Class and Culture in the Developing World

Greetings from Kedougou! Hope everyone is well. Today, I'd like to write about something I think about often, and people often talk about here. People ask me about the similarities and differences between South America and Africa all the time. After travelling in parts of both, I feel like I can express my opinion; it's only based on my own experience, but that's the best I can do.

I feel like, overall, people seem to overemphasise the differences in between places, people, and things. There tends to be a view that everywhere is immensely different from every other place. While the "local" is certainly important, I feel like this constant focus on difference, usually cultural difference, tends to understate the similarities in how people actually live. American media, especially television shows and movies, tends to fetishize the "exotic" and "weird" aspects of different cultures, using them as plot devices to make things more interesting. Using "American" or "Western" as the constant for "normal," people of other cultures serve as the foil and are usually boiled down to some "essential" aspect of their being, and portrayed as such: people from the Middle East are crazy Islamist terrorists, Cubans are bizarre communists, Mexicans are drug dealers, Africans are either corrupt or starving to death, and so on. Any group is otherized and portrayed as a bizarre, stereotyped parody of itself.
Actually being in these far-away places that most Americans only experience from bad TV shows and movie villains, however, it's immediately obvious that it isn't that simple. And in that way one begins to see that, for example, Bolivia and Senegal really aren't that different. All the immediate indicators, or stereotypes, or gut-feelings about these two places would seem to be different: Africa vs South America, Christian vs Muslim, Latinos vs Africans, and so on. But if one is in a small village in Bolivia or Senegal, the actual day-to-day of people's lives are very similar. If I were to explain a village where the women are carrying buckets on their heads, men are working in the field all day, it takes atleast four hours to cook a meal, the village acts as a collective, in terms of sharing land, collective responsibility, deferring decisions to village elders, people pull water out of wells, and so on, I could not say if that were Senegal or Bolivia, or Ecuador or Tanzania, or anywhere. I would know if was a poor village, where people are basically grappling for small changes, lack an organised central government, and whose needs are basically peripheral to the international financial system. If you were to compare their gross national products (GDP,) basically the most common indicator for economic success internationally, you would see that Bolivia, ranking 95th, Senegal at 115th, Tanzania, 97th, and Paraguay at 101st, are all basically in the poorest half of nations (there are, of course, many many more poor nations than rich nations.)
Now, if one visits the capital of any of these countries, there are rich people, in nice cars, with air conditioning, who never carry anything on their head, never work in the field, spend 4 hours a day on the computer, and so on, and to an extent, their day-to-day lives are very similar to people's in the United States. In Pulaar, we say these people "eat money." In English, I guess, we say they have "disposable income." It's like that old (I'm sure apocryphal) quote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the rich are different than you and I." The interesting thing isn't necessarily disparity of income, as we all know that it's similar in America, where 1% of the population own 70% of all financial assets. The  UN says the richest 1% of the world owns 40% of the world's wealth. So the inequality isn't what is interesting. It's that poor people, be it in Senegal or Tanzania or Paraguay or downtown Atlanta or Paris, share more in common than they do with the rich in their own countries. A peasant in Ecuador, living in a tiny, relatively isolated and (from the viewpoint of the government) unimportant village, lives really a very similar life to someone in a similar position in Guinea, and a life that is not all that different from someone living in the ghetto in Los Angeles. Certainly when compared to a wealthly businessman living in Dakar, a person living in my village shares almost nothing in common, besides superficial cultural similarities.
The question arises, then, why are these cultural differences so focused on, when in the larger picture, they don't affect how people actually live their lives too terribly much? Why, in the popular American imagination, does one think of a poor Mexican and a poor "African" as so different? I would argue that our modern, capitalist mindset, heavily influenced by the rhetoric and reality of "globalization," tends to emphasise culture. Talking about the spreading of markets, technology, and a "global culture," one typically sees that culture is framed as the major impediment to the spread of the global economic system into every nook and cranny of the world. The old "McWorld vs Jihad" viewpoint, that "backwards stone age Arabs" hate modernity, and therefore won't accept capitalism or McDonalds or 'the unstoppable tide of globalisation,' frames culture as the major division between "us" and "them." On a more policy-based level, the "barriers to trade" are usually discussed as cultural ideas-- the importance of efficiency, the fundamentals of property rights, "ease of investment," strength of legal systems-- all of these things arise from perceived cultural differences.
The capitalist mindset, one that views possessions as the basis of life, or society, or whatever the fundamentals of life is chosen to be, will find culture to be the main difference, because it is assumed that consumption and accumulation are truly the basis of all social relations, and culture is what is holding back some of these "fundamentals of human nature" from being expressed fully-- and therefore signing the next trade deal, having a Wal-Mart, or getting rid of collective property rights. These cultural arguments are often used, then, to explain poverty and lack in the developing world, as Africans are viewed as lazy, South Americans as abusing their siestas, or now, the Greek as having a permissive and corrupt culture. There are two main problems with these arguments:
Ha-Joon Chang, a professor of institutional economics at Cambridge, has analysed these cultural arguments, with surprising results: they tend to change drastically over time, choosing to emphasise different aspects of a single people, depending on whether or not this group is currently successful. In analysing the claim that Africans are poor because they are lazy and don't work hard, Chang looks at an American history book from the early 20th Century, describing the Japanese of being “lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time, " and Koreans as “sullen, lazy and religionless savages”. He also looks at popular views of other cultures, such as in  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where a character complains that “the Germans never hurry”. Now, the stereotypes of Germans, Koreans, and Japanese are the total opposite; nobody would accuse these cultures of laziness. Chang argues that people often make assumptions about people they believe are inferior, and quickly blame culture. India is now a booming economy, but not so long ago economists spoke of a ‘Hindu rate of growth’, saying Hindu culture was fatalistic and not conducive to innovation or enterprise. The same is true of Brazil, which not too long ago was written off as a hedonistic culture, more interested in short-term fun than economic growth. “The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and the free market to developing countries” says Chang. Instead, they blame culture, saying there are innate differences, which prevent people from gaining an economic foothold.

The second problem with this culturalist viewpoint is raised by Paul Farmer, an anthropologist and physician at Harvard Medical School. A constant theme is his works is what he terms the "misdiagnosing of structural violence for cultural difference." That is, people "taking their time" cooking meals, or carrying water, or eating the same food every day, or what have you, tends to be viewed as a cultural difference, as opposed to situations imposed on people by desperate poverty. In one of his books, Infections and Inequalities, he gives the stark example of snacks made of mud sold in Haiti. Some would say that is part of their "culture," and indeed, that is the gut response many Westerners would have. He argues one can really only understand that by looking at class, that is, extreme poverty.
So then, to answer the question of how similar Africa and South America are-- poor people in both places live in a very very similar way. Class ends of really determining how people live daily-- pulling water from a well and walking three kilometres, or buying bottled water. Although the idea of class isn't very popular in America (although, with the increased focus on "the 1%"," that is changing,) I find it to be a much more useful model for looking at, and understanding, the world. Culture makes better postcards, but the upper middle class around the world lives surprisingly similar lives, and the poor around the world live depressingly similar lives as well, be it in my village in rural Senegal, or San Juan in Paraguay, or Endesac in Tanzania.