The Red Cross Torture Report," p. 54.
With all gratitude to Danner for his work and thought on this most difficult of issues, and with due respect for his conclusions, I have to disagree. Or, rather, I agree that we should have such an investigation, but I believe we can build a consensus - indeed, must build a consensus about torture - irrespective of its practicality.
At the outset, the lessons of history leave no doubt: torture does not produce reliable information. Humans will say anything to stop themselves from suffering pain. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed no more murdered Daniel Pearl than Roxana Saberi was a spy.
But, nonetheless, let us do the failure analysis. Let us examine precisely how useless was the information gathered through the US government's torture of terrorists and innocents alike. Let our harvest be an acute documentation of just how much time the US government wasted, and just how many "false red-alerts" were issued, as a result of the lies extracted under duress from K.S.M. and others. (See Danner, "US Torture.")
But though the failure analysis has its strategic uses, I believe that its role in building public consensus about torture should be minimal. Refusing to engage in torture is a moral imperative, regardless of the number of US lives - or the lives of other humans - at stake. The US needs to make a moral choice - not a pragmatic or strategic choice - not to engage in torture. Nothing short of moral absolutism on this issue will suffice to restore US integrity (to say nothing of its reputation). Curiously, this conviction - indeed, moral dimension - is absent from Danner's analysis.
Dick Cheney likes to assert that bravery is demonstrated by adopting "tough, mean, dirty, nasty" tactics against terrorist, tactics that require "the gloves . . . to come off," and by other such vague and vaguely Hollywood-cowboy-movie-dialogue methods. But Cheney is exactly wrong. When the American people maintain their integrity under fire - and demand that their government do the same - only then will they will have shown courage.
A condemnation of torture because it's useless - as opposed to because it's morally abhorrent - is an empty gesture.
