What anthropologists mean when they talk about culture: Conflicting discourses in development

by Leslie Butt - McGill University

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the results of fieldwork conducted among a tribal community involved in a gender and development project in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. I focus on a particular incident: an Indonesian development worker, well-trained in basic anthropology, turns a story about a tribal woman's childrearing practices into a derogatory and negative account in a way that fits his understanding of culture. His anthropological knowledge -- of spirits, witchcraft, and indigenous beliefs -- is built on a static definition of culture and denies the impact of his presence on community healing practices. This paper argues that a more complex understanding of "culture" is necessary. Culture is both process and product, and is shaped by ethnicity and power relations. Development workers who are familiar with a broad definition of culture may be able to provide more appropriate guidance when project recipients are of a different ethnic background.

Unreflective beliefs about people can constrain even the most successful culturally-sensitive health and development endeavours. Those development workers who use " culture" as a means for health promotion generally do so because they believe that cultural knowledge provides them with a progressive, sensitive and empowering approach to improving health. It is undeniable that cultural beliefs and practice affect health outcomes. However, such an approach does not always garner the success it deserves because of a misplaced understanding of what is meant by culture. The case study about culture in development that I want to discuss revolves around Indonesian development workers from the island of Java who work with tribal peoples in a gender and health development project called CWHI (Children and Women's Health Initiatives) in Irian Jaya, Indonesia's easternmost province. CWHI works within national objectives to supplement government health services. Building on the primary health care foundation set in place by the government, CWHI is a flagship programme that has earned the highest praise from its sponsors for its work promoting crop diversification and preventive health measures. I focus on CWHI because it offers a case study of the role of cultural values in shaping the success of a project.

Rather than discuss the cultural values of the target group, an isolated indigenous population in Indonesia's least developed province, I look at the way CWHI workers talk about culture. I will argue that CWHI workers have been trained to see culture from an orthodox perspective, that of culture as a set of shared meanings. This definition does not take into account that cultural beliefs also build ideologies by means of which certain political and economic realities are legitimated . Through a look at the culture of CWHI, I want to tie the local relations of the project to issues of ethnicity, power and nation-wide development objectives.

A broader contention this paper sets out is that development projects can be understood as extensions of prevailing cultural beliefs that dominate Indonesian politics. The small but significant number of studies on the role of the state in shaping local definitions of culture have unilaterally argued for persuasive, almost coercive molding of cultural boundaries and legitimate cultural expressions by a set of informal and formal national policies. However, this type of analysis has generally been limited to the arenas of cultural production most directly affected by static definitions of culture: textiles, dance, rituals. In this paper, I want to extend these convincing analyses to the arena of development activities, suggesting that a closed definition of cultural practice works as a powerful tool which denies normative ways of learning in favour of a static model that allows more aggressive (and consequently less successful) forms of intervention.

The Setting

Several hundred cultural groups and people from 1,200 different linguistic backgrounds make up the country of Indonesia. Although the population of 190 million is spread out over 12,000 islands that span some 5,000 kilometres, the national agenda for development is built on a comprehensive set of premises that is meant to apply to all its multicultural citizens. Whether the project recipients are tribal peoples just recently brought within the fold of government agencies or rice paddy farmers who have laboured for centuries under Dutch colonial regimes, development objectives are set at a national level and have involved both military and political goals and strategies.

Perhaps due to the broad political goals that founded development initiatives, rational economic growth has characterized Indonesian development policy. Within this economistic approach, control over population growth has been the cornerstone for successful development since the mid 1960s New Order regime consolidated its power: "the rate of population growth is a significant determinant of the success of a country's economic development efforts" . Improvement in health constitutes an investment in human capital formation that, in the words of one government social law, will allow Indonesians to "become valuable human resources for national development and resilience" . Thus, many development goals center on reducing infant mortality rates, improving maternal health and implementing effective preventive health measures for women and children. The broad ideological position is that if Indonesian families have healthy children, it will lead them to want smaller families.

