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  hardie karges 6:48 am on February 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: handicrafts ( 2 ), Third World ( 3 ), tourism ( 4 )   

  World Crafts 

  The party’s over for world handicrafts, not for lack of skill or quality, but for lack of interest, or marketability at least.  The crafts that are a product of hundreds of years of cultural development can be run through the Western consumer-culture meat-grinder and spit out within a matter of a few years, if not months.  The best products might have a life span of ten years or so, but more than that is very rare and at a very reduced level of activity.  Ironically, while tourism can dilute traditional cultures, it can stimulate crafts production.  Little by little, the product is adapted to the tourists’ tastes to the point where it actually becomes a viable product in foreign markets.  Unfortunately it can seldom keep up with the demand for novelty required in Western markets and a once vital industry can dissipate to virtually nothing.  Hopefully there’s still something of a local and tourist market left.  Of course, by then the product has changed beyond recognition so indigenous use is out of the question.  After exposure to the whole process of tourism and mass production, their tastes may have changed beyond recognition anyway.  In some cases they may have jumped to a new level in society.  In others, they may simply have lost touch with their indigenous culture.  In still others, they might continue making knockoffs to order, generic ethnic product from the lowest bidder.  It’s no accident that some of the nicest products come from the politically most hideous countries.  Hopefully something is gained positively and permanently from free enterprise to more than compensate for whatever might be lost.

   

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  hardie karges 10:06 am on February 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bolivia ( 2 ), handicrafts ( 2 ), La Paz   

  TEODORA 

  I miss Teodora.  In all my history working as a handicraft producer/importer/exporter, working with Teodora was the most fun.  She’s a chola, a partially acculturated citified Aymara Indian.  She’s way cool, wearing the little traditional bowler perched on top of her head, just like the pictures.  She lives in El Alto, a suburb of La Paz, Bolivia, not more than about a long stone’s throw from the international airport.  The altitude there’s about 13,000 feet, and there are peaks all around over 20,000.  The sun beats down unmercifully, but it’s not hot at that altitude, just bright.  The clouds look like you could just reach out and grab a handful.  That’s where Teodora runs her sweater business.  It was hopping a decade ago back when I still had a US-based business.  I made a video of her and her crew going through all their phases of production, a dozen or so friends and family working it all out by hand.  I went back last year for the first time since then.  It’s pretty quiet now, the crafts business being what it is.  If indigenous people get better incomes now doing other things, then more power to them.  I would’ve made more money doing other things, too.  Others made lots, but I didn’t.  Many more than that made nothing and went on to one job after the other, selling real estate, insurance, whatever.  It may not be much, but I’ve given some people some work, and I’ve allowed some people to maintain a traditional lifestyle with a decent income rather than live in the shantytown of a city without much of anything.  For an indigenous person with traditional lifestyle, even poverty in the countryside has more dignity than anonymity in the city. 
   
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  hardie karges 10:13 am on February 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bolivia ( 2 ), Nepal ( 2 ), Peru ( 5 )   

  BOLIVIA 

  Peru’s okay, and Bolivia one of my favorite countries of all time, always a poor man’s Nepal, and now a smart one’s also, what with the Marxist insurrection in the Kingdom, not so different from Peru itself circa 1990.  You’ve got to be pretty pathetic to be ‘going Marxist’ in the 21^st century, socialist maybe, but not Bolshevik.  Tourists notwithstanding, Nepal is so poor that Nepalese go to India to work.  I was in Kathmandu a week and didn’t see the mountains till the plane took off.  I thought for sure that I’d be going back; maybe I will.  La Paz is already there amongst the peaks.  The plane lets you off at 13,000 feet in El Alto where Teodora lives; then you go down 1500 feet to La Paz, skyscrapers rising up toward you from below.  It can be quite an effort just to breathe sometimes, especially after climbing the steep sidewalks.  But Bolivia’s another world, almost.  There is not a paved road crossing any border into Bolivia, at least not the last time I crossed.  Yet, they have buses more modern than any in North America.  There’s logic there somewhere.  You cruise across the lunar landscape as though there’s nothing more normal than riding a bus at an altitude higher than some airplanes fly.  The local Indians look like leathery-skinned Martians with pointy caps serving as secret transmitters to the mother ship. 

