Working in the Third World: Evangelist or Rip-Off Artist?

Abstract

According to the title of this paper, the Westerner has two possible roles: that of the evangelist, like a missionary spreading the good news of Western culture and taking the Third World to a more sophisticated level of creation. The other role casts the Westerner as the rip-off artist, taking the poor third world artist's ancestral lifework, beguiling these wide eyed innocents with the trinkets of music technology and pillaging and raping the virgin beauty of third world art in the process. Although in the course of this paper I will give instances which tend towards one or other of these extremes, the artistic relationship between the West and the third world cannot be viewed in this wonderfully simple polarisation. The world is far more complex than that.

This paper is a personal view of the influences that working outside my native environment has had on me. My primary aim is to arm readers with a few questions to ask themselves about the way they work, the assumptions that they take with them and perhaps lead them to explore alternative viewpoints.