non-governmental organizations and craft producers: exchanges south and north

Non-Governmental Organizations and CraftProducers: Exchanges South and North

Jane Henrici

This article concerns visual and verbal methods of communicating about Peruvianhandicrafts. The text is a discussion about exchanges among international agenciesand community organizations that promote, produce, and sell artisanry in the globalmarket as a part of social and economic aid efforts.Research for this study comes out of informal interviews with workers in non-

governmental organizations (NGOs) in Peru over a 15-year period. The directorshipand staff at one agency, a combined NGO-ATO (alternative trading organization),1

provided the impetus and background for what follows, as well as the illustra-tions.2 According to the organization workers, an imbalance between the Northernand Southern Hemispheres often appears in the relative willingness of those in-volved in the world craftwork industry either to supply, or receive, requests orsuggestions through non-Western and nonverbal means.The graphics that appear throughout this article are attempts to clarify and highlight

certain issues without distraction for a largely literate audience that, the agencyworkers worry, is not paying enough attention. Local and regional NGOs and ATOs ofthe Southern Hemisphere must strive to explain things clearly in terms that translate tosupporters, customers, ATOs, and advisors in the North as well as to their constituentsand partners in the South, regardless of the level of flexibility on the part of either torespond. Visual methods are among the tactics that workers in the South employ.

EXCHANGES NORTH AND SOUTH

Mary Strong, guest editor of this issue of Visual Anthropology, wrote to NormaVelasquez, founder and co-director of the Peruvian NGO-ATO Minka, S.R.L.,asking her to submit her agency’s report about alpaca herders and artisans forthe volume. Norma asked my help with Dr. Strong’s request when I was

JANE HENRICI is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. She has con-ducted research in Peru, on the border of Texas with Mexico, and in low-income neighborhoods inSan Antonio. Her past publications examine the tourism industry, particularly as it links to planneddevelopment, and analyze the use of handicrafts within ethnic tourism in Peru. Her recent and forth-coming publications concentrate on the effects among lower-income families in the United States ofthe changing benefits system and NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. In general,Henrici studies poverty and policy in the Americas with a particular interest in how these connect togender and ethnicity. Address correspondence to [email protected]

Visual Anthropology, 16: 289–313, 2003Copyright # Taylor & Francis, Inc.

ISSN: 0894-9468 print

DOI: 10.1080/08949460390212878

289289289

doing follow-up interviews in 1999 about conditions for local NGOs workingwith artisans and crafts in Lima. According to Norma, she does not like to write,particularly in English, and so I was happy to make the attempt. Norma laterconcluded that, since her report, Propuesta Tecnologica y Gestionaria para laTransformacion Manual de los Derivados de la Alpaca [1996], focuses on the extremepoverty currently suffered by herders, for which craft sales are an inadequatesupplement, an article dealing primarily with visual communication shouldtake only graphics rather than translated text from the report. The article thatfollows is a description of issues she and others have shared with me aboutforms of communication within efforts to help local producers, forms onwhich she has given me comments and suggestions. The illustrations arereproductions of drawings and charts by Minka staff.

In this article, I do not provide the results from a broad study nor from anextended commentary on international policies and practices. Instead, I presenthere observations made among various NGOs in Peru from 1988 to 1999 and theexperiences of one Southern NGO-ATO over more than two decades regarding itsencounters with even the friendliest and most generous of Northern importingand aid agencies.

Norma Velasquez, like many others, mediates within the international devel-opment world where NGOs and ATOs that are dedicated to assisting small-scaleproducers actually encounter raw materials and hand-made goods. Over theyears, she has told me about the frustrations of running an NGO and ATO in aneffort to bring higher shares of the profits, not merely payments for labor timeand materials, to cooperatives and communities of small-scale Peruvian crafts-persons. She and her coworkers acknowledge and respond to the concept thatnonverbal forms of communication, such as simple pