The paradox of the 'primitive': The rhetorics of development and ethnography discourse (a Guatemalan case)

A paradox was identified in the ostensibly well-meaning motives that brace the missions espoused by American Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs)---non-profit organizations that work to assist groups of disadvantaged artisans in the "Third World" by helping them organize into cooperatives, and instituting methods for large-scale production, quality control and business management. Their statement-of-purpose are contradicted by the ethnographical renderings of artisans that appear in these ATOs' product catalogs. Studying how ATOs portray Guatemalan Maya artisans in particular, it was found that while fostering private enterprise and free trade as the best stimuli for the equitable distribution of wealth, these descriptions, which I term petite-ethnographies---ethnographical descriptions that satisfy James Clifford's six determinants of ethnographic writing---reveal that ATOs deconstruct and reconstruct the image of indigenous artisans. Throughout time, the images ATOs portray of the Maya producers remain unchanged---and underdeveloped---however already "modernized" those artisans may be by virtue of their "encounter" with the Western world.; Further study revealed that such incongruity has historically held true in the rhetorics of the discourses of political-economic development and ethnography. An investigation that backtracked the evolution of the strategies and practices shared by these discourses established Christopher Columbus as its architect; it discovered that "conversion" (be it religious, intellectual, or economic) of "inferior" inhabitants "encountered" by the West since 1492 is the result of an imperialistic ethos that veils and justifies the West's colonization and self-serving appropriation of discursively constructed "New" and "Third" Worlds.; Tracing the evolution of the rhetorics of the discourse of economics and ethnography has shown not only that they have historically nurtured each other, but that they intersect at one or more of three points: their descriptions of "inferior" Others focus the lens of their perspectives upon characteristics that fit the Western model of "primitive" or "underdeveloped"; and/or tailor their narratives with misrepresentation so as to render their subjects as "traditional"; and/or portray the subjects of their discourse as irremediably unchanged, forever moored in the primordial quagmire of tradition, habitually coding non-Europeans as inhabiting the past.; Such is the paradox of the "primitive".