One More Year

The news came out tonight that Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest has been extended by another year. I'm angry and disappointed and frustrated and sad all at once:

… thinking of this amazingly smart and spiritual and powerful woman, who means so much to so many people, but who is stuck in a house all by herself.

… wondering how long we will keep calling her detention “house arrest” when, even in jail, one is allowed to receive visitors.

… questioning when the time is going to come for the Burmese, and for the Tibetans too.

… hoping that we all have enough passion to keep fighting.

Intellectual Property?

It’s amazing how reading the newspaper everyday gives you new insight and depth to a place that would otherwise be missed. Although I am a long way from understanding politics in Thailand, I am starting to learn more about the coup and constitution-drafting efforts, the problem in the South and also about activists in the country—some of whom staged a wicked demonstration Saturday night on Democracy Monument.

In the last couple of weeks here, there has also been a big uproar over intellectual property rights and drug companies. Thailand recently announced compulsory licensing for all AIDS and heart disease-related drugs (including of the generic forms of those that are patented). The decision was taken in an effort to make drugs cheaper and therefore more accessible to the people who need them, and has since been proven to do just that. Pharmaceutical companies have been forced to lower their prices to compete with generic drugs. However, under the influence of its powerful pharmaceutical lobby, the US has put Thailand on its “Priority Watch List” due to the country’s supposed lack of respect for patents. While the US argues that Thailand has violated WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property agreement (TRIPs), Thailand says that this decision was the only way for the country’s patients to access the invaluable drugs. This argument seems to come down to a debate between two ideals: intellectual property versus the individual’s right to affordable drugs. While I support the principle of intellectual property per se, I don’t think that upholding this notion should come at the expense of potentially millions of people in developing countries.

Another case of intellectual property rights that caught my attention is that of yoga. In February, India announced that it was creating a digital database of traditional knowledge, everything from ayurvedic remedies to construction techniques to yoga. This raises essential questions about the nature of traditional (or indigenous) knowledge and whether, when, or if it should be considered public knowledge. If it is public knowledge, then how can it be eligible for patent? India shouldn’t have to fight battles to revoke patents on their traditional knowledge, such as their legal skirmish over the US patent for the medical properties of turmeric, which India claimed to be common knowledge in its households. The US’s tendency to claim whatever it wants as its own is, however, making the protection of traditional knowledge necessary. In 2004, the US granted an Indian-American yogi a patent for a series of 26 asanas, despite the fact that they are a part of a tradition that is over 5,000 years old!

Is patenting traditional knowledge, as advocated by TRIPs, the best route to take in order to protect it? Would it be more effective to treat traditional knowledge as cultural heritage or as a collective human right? I guess that would depend on whether the economic implications of that knowledge are deemed to be more important than its intrinsic value and its cultural significance. In the case of the US and yoga, the patents, copyrights and trademarks are safeguarding a $3 billion industry. The US has obviously placed the importance on economic gains (as it did with the case of compulsory licensing of AIDS drugs in Thailand). One has to wonder what spiritual ramifications the patenting of traditional knowledge such as yoga would have for Indians themselves, and for the practice of yoga all over the world. After all, the notion of a universal mind—part of Indian beliefs, in general, and yoga—does not really seem to fit with the notion of intellectual property. In order to protect the intrinsic nature of yoga as a belief system, would this be an instance where the protection of this traditional knowledge should be treated as a cultural heritage or a collective human right? As a human rights activist, I hate to say it… but maybe money and patents speak louder than the more idealistic claims to cultural heritage and collective human rights.

I hope someone can prove me wrong.

I am all of these: Consumer. Invader. Crusader. Seducer. Self-hating Westerner. Buffoon.

A Traveller’s Response to “There’s No Such Thing As Eco-Tourism” by Anneli Rufus (http://alternet.org/story/40174).

I agree: colonialism isn’t dead. The dreaded word has crossed my mind on numerous trips in the past, but never more powerfully than in the last 5 months that I have been living in Asia. My relations to those around me have undeniably been affected by the notions of the consumer, invader, crusader, seducer, self-hating Westerner, and buffoon, all of which play into today’s form of colonialism.

I am a consumer of culture. I pay to see traditional dances and puppet shows, and to enter temples. I search out and relish new places, new experiences, and new foods. I may not buy typical souvenirs, but I avidly consume these new experiences. Similar to the way a fire consumes things, I have also destroyed the cultural essence of interactions by taking photos. As an anthropology student, I became really interested in the duality of photography as an art form and also as an ethnographic technique. While I can’t deny that a picture may be able to capture a ceremony or emotion, I have found that it often removes the human interaction that might have taken place in that moment. When I started being approached by tourists from Java asking to have their pictures taken with me, I understood just how alienating it can be to have a camera pointed in your face. All of a sudden, I was the odd one, the “other,” deemed to be so different and interesting that the mere act of me being there at the same time as them needed to be caught on film. I was really uncomfortable with the cameras pointed my way, openly or covertly. How then, can I turn around and expect people to let me take pictures of them? I can learn so much more about them (and they can learn more about me) by watching and asking the right questions.

