by Dan Robbins
courtesy McGill Daily
MONTREAL (CUP) — Along one wall were small
laughing Buddha’s. Opposite them were some hand-
painted Indonesian embroidery and in the back I
could see African wood carvings
I was in one of Montreal’s boutiques of Third
World Chic, where cultures are mixed and matched
like so many baseball cards, and consumed alongside
potato chips and t.v. dinners. I felt dirty. Selling off
their culture may be one of the few options left to
the world’s rural poor, but I can’t help but feel it’s
the sign of a definitive victory for liberal colonialism.
I have this picture of someone, maybe an Arts
student waking up in the morning, bleary eyed,
wondering what to wear. Does

 

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hvistmas Gift /de

unstable.

“The ethnic clothing market around the world is
very capricious, it comes and goes. It’s not something
we would ever encourage anyone to become deeply
involved in,” saysTed Macdonald of Cultural Survival,
a Massachusetts-based group which works with
indigenous peoples the world over to preserve
traditional culture.

Almost all of the trade goes through large-scale
commercial importers. Pier One is among the
biggest, operating 30 stores in Canada and over 600
in the U.S. According to John Baker, a 20-year
employee working in the merchandising department
of Pier One’s Texas head office, they don’t deal
directly with artisans, who subsequently receive very

June 8, 1994

 

“primitive, uncontrolled and unregulated,”
according to Ann Weston, one of the authors of the
study.

Workers frequently came down with respiratory
problems, and dyes from the rug-making process
often found their way into local water sources.
Meanwhile, children worked in the shops at the
expense of their education (researchers were unable

to determine if the children were forced to work as
bonded labour.)

“The idea that you’re supporting an individual
artisan is misplaced,” says Weston.

Still, with the world economic system as it is,

and with U.S.-dominated lending institutions such

as the World Bank

and the

 

Guatemalan go with Nepalese? she
wonders as she stumbles to the
closet. Is my poncho warm enough
for November?

She likely bought these clothes
from one of many shops
specializing in clothes and
handicrafts produced in the poorest
areas of the world’s poorest
countries: Third World Chic.

_ According to Caroline husband,
a Universite de Montreal student
who co-owns the recently opened
One World on Montreal’s Rue St-

 

 

International
Monetary Fund

showing little
interest in
changing it,
artisans in
impoverished
countries may have

 

little choice.

“It’s one of
the few ways that’s
been found to
bring money into

 

 

Laurent, this is a fashion statement

that appeals to many students, especially those
who're into the sixties peace, love and good drugs
aesthetic.

But it didn’t with the modern liberal student.
Europeans have long enjoyed surrounding
themselves with cultural tidbits from the societies
they’ve destroyed. Collections have been maintained,
museums have been filled, and even the occasional
brown ‘savage’ has been presented for the titillation
of the court.

A white-run business serving mainly white
consumers, Third World Chic is a denial of difference
and a denial of the political and economic realities
that make it possible.

Commerce Jo Culture

But it’s not just one world. There is a developer
world (where we are) and a developed world (where
people get developed whether they like it or not).
Without the colonial history shared by the two, Third
World Chic could not exist.

There have never been any reparations made for
slave-trading, and European economic colonialism
has continued. As a result, colonized nations have
been left impoverished, with little choice but to sell
off everything they can.

“Third World countries have to export to survive
because we don’t have any international safety net
and no prospect for one, “ says McGill economics
prof Myron Frankman.

While this has most commonly meant a switch
from subsistence agriculture to large-scale cash-crop
farming (often dominated by US. agribusiness),
cultural production has also been geared up for an
export market - a market which is inherently

little of the eventual sale price.

“Because the craftspeople don’t get to talk to their
customers, they have no idea what their products
are worth,” says Jacqui MacDonald, director of
Bridgehead Canada, a non-profit group which tries
to deal with producers on a fair basis.

Instead, the money goes to a long chain of
intermediaries. These are local ‘entrepreneurs’ who
control access to the export market and are able to
take the biggest part of the profits before the
products even leave the country.

Baker says one of the biggest questions a Pier One
buyer asks when deciding whether to deal with a
‘Third World’ artisan is, “How many can they
produce?”

Because an individual artisan could never produce
the 6,000 items necessary to put 10 in each Pier

One store, Pier One and other commercial .

enterprises deal instead with larger-scale networks,
often under the control of master craftspeople and
local elites.

Sometimes, they are organized into factories, but
a study published by the Indian Council for Research
on International Economic Relations in 1986 found
that, at least in India, small-scale workshops were
far more common.

Because they are often free of government
regulations of factory health and environmental
standards, such workshops are cheaper for the
owners, who can therefore make higher profits.
(This isn’t a problem for elites in countries such as
Guatemala, where factories are effectively
unregulated.)

The study also concluded that though the
handicrafts industry had provided higher wages for
rural Indian workers, often working conditions were

these rural areas,”
says Weston.

Principles of Sunk

There’s a town in southwestern China called Dali.
Dali is Chinese for Great Principle, but the surrealist
reference isn't completely inappropriate. Dali isThird
World Chic run amuck.

Clustered around Di’Zhaodaisuo, where I stayed
on a visit two-years ago, were restaurants sporting -
names such as Salvador’s, Jim’s Peace Cafe, and the
Coca-Cola Restaurant, where you could buy Mexican
food an oatmeal cookies. You could also rent English
novels, or read the mostly-English graffiti on the
walls. Free Tibet, said one. Free Palermo, said the
next. .

About half of the restaurants sold pizza. Most had
English names. The people who worked in them
spoke better English than anyone else I’d met in
China.

The tourists in Dali called themselves travellers
and carried backpacks instead of suitcases. Mostly
they bought batiks - wall-hangings and clothes -
but there was also brisk trade in local marble. They
looked with disdain upon the middle-class and
middle-aged who flock to the Forbidden City and
buy up touristy crap.

There was a debate among the seasoned ‘travelers’
who came through Dali; was this authentic China
they were experiencing? Or were they somehow
cheating themselves with a fake, a rip-off by those
cunning Chinese, willing to steal money from honest
westerners who just want to experience the ‘real’
China?

There are places like Dali all across the world’s
poorer countries. Places where the local economy
has shifted entirely towards filling the needs of the