On Saturday I went with my brother and sister to Sojourns, the fair trade store downtown that has been mentioned in class. I loved it. It’s a small store, and it felt like a museum, displaying little windows into cultures from all around the world. The store has small drums and a few other instruments, music from different cultures, jewelry, pottery, colorful linens and hand bags, artwork, tea and coffee from around the world, and all kinds of small handmade crafts and various items. Many of the items have a sheet of paper beside them, explaining where the item comes from, who made it, and how fair trade is helping those individuals. One of my personal favorites to read was about how fair trade organizations are working alongside local small farmers in Darjeeling (a city in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeast India known for its tea). I was actually able to spend about six weeks in Darjeeling a little bit over a year ago on a missions trip, and backpacked through some of the local tea estates in various villages, so it’s cool to be able to put faces to some of those farmers. Overall, the store has a blaring theme of global connectedness. You can see it in specific pieces of artwork, in crafts, and in quotes you find throughout the store. One piece of artwork shows people holding hands lining the outside of the planet. Another picture shows a tree with an enormous amount of branches that are all connected to one huge trunk. But you also see this theme just by being in the middle of the store, looking around and realizing that everything around you was made my real people literally all over the globe, and yet here it is all together in one place, in a small shop in downtown Birmingham. It really helped me remember that even though we’re from all kinds of cultures and backgrounds, we all have our humanity in common which is a similarity that vastly outweighs our differences.
My own culture is such a mix of different places that I’ve lived, so I’m not quite sure how similar or different this experiences was to it. I guess that because I have grown up in a few different cultures, I do prefer being in places that are more culturally aware. So in that sense, it felt like “home.” One of the main things I learned from this experience is that we all have the responsibility of helping our world by the way we spend our money. It’s good to be reminded that everything we buy is being made some someone, somewhere—a real person just like you and just like me. And when we support a company by buying their product, we indirectly support everything that company is doing, whether good or bad. Ignorance is a poor excuse. Fair trade is a way of doing business that ensures economic and social justice. Sojourns’ website says, “The key goals of fair trade are to empower low-income, disadvantaged artisans, laborers and farmers around the globe, and to promote understanding between them and industrialized nations” (http://www.adventureartpeace.com/What_is_Fair_Trade_.html). As far as preconceived notions/stereotypes I had before this experience that were changed, however backwards this may seem, I realized that Americans can live lives that are very much globally aware. Growing up overseas and being surrounded by people whose lives are in tune with everything going on internationally, I’ve had a prejudice against “ignorant Americans.” But actually living here, that prejudice is slowly changing, which is exciting. One of the connections to an anthropological concept I found from this experience was realizing that all of us have “etic” perspectives of other cultures initially, and the only way to gain a true “emic” perspective would take lot of time, which is obviously why anthropologists must spend years and years absorbed in another culture to gain that culture’s perspective.
Great entry!
ReplyDelete