I am an invader. This is not my place, and it never will be. Westerners in Bali may be able to speak Bahasa Indonesia, many become Hindu and eat local food, they may even marry a Balinese. But their skin will always be a different colour, and they will always be seen as a tourist once they step outside of their group of friends or the banjar (community) in which they live. I even found myself and my friends making that erroneous judgment. When I saw other white people, I instinctively thought that they were just tourists. It’s as if, because I lived there and hung out with mostly Balinese friends, I didn’t consider myself a tourist anymore. I have found that expats here in Thailand do the same thing. Loud, obnoxious and inconsiderate tourists make the farangs foreigners) living here sink down in their chairs, and exchange embarrassed glances with one another, as if they are different than the tourists. You can feel this sense of superiority at the Foreign Correspondents Club every night, where expats mingle amongst themselves. They seem to think that they have adapted to and joined the local culture, and that this distinguishes them from the tourists, making them less of an invader. A wolf who sincerely considers himself a sheep is indeed an interesting phenomenon.

I am a crusader and a seducer, even if indirectly. My way of life and fundamental beliefs about society and relationships come through very differently in another country. In Bali, I got the distinct impression that my generation is extremely envious of what they see as the Western lifestyle and the values that entails. They want it for themselves at the expense of their traditional way of life. They want to be free and independent and travel the world, rather than having the responsibility of taking care of their families and contributing to the banjar. So while I haven’t directly and vehemently promoted my beliefs, they are being adopted by the younger generations. I haven’t tried to seduce locals to my way of life, but I can see it happening.

I am a self-hating Westerner. In the face of my Balinese friends’ deeply rooted religious beliefs, I felt spiritually confused and almost envious that their spirituality was intertwined with their daily lives. An argument with a guy named Wayan at the local drinking hole makes an excellent case in point for my own spiritual uncertainty. One night, Wayan said that Rastafari was a fashion style and not a religion. Amongst a bunch of self-proclaimed Rastas who weren’t rising to the defense of their beliefs, I felt compelled to argue the opposite: Rastafari has a strong biblical and historical basis like any other religion, with deep beliefs that influence how people live their lives. Some Rasta beliefs, such as dreadlocks, have been adopted by some people who may not know the deeper meaning of the symbols that they wear. My main argument was that religion cannot be reduced to what a person looks like on the outside, but is more fundamentally about what is in his or her heart. I told Wayan that to me, he didn’t especially look like a Hindu, sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt. At this point, he got really mad and started accusing me of being a stupid white person who knew nothing about religion, and especially nothing about Hinduism. He said that I didn’t believe in any god and the more I learned about other religions, the more confused I got. I was taken aback by the anger in his voice when he said this, but I totally agreed with Wayan. Despite that, there was no way for me to convince him that trying to understand and learn from different religions was acceptable position for me to be in. I may have finally won over Wayan and everyone listening when I said that I believed god was in everything, but his point had been made: a lot of Westerners are spiritually confused and I don’t think that any of us really like to admit it.

I am a also a buffoon. From the moment I stepped into Thailand, I have felt like a stupid white person – and nowhere nearly as much as in taxis. Most taxi drivers here do not speak English, so when I go out on my own, I carry along a little map my coworkers had made with my address and all the street names written in Thai. Since I cannot speak Thai, I thought this would solve the problem of communicating with taxi drivers. On my first time going home alone from a market which I had already been to several times with coworkers, I got into a taxi and showed the driver my map. He nodded and smiled so I thought he understood and knew where he was going. After our first wrong turn, I told him he should have gone the other way. He said something that seemed like “this is a better way,” so I gave him the benefit of my doubt. After 10 minutes and passing several large overpasses, I knew that this was not a better way and after a similar experience in Kuala Lumpur, I assumed that he was taking me the wrong way to make me pay more money. I held my cool as long as I could because I had been warned that Thais think it’s funny when Westerners get upset. But eventually I told him that I knew this way was more expensive and that this was a bad thing to do to farangs. He said something in Thai and kept driving. After an hour on what should have been a 5-minute trip, I realized that he wasn’t trying to scam me and that we were lost because neither of us could understand one another. I must have mispronounced my street name – there are 5 different tones on vowels in Thai! – and on top of that he couldn’t even read the Thai on the map I showed him. This has taught me that it is totally unrealistic to think I could live here for the next 9 months without having to learn such a hard language. However, people here who are learning Thai have pointed out the catch-22: while I want to learn so that I’m not such a stupid buffoon, my undoubtedly horrible pronunciation will only make me more of a buffoon as I learn!

All of this begs the question: why do we have this quest to travel and to go on so-called “adventure” trips? I think that we, as a society, have become bored. And I don’t just mean Westerners. In my experience teaching English online, I met hundreds of Asians who loved traveling just as much as Westerners. I think that we are not happy with our lives at home so we feel that we need to leave in order to get our heart beating again. In a world that so highly values commodities and personal accomplishments, traveling also gives us more bragging rights.

The more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve realized how lucky I am and how great I have it back home. I am privileged to have grown up in a society that allows me to study as much and whatever I want at school and that doesn’t limit the importance of my life as a woman to the house I keep, how happy my husband is and how many healthy children I have.

Does that mean that I will never travel again? Probably not. But these ideas definitely change how I travel. Being in another country, I am aware every day that I am a part of a new form of colonialism that makes me a consumer, invader, crusader, seducer, self-hating Westerner, and buffoon, all in one. It’s all part of the humbling experience of trying to understand another culture, whether you are passing through as a traveler or are trying to settle in.