   

   
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  hardie karges 6:56 pm on February 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Guatemala ( 4 ), Maya ( 4 )   

  Save the Endangered Peoples 

  Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, the quaint rural Mexico that you always wanted, but it changed before you got there.  Guatemala City is nothing much more than a pit stop, but the western highlands are breathtaking.  Long inhabited by the highland Mayas from the ‘City’ west all the way to Chiapas in Mexico, the area is a piece of living history.  Emerging from the mists of history as descendants of the classic Mayas possibly inter-mixed with central Mexicans, they nevertheless maintain their ancient traditions to a degree seldom matched anywhere else in the world.  Numbering dozens of ‘tribes’ (i.e. linguistic groups) and millions of people, these are a proud people who never changed their names to fit Spanish fashion and who only reluctantly give up their own clothing styles to fit Western fashion.  Most Indian women never do, and this becomes a point of identity and pride in their ‘Guatemalanness’.  Though there is increasingly a stratum of ‘generic’ Indians whose females wear non-distinct, though very striking, Mayan garb, traditionally a woman would wear the style of her particular village, and were identifiable as such.  The related Quiche’, Cakchiquel, and Tzutuhil Mayas reside in the central area around Lake Atitlan and Quezaltenango, and are generally relatively prosperous, with tourist income, though a far cry from their former glory.  Increasingly they are fragmented culturally and their languages are mutually unintelligible from one hill to the next, forced to rely on the Guatemalan government and the Spanish language for their unity.  The Ixils and Kekchis to the north and Mams and other related groups to the west are in worse shape, maintaining traditions in a world that increasingly doesn’t care.  You can protect an endangered species from extinction, but what can you do for a culture?  I guess we should print bumper stickers that say: “Save the people!”

   
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  hardie karges 9:48 am on February 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Guatemala ( 4 ), Maya ( 4 )   

  Maya, Illusion 

  One of the great mysteries of histories is “What happened to the Mayas?”  The quick answer, of course, is nothing.  They’re still there, right where they always were.  Okay, not so much around Tikal and the other classic jungle centers in Peten, but definitely not far from the Yucatan and Guatemalan highland centers where the Spanish found them.  The question then is: “What happened to the Mayan cities and high civilization?”  The cities were probably never cities in the Western sense, but more like ceremonial centers, where people gathered and then dispersed periodically, just as they do now on market and festival days.  Civilization itself seems to go through phases, possibly in some predictable order, but the concept is so new that it’s hard to generalize.  The era of civilization occupies only a very small fraction of man’s total time as a creative, speaking, tool-using animal.  Certainly civilizations don’t just go through an early, classic, and late phase, and then just disappear.  Something else comes along.  Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia are still here long after their classic eras.  As for the cause of cataclysmic changes, disease is a good guess.  Cities were a major breakthrough for bacteria.   

  Lake Atitlan and Guatemalan Maya Health researcher are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Guatemalan Maya Health researcher 10:53 pm on February 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    You are correct, the Maya are alive and well today. Why did their cities collapse? Good question, one that we will never know. I would wager it is a combination of overpopulation, lack of resources, climate change, and cultural development. What is exciting is that the Maya are beginning again to resuse many of their historic and traditional temples.

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    Lake Atitlan 8:22 pm on March 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    You are right that the Maya are alive and well. Some are even prospering around Panajachel.

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  hardie karges 2:41 pm on February 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Guatemala ( 4 ), Lake Atitlan, Mayan Indian   

  GUATEBUENA, GUATEMALA, GUATEMEJOR 

  Back in the old days Guatemala was THE place to hang north of the Darien Strait, beautiful and cheap, the winning combination back then before my DNA started demanding a bigger gene pool to swim in.  The first time I was there, c.1977, the earthquake had just been cleaned up and people had forgotten that there was still a civil war to fight.  International hippies still slept on the beach and paraded through town in the evening playing guitars for tips.  Very HIPPIE.  Some buds and I rented the house over the hot springs in 1981, from which I launched my handicraft-import business, which still sputs and sputters to this day.  Perched above Lake Atitlan at 5000 feet and ringed by volcanoes, in a land inhabited by some of the most beautiful and peaceful people in the world, the scenery was incredible.  I can still see it in my mind’s eye to this day.  Then one day a body was found tossed down the ravine along the road back to town.  The civil war was on, and all bets were off.  Within two years the country was in a shambles and Panajachel, formerly dubbed ‘Gringotenango’ because of the number of tourists and travelers there, was devoid, at least until the handicraft business really took off.  I hadn’t been there in over ten years, until I went back last year.  It’s better.     