A wide range of programmes target the effective dissemination of information about birth control; the use of midwives; and pre- and post-natal services for mothers . In order to ensure "high quality" babies, interventions into the care of newborn children include promoting adequate maternal nutrition; nutritional food supplements for the baby; immunizations and breastfeeding. Health achievements under these programmes have been solid and impressive: infant mortality rates have dropped to 68/1,000 live births, and 70% of children are fully immunized. Providing these measures of preventive care in Irian Jaya is no easy feat.

The resource rich province is also perhaps the least developed corner of the world. CWHI serves approximately 200,000 indigenous people in the Jayawijaya district. The district encompasses a large mountain range spanning the length of the island, a place accessible only by airplane and home to treacherous mountains, mud, fog and rain. The sweet potato tuber is the main food source in the mountains, and wild game and domesticated pigs complete the diet. Basic services -- schools and health clinics -- are still unavailable in many remote regions. Infant mortality rate is exceptionally high: among the Dani tribe of the Baliem valley in the center of the mountains, for example, my figures tally 280 deaths/1,000 live births and can approach 400 deaths/1,000 live births in infertile and arduous regions . Malnutrition and stunting in toddlers is common in regions where food is scarce, and influenza, upper respiratory infection and dysentery are the main causes of death of children under 5. Not only are the highlands of Irian Jaya remote, health conditions are among the poorest.

Projects like CWHI are needed, particularly since density is low, and the distance between a health centre and the farthest point it serves is an average 32 kilometres away . Most tribal people in the highlands have begun to participate somewhat in the complexities of the developing world. Material objects such as clothing, aluminum siding, matches, books and world religions still delight most highlanders, not to mention VCRs, satellite dishes and Michael Jackson. In contrast, the development workers from Indonesia who run this project are all university-educated Javanese. To essentialize the cultural situation: those who provide the care have a rich legacy of artistic accomplishment that includes batik, dance, and pageantry; and traditions sustained by shadow puppetry, the Ramayana, and a legacy of valuing aesthetics and restraint. Malay culture also has a complex set of indigenous beliefs about healing built on oppositions of hot and cold. In contrast, the highlanders of Irian Jaya would still practice warfare if it were allowed; act out complex political relations between enemy tribal alliances; live in small huts built from forest products; subsist on a diet of sweet potatoes and pigs; and have a rich set of beliefs about ancestors that allows them to tie the illness of live persons to unhappy dead ancestors who are exacting revenge on the living. To borrow oft-applied phrases: "Javanese aesthetics and restraint" meets "stone-age warriors".

It is just such essentializing that I want to bring to your attention. To reduce the Javanese to "aesthetics and restraint" is inappropriate, but to reduce the Dani and other Irianese highland groups to "stone age warriors" when it is those who are in a position of power -- institutional, intellectual, developmental -- who are making the reductions is to generate a whole set of discourses in development about target populations that I consider problematic.

A Case Study: Educating women about infant health

Let me provide you with an example which illustrates my argument that essentializing cultural traits makes for ineffective development projects. Neli is a new mother from the Dani tribe who has a 4 week-old child. Neli wants to be "modern" and to that end she has learned a great deal about contemporary ideas of child care through CWHI project and other small religious NGOs. CWHI employees are Malay/Javanese in origin and their teachings syncretize modern medicine with traditional beliefs. One of the many Javanese/Malay beliefs Neli has absorbed is that babies must be kept warm at all times in order to stimulate growth.

It is proper, she was told, to bathe your child and to place the child in the direct sunlight for an hour in the early morning (before 9 A.M.) to counteract the cooling effects of the bath and to keep your child warm. It is also important to cover the child with Malay oils to keep the skin moist and to protect the body from cold.

These suggestions directly contradict Dani beliefs. The Dani believe that an infant up to the age of about three months should be kept as quiet as possible, in a cool and dark netbag slung over the mother's back or hung on a hook inside a cookhouse, during the hot daytime hours. Babies should be bathed in a safe space where malevolent dead ancestors cannot affect the health of the child. These measures are extremely effective from a health point of view: the Dani often give birth to small babies - just over 2.5 kg [5.5 lbs] - but the growth rate during those months where the child is kept isolated in net bags is phenomenal: a child easily adds 1 kg [2.2 lbs] a month during that time, so that a 3 month old baby weighs 6 kilos [12.5 lbs], more than doubling his/her birth weight by the time the child is three months old.

Neli faced a conundrum every time she wanted to bathe her child. Putting a child in the sun will kill it, tradition says, but local health "experts" tell her that putting the child in the sun will help the child grow big and strong. Neli's husband did not want Neli to expose the baby to the sun because of the dangerous diseases that can come from "overheating" or from entry of the body by ancestor spirits. He therefore told her not to do it at all. This is how Neli dealt with the problem. As learned, she bathed her child every day. She also covered his body with generous amounts of Malay oil, purchased at great expense. However, she increasingly put the water on to boil later and later in the morning, so that when the time came to bathe the child it was closer to noon when the sun, by 11 A.M., was at its hottest. "Will you put the child out to dry in the sun today?" I asked Neli. "Oh no," she replied, "it is far too hot outside now to do that."

In effect, Neli made a choice. She kept what she liked from what she had learned -- bathing and slathering the baby with oil -- and rejected what she didn't like or what didn't fit in with what she believed. She also negotiated her choice extremely tactfully, in a way that was designed neither to offend, nor to deny the value of what she had been told was the best thing for her child. It is good to put the child in the sun, she is certain, she just isn't able to carry out that task.

I liked this story and told it to CWHI workers. This is how the manager retold it to an audience of Indonesian bureaucrats at a health policy meeting several days later: "A woman had heard from us that it was important to give your baby a bath and dry it in the sun. One woman listened to what she had learned but she didn't listen well and so put her baby in the sun to dry for an hour at 12 noon! We have to be careful about what we teach because they will interpret it wrong. They are very simple people; they have very little intelligence. They need to be told what to do."

Although CWHI workers have been well-educated about Dani beliefs about illness such as the power of ancestor spirits they do not apply their knowledge to this situation. As one worker named Susana who is known as intelligent and sensitive said to me: "I had no idea that the Dani actually had any ideas about their bodies, or how babies are born, or that they might have ideas about how to keep a baby healthy. I thought the Dani had empty bodies, no content." While this worker knew that many Dani link sickness to spirit ancestors, she tended to keep this knowledge separate from Neli's everyday pragmatism. In other words, the health worker compartmentalized beliefs about healing so that it was separate from actual life experiences. She saw culture as static.

Discussion

Cultural knowledge about sickness can be thought of as static simply because it tends to be described as such. In the case of "stone age warriors" like the Dani, ethnomedical practices can be seen as contained by the "pre-cultural" lifestyle they are seen to lead. To see culture as merely a "set of shared meanings" as I argue CWHI employees and other development workers do, makes it difficult to do good development work. It prevents understanding of differences within a group, and obscures the reality that cultural beliefs adapt, grow and change. Abu-Lughod argues that static misleads: "it makes what is inside the external boundary set up by homogenization seem essential and fixed...populated by generic cultural beings who do this and that or believe such-and-such" .

From this vantage point, Neli cannot possibly be intelligent for a static view of culture dictates that she live inside a reactive pre-thinking cultural stage of the "stone age primitive." I make this point forcefully for I believe that this type of essentialism is used all the time. There is a lack of awareness of the differences between thinking something and actually doing it; and between ideal models of behaviour and everyday actions. And yet, on the basis of my story, who would deny that Neli is intelligent, and that she integrates new knowledge into existing knowledge banks, and that this new knowledge comes from external sources and shapes and is shaped by what she already knew? Why is it all right to downplay the interlocking nature of human interaction when talking about culture? One possible answer to this question is that there is an ideology in place that makes Dani culture appear "natural." This idea of a "natural" society that has a closed and static belief system, has become a normal way of thinking in Indonesia.

This way of thinking has concrete material practice. Under government influences too complex to mention right here, "culture" in Indonesia is coming to mean the ritualized, public, decorative celebrations that visually distinguish ethnic groups within Indonesia from each other, the "apolitical features of regional identity such as local costumes, dances, handicrafts, and architecture. The state motto of "Unity in Diversity" [Bhinneka Tunggal Ika] spells the message out clearly: to foster and enhance aspects of diversity that reflect custom and tradition, set apart from daily life, and that characterize a group as different from its neighbour, but that at the same time emphasize the unity of the nation because no traditions have preeminence over any other. The Javanese have wayang puppets and palace courtesans; the Dani may have their public displays of artificial warring dances and pig chases, if they so desire, as long as it falls within the normative boundaries of "culture." "Culture" is "natural," and it distinguishes ethnic groups from one another.

This interpretation of culture equates tribal with primitive. For example, Irianese, ever since their incorporation into Indonesia in1969, have been denigrated as "stupid" (Papua bodoh) and "backwards" (terbelakang). Aspects of the primitive which Irianese are said to embody are then easily reified. For example, the Indonesian district head proposes that his development goals are culturally sensitive because they include certain "positive" features of indigenous culture such as "environmentalism" and "cooperation" . These qualities are simply reifications of an idea of the indigenous rather than abstractions derived from local practice, particularly if one notes that the Dani and other highland groups are far more famous in the anthropological record for their warring tendencies and for their political competitiveness than they are for any innate spirit of cooperation .

In another example, a national newspaper uses the term "primordialism" to describe any cultural group such as the Dani that places its own local interests above state policies . The primitive Irianese such as the Dani can easily be linked to non-compliance with Indonesian values; this point is relentlessly driven home throughout the country to encourage all ethnic groups to conform to state goals which, as I suggested earlier in this paper, are intricately linked to development.

Conclusion

Comments on the nature of social relations within this development project can lead us to examine the issues in two different ways. The first is pragmatic. CWHI's flagship status and innovative goals are brought down to earth by inadequate training in the realities of how people think. Indigenous beliefs about witchcraft and ancestor spirits are about what people think. It is ironic that money and time are willingly spent to train CWHI staff to learn how Irianese women garden and why they plant tubers the way they do, and so little energy devoted to learning how beliefs about disease causation are mediated through the influx of new ideas. There is a need to link the essential prerequisistes of good development work --"ethical sensitivity and considerable self-reflection" -- to ideas about culture. Ethical sensitivity might productively include an awareness of contemporary debates about development as signifying growth; where people and their communities act as subjects, not acted on as objects; where change includes changes in culture and beliefs; and where "making culture" happens even in the midst of a large development project.

The second analytic direction worth pursuing is the link between CWHI workers' beliefs and the institution within which they operate. It is beyond the scope of this presentation to discuss what advantages the Indonesian state gains by promoting a reductionist model of culture as dance and dress, or whether the CWHI project leader was speaking conformist language or actually believed in what he was saying when he denigrated Neli's actions. I argue that this particular project is so disciplined from the outside in terms of national ideological goals that the workers in CWHI are given considerable latitude to execute mandates or to think freely because their actions will have little real impact on the success of the project.

If a static model of culture is in place, as is the case in Indonesia, executing development goals becomes unproblematic, and relations of power and of ethnicity can be acted out without concern. In the case study, the project workers embody the power of the nation. If power were not so thoroughly in the hands of Indonesians, and if ethnic relations were more subtle and complex, as they are in many other parts of Indonesia, the re-making of Neli's story could be seen as a slip of the tongue. Here, I argue, it is simply a thoughtless act, but a telling one for what it shows us about how power and ethnic bias are given free rein in an unviable but ever-popular idea of what it is that makes up culture.

Footnotes

I am indebted here to definitions of ideology proposed by A. Young 1993, and to analysis of levels of control exercised in development agencies proposed in early works of A. Hirschmann.