From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Population growth and cultural destruction (Re: Nasty
Distribution: world
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 03:04:45 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <JMC.92Dec11180555@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:

 > Some years ago the _New Scientist_ reported on the outcome of an
 > appropriate technology project to bring a new design of cooking stove
 > into East Africa.  The new stove used local materials, used local fuel
 > and was efficient in energy.  Meetings were held in villages, and
 > after a few years 250 were in use.  About the same time, a new stove
 > made in the Far East using kerosine was introduced through normal
 > trading channels and sold 10,000 in about the same time.
 >  
 > Was this a case of "appropriate technology" doing more harm than good?
 >  
 > I'm inclined to think so.  It used up an extremely scarce resource
 > in all backward countries - initiative and organization - with an
 > essentially trivial result.

Wholeheartedly agreed. The Chinese are now busily importing little
one- and two-burner gas stoves from Taiwan and Japan to replace their
traditional brick fireplaces. Their initiative and organisation is now
being directed into producing gas stoves for themselves, now that the
market has been identified and demand clarified.

 > My opinion is that strengthening a country's connection to the world
 > market is the main way of modernizing it, and making the country
 > or some part of it technologically special is a mistake.  To the
 > technological romantic, having a network of wholesalers, having the
 > means of advertising new products and having the commercial institutions
 > permitting taking part in world trade are all rather dull things.
 > However, their lack is often the main barrier, because the technology
 > per se is well described in books and courses.

My only caveat here is that while any given country should indeed be
exposed to the world market (after all, every traditional village
since time immemorial knows very well how to barter and trade), the
mistake in the past has been to *impose* controls on production and
supply to benefit the "First World" industrial nation to the detriment
of the "Third World". Manchester and its control over Indian cotton is
a classic example of what *not* to do.

On the other hand, countries like Australia are nowhere near capable
of competing on an industrial mass-economic scale with the US, Europe,
Japan or China sufficient to be cost-effectient, but we get around
that by engaging instead in very small volume, high quality specialist
technology supported by resource development.

But that technology is appropriate to a European-derived culture,
while others can just as readily develop whatever technology may be
more appropriate among themselves.

 > In support of that, the Soviet Union was nowhere near behind in
 > the aspects of computing that could be read about in journals as
 > it was in those aspects of technology normally transferred by
 > salesmen.

And because they are intelligent once they get the hands-on experience
they can take it the rest of the way themselves . . .

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
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