   
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  hardie karges 8:57 pm on February 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Asia ( 17 ), economics ( 2 ), Mexixo, NAFTA   

  Afta Nafta the Lafta 

  Well, maybe.  But say what you want about FTA’s, Mexico’s changed a lot since the old days, and has closed much of the gap separating it from the first-world living standards of the US.  In the old days, at least right after the first major currency devaluation around 1980, you could get a room for a few bucks, private with running water, no pissing in the sink or anything like that.  Then it became hard to know whether inflation was causing devaluation or devaluation was causing inflation.  Mexicans are gougers at retail, probably a vestige of the monopolistic past.  If a merchant in Mexico wants more income, the method is simple: raise prices.  Being a part of an economic entity now with the US seems to stabilize all that.  If Mexican businesses aren’t competitive, then US companies will drive them out.  Latin American airlines have been decimated since US airlines moved in, though the same US airlines struggle to compete in the Asia market, where companies are nothing if not competitive.  The world is ruled by those who know how to hold money without spending it.  They’re the masters.  The slaves are those who spend every penny they get.  This distinction is without race or class and, in fact, promotes class mobility.  That’s all it takes to be in business, really.  My friends are of both types.  Though saving money is a traditional American virtue, it is somewhat eclipsed these days.  Chinese are good at it; Thais are not.  Ethnic Chinese rule Thailand, and always have.  What would Thailand be without Chinese businessmen?  Laos.  Ditto for Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, and others.  Southeast Asia without Chinese businessmen would still be a village-oriented society, which would be nice, but probably untenable.                

   
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  hardie karges 3:38 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Mexico ( 7 ), religion ( 187 )   

  Milagros 

  Twice I was in Mexico City on the most polluted day in the history of the world.  Yes, it got worse.  One day somebody found a yard-long mutated rat.  Yeow!  I hope that’s not the future path of evolution.  Nobody wants to brag about that, of course.  It seems like every time I go to Mexico somebody’s just seen an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe shedding her tears in some new location.  They take that catholic shit seriously, miracles and all.  A common greeting in Mexico is, “Que milagro!”  That’s what I want to know, “What miracle?”

  ecointeractive and ecopreservationsociety are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    ecopreservationsociety 4:58 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Mexico City has some wonderful attributes, but the pollution there is nothing short of disgusting.

    Not sure you measured the “most polluted day in the history of the world”

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    ecointeractive 5:01 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Sorry, not for me. Mexico is possibly the least desirable place in all of Latin America

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  hardie karges 7:45 pm on February 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: cowboys ( 2 ), Mexicans ( 2 )   

  Vaqueros 

  Mexicans were the original cowboys of the American West, as attested in such Spanish-derived words as ‘buckeroo’, ‘lasso’, ‘chaps’, ‘rodeo’, etc.  Before wresting Texas from Mexico, Americans learned from the locals how to work the thousands of longhorn cattle grazing there on public land and put it to good use when the Civil War was over and the industrialized North was hungry for cheap Texas beef.  So they built railroads.  The golden age of the free-range cattle drives lasted only twenty years, but made a more lasting impression on the American psyche as the era that most represents the American personality.  The impact on Mexico was probably even greater, where to this day, ‘western wear’ stores can be found lined chock-a-block in any western Mexican city and a great many others, also.  Similarly, Plains Indians are considered the typical war bonnet American Indians, though their entire history as horsemen hunting buffalo barely spans a hundred years.  Their ancestors apparently hunted the native American horse to extinction 8-10,000 years ago after fifty million years of evolution, only to be re-introduced in highly-evolved breeds by those same Spaniards who taught the Americans vaquerismo.  Thus a long evolutionary and geographical cycle was complete, in which horses established strongholds in central Asia, the Russian steppes, and northern Europe before finally being tamed and breed into the fierce fast fleet war horses of Parthian, Arabian, and European legend.  All this was before the Spanish used them as superior technology to subdue native Americans.

   
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  hardie karges 12:30 am on February 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: DNA ( 47 ), Mexicans ( 2 ), obesity   

  Mexicans in the Morning 

  Whatever it is that makes so many Native Americans obese seems to apply to Mexicans also, at least the border area; at least the women.  Maybe they just can’t digest the sugar.  Statistics for Indian diabetes and Indian obesity seem to parallel each other.  I think there was a study of Pima Indian DNA that proved that they, indeed, do have the ‘fat’ gene.  Of course, Mexicans aren’t exactly Indians, but they’re close.  There were never that many Europeans in Mexico at any one time, but there were enough that their mixed-blood progeny had a better chance of survival than the natives that they largely replaced.  Montezuma’s revenge comes in the form of Mexicans spilling over the border to the US, so that we’ll have mowed lawns, trimmed gardens and clean houses.  They find a convenient corner that serves as the day labor office in areas with Hispanic populations.  Drive by in the morning and cut your deal.