Famine and the Evidence of Experience

I'll get to famine in a few minutes - I'm not quite up to writing about it yet, though the picture here is a token that I will.   

What got me into this post was a realization that two things I deeply hold to be true don't quite sit well together.  And this struck me as an issue coz I was sitting in Bookshop Santa Cruz the other night hearing Donna Haraway reading from her latest book - When Species Meet.  The book is a wonderful exploration of how we live with other creatures - inside us, around us, between us... .    Toward the end of the talk, Donna gave a great recipe for 'creative indigestion'.  The idea here is that rather than try to reconcile all of our conflicting beliefs, passions and philosophies, we should recognize the ineluctability of irreconcilability.  We shouldn't try to conjure the world around us according to any one true right or only way - we should accept contradictions within us and between ourselves and others. Thus she - bravely in front of the standard Santa Cruz audience of underaged, aging and ageless hippies - spoke movingly of her practice of eating meat, while attacking the 'meat-industrial complex'; of raising purebred dogs while living in a world where's more than enough mutts in the world being put down on a daily basis.  The creative indigestion is in the 'both/and' as opposed to the 'either/or'.  (I do recognize the irony of talking about indigestion in a strip alongside such an incredibly powerful image).

So what I was thinking about was my deeply held beliefs that experience doesn't matter and that it does.  The former is somewhat the harder case to make, so I'll start with that (leaving the procrastination for later, when I have time :-)).  There's a great article by Joan Scott called The Evidence of Experience which I commend to you all.  It starts off describing Samuel Delany's autobiographical account of being gay in San Francisco as a youth - the high times of Height Ashbury and prodigal sexuality.  She uses this as a way into discussing the refrain from many particpants in the world's events: "I was there and so I know what really happened", too often intoned contrpanutally with "You have no right to talk about that time - you weren't there, you don't know what it was like".  Scott's is an incredibly clear statement of why 'being there' is not a priveliged position - indeed it is one that has significant disadvantages.  Think of all those people who tell us what the Sixties were like.  A time of discovery, of love, of hope, of change.  Well yes, I had my moments of that.  But those of us who thought that was the Sixties are a very narrow group of people.  I remember one of the things we used to construct the sixties in our collective heads was to demonize the fifties as conservative, naive, happy families time - Dick van Dyke getting his martini from Laura and the two retiring to separate single beds in the evening....  Now there was just as much a rich radical counterculture in the fifties - we just tended to deny it.  And there sure was an incredibly powerful conservative culture in the sixties, if you stopped listening to those nattering nabobs of negativism for long enough.  Experience itself is always partial, biased, myopic.  Now experience intertwined with distance from events - that's something which can give a truly rich understanding of the past.  And you don't even need the experience to get the rich understanding.

Which brings me to famine, and the other belief I hold.  Jericho Burg at UCSD is just finishing a superb thesis on Famine Early Warning systems in Ethiopia.  She traces in part how the evidence of experience (people reporting their own difficulty getting food, their own hunger, and reporting on crop failure) is not really to be trusted as far as the international aid community goes.  We all know, the sages say, the politics of this - locals (what a horrid word) exagerate so that they can get more, or in some political configurations overstate their food supply so that they can get elected.  And these nations are so corrupt.  What we need, the argument goes, is an objective measure.  And lo and behold the eye of God, in the form of an orbiting satellite, can provide this.  The satellite can give an objective measure of ground cover (so much vegetaton, which an algorithm can turn into so many calories per capita), as well as an objective forecast of next year's crops.  No matter that vegetation cover can be noxious weed as much as foodcrop - here is a meaure that we can finally trust, and which we can use to unlock the coffers of the global north.

So part of me says never accept the evidence of experinece, and another part of me is outraged that the evidence of experience is being treated so casually.  Jericho's discussion is much richer than this - I am just pointing to it to indicate the contradiction. 

Now is the time that by genre conventions I should be providing a moral.  Sorry.  Happy indigestion one and all.