[Spotykach] guest syndrome, east-west meetings.

[Laure]

Olga wrote: 

care for others. In western discourse is a bit different: even you are quest, you act autonomously and don't expect too much from the host. In most cases if you are invited, you supposed to bring own food with, pay own cover a costs of your staying as a normal things of rational society. Any the main is to care yourself of your own feeling good, have initiative to get integrated by yourself. Sometime the present of two different perceptions about hospitality as many other wrong expectation from each other can cost a problem.


Laure: Maybe you're right about this. I mean, it sort of drives me crazy when somebody is coming and the locals get all fussy about details like what kind of food you're gonna feed them - and my attitude (even though I personally like to cook and often make some small feasts:)), is more like - there are more important things to worry about. What's the problem? If there's no food, people will go to the shop and cook something. What are we - cooks and servants? Let people handle it themselves. And some local people think I'm like totally irresponsible if I think people can cook themselves. Maybe it's related to what you are saying. I never thought of it that way - I just thought people had some FNB fixation or something. 
Or that they don't believe people are capable of cooking themselves.

Olha wrote: A Westerners less talking using the political cliches and looking into a real world, coming from a books into a reality to learn a language of simple person. Sometimes Easterner blamed of political illiteracy. This is true. But I want to be careful into turning now eastern population into total learning western tradition which was developing many years.

Laure: Well, it's something different than illiteracy. Very few people have the same background knowledge, access to the same ideas or history. 

Some political fractions have even their own internal jargon. Like PGA. I mean, I speak English and I found some of their terms bizaare. It's easy to feel like an outsider if you can't navigate your way through the background.
************* 
I promised to come back to the topic of E-W meetings, but now it's too late. :-) BUT, since I was just now replying to somebody on a topic like this, I just have to start with one concrete example.

One of the biggest problems coming from the west in terms of east-west meetings is the problem of westerners developing their concept for an eastern project, rather than some common idea, and then not consulting people about what they expect or want, and then if there are any different ideas, not trying to find some compromise - in other words, sticking very rigidly to the idea that most probably is beneficial from their point of view, but not necessarily the best from the other side.

I really hate to tell you how many times I've seen this, because really it's too many.

Like, for example, planning a whole program of events without asking what people want to do, and then, if people do something else, sort of a bizaare reaction, even sometimes disbelief like - why didn't anybody say anything. Or like some very narrow inclusion of people, like one project I cooperated on where we were interested to invite certain people from the western side, but they wanted to invite who they wanted. So it was more like self-interests were being served than trying to make something both sides are interested in.

OK, I know it's a little abstract without concretes, but even today I came across something which I think qualifies for the problems of E-W meetings.

Some people (actually very nice people:-)) want to make their camp in Poland this year and have discussions with Polish people. OK - why not. (I invented the (not so) funny slogan - welcome to Poland, the land of camps.) So they sent me an invite, but I was surprised that the people from the city in which it will be held didn't invite me or anybody, especially since we all met last weekend. It turns out that they want to invite a couple of people they know, and we can invite a couple of people, but in general we shouldn't have a public invite. By public, I'm not even talking about Indymedia or something, but I mean like at the meeting (25 people) or on the anarcho-syndicalist list (15-20 people) or the wider anarchist list (maybe 100 people). Now there were quite a number of strong reasons that I am actually against hand selecting from those even 25 people if any one or two or them should be "eligible" for an invite. The biggest reason is that when this type of "selection" has happened before (regardless of whether it involved at free trip, because that's even worse), then there have always been months worth of scandals, fighting and hard feeling about why X was invited and not Y. Because, in general, there is still some perception that contacts with people from abroad is limited and those who have them are in elites with positions of power. (Just last weekend I was, along with Zaczek, reminded that we have "all the power" because we have some access to people from abroad.) Whether or not this is a correct perception, it is a perception people have, and there are historic reasons for this. So I wrote about my concerns and also said that, well even if I told 25 people, only two or three would be interested, whereas if I only told one person, he or she would either tell the other 24 in due course, or I would have to explain that it is "selective" and then have to give some sort of explanation why, or some criteria how to chose people, neither of which I could do. (Although I guess, choose somebody who doesn't sulk in the kitchen instead of talk, who can say something intelligent and speak English would have worked and would have narrowed it down to a couple of folks, the same ones who always go to these things and that are supposedly the ones with all the power.:-)) 

OK, maybe it's too much information, but the point was that I felt that the visit, constructed in such a way, and organized in the way it is, has some potential to be a divisive element locally. Well, they can sympathize, but no changing the conception. So it shows that the conception of what is beneficial for the foreigners outweighs the question (which maybe nobody even asked) of what is beneficial for locals. Further, the Polish people are supposedly "organizing this together". So I asked about it. I was told that they have no idea, that the foreigners were organizing the program, inviting the people, etc. etc. and they haven't the foggiest idea. I don't know 100% how it is, but the Polish participating seems to be limited to presenting a day on Polish issues. So, although maybe it's natural, this participation is also oriented towards educating westerners, which is a one-way approach. Not that western people may not try to educate too, but it doesn't seem like there is any common effort to determine together what this thing might look like, what topics might be there, how it can be organized from this side, etc.. It's more like "we'd like to do this - can we do it in Poland and will you tell us about Poland?"      

I don't know if people can appreciate what is wrong with this picture but after I saw a half dozen such things, I began to see some sort of patterns common to these projects. Although I am very much a fan of visiting people, and actually I think such visits can be extremely fruitful, I also think there can be some very unhealthy phenomena. These are some things I've observed in different projects which can cause mistrust or resentment.  (Although, please note, these occurred over maybe a dozen projects or meetings and some only occurred a couple of times.):

-  some people are clearly using the "project" for academic purposes or to write a book, etc.. In this situation, they pick brains and it is clear that they are getting some concrete benefit, often one that can relate to material well-being, but they may not show any other willingness to cooperate, work together or reciprocate, leaving a person feeling like they've been exploited. The worst case scenario I know was somebody hounding my friend for 3-4 days, getting tons of help on research, lots of material etc., producing a large publication afterwards and getting paid. Even though my friend is an academic and this guy was a student, the relationship was sort of exploitative like professors who use students to do all their research and so on. Within the past year, I have been approached 3-4 times asking for this sort of help, and, although I generally like people and like to help people if I can, I think it reflects this sort of privledged position. How many students from eastern europe write to western professors with questions like "Hi, I'm Marek, can you help me with my HW?" and how many of them do you think would really answer.          

- a tendency to place too much emphasis or their conceptions of project rather than mutual development

- not enough mutual development of topics to be discussed

- different economic possibilities which create some tension, especially if people have to apply to you for money

- definition of purpose being too vague, leading to different expectations

- definition related to voyeuristic descriptions "I want to see and find out about...."  (which can be OK) can sometimes cross some line where people feel like in a zoo. A similar but much better-received approach might be "well, we heard about X and Y that you do, and we do "Y and Z", so maybe there is some room for cooperation in the area of....... and we'd like to get to know each other better and see where we can help each other, what we have in common.  
 
- being a bit too judgemental or expecting some level of development in certain areas. For example, why aren't there more lesbians in your group - are you homophobic or what?
*********************

Just for the record, I don't think that any of these things may have been the deciding factors in terms of the E-W meetings WIll talks about, although I wasn't there. I would have to put some lack of energy and dynamism as a factor, because I think sometimes that's more important here than in the west to get people involved. I won't even try to guess how it happened that there was once an east-west meeting where nobody from the west showed up. I'd be more interested in the feedback of the people involved from the west.

BTW, I suggest a post-meeting feedback section and even a forum about it to let feelings and perceptions come out. Will might be interested in Antti's idea about the East-West meetings. I'm not sure he's 100% right, but he has his points I agree with. http://www.alter.most.org.pl/iam/feedback.htm

Laure
 




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