[Stoves] Cleaning Dung

Tue Mar 20 03:29:33 CDT 2012

Dear Richard

Rolled along with you, right up to last paragraph...for us, its ...not about  teachin "them" how to improve the tech but networking between us all to utilize  all our experiences. The students  become participants in the process. Thats the fine point of it, to my own experience. 

I have not taken you to task at all about your version of the principle of participatory development but I will this time.  If your buddy the briquettist was a well-trained scientist instead of graduating from grade 4, his work would be even more successful and his influence far greater. Ignorance is not a virtue. The lone wild west cowboy bolting a bigger engine on an airplane sufficient to make it fly into the face of danger is not ‘a better way’. It is just ‘possible’ and so people do it.

I related the story about the brick machines to a friend of mine who write a newsletter that tries to raise rabble and stimulate change. He asked me to write it in a way that removed all mention of the origin of the design (as if it magically appeared from somewhere as a localisable technology) and of the main person who trained the people to use the equipment and building processes who is a Ghanaian. He asked this because the two principals who pulled it off were ‘foreigners’. He wants the out of the story. Completely.

Think about this for a moment. He is asking me to assist him to describe an important technological innovation and adaption and adoption as ‘an effect without a cause’. I do not believe there are uncaused effects and we should not pretend there are. Philosophically, making the pretense that there is no technology transfer from one who works something out, like from your buddy to the rest of the world, is creating a lie. It is placing oneself ‘above’ the process and the participants as if we are Greek gods who look down from technological mount Olympus sticking a finger here and there and then pretending that ‘they thought of it all by themselves’. Well they will think of things ‘by themselves’, that goes without saying, but to pretend that the evolution of a system through the means of a well-though out plan for localisation happened without  a cause it to relegate it to the realm of magic. I don’t believe in magical solutions either.

For the moment I am refusing to write any story about it at all either until I can work out how to write about effects with no cause, or until an acceptable cause-effect chain is clarified that somehow serves the socio-political objectives of my technology-conscious friends.

Good technologies are often developed with the active participation, even leadership, of those who use them. This is by no means the only method of development. Vaccines, for example, are used by millions of people who have no common understanding of modern disease theory. There are no ‘appropriate technology cell phones’. There are no ‘participatory internet routers’ sending SMS messages from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. We have to get real about how technologies are developed and transferred. 

If a better combustion system is developed in principle, it gets shared. How it gets constructed in the field might have a great deal of local knowledge and input. Hopefully it will. But to set up the users with the idea ‘they thought of the whole thing’ is condescending, in my view. We all stand on the shoulders of both giants and pygmies and people in between. There is no need or validity to encourage people to think they stand alone.

I am however completely agreeing with you that the technology missionary going out to save people from their ignorant selves is quite incorrect. We have had and will continue to have lots of that and I support you in your mission to have less of it. It is not a useless approach, but it often is damaging and creates artificial dependences which should not be there.

So, good people, like any good physicist, please try to live with two concurrent models of reality and ponder how best to proceed in the circumstances in which you find yourselves.

Regards

Crispin in sunny South Africa

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20120320/434a3294/attachment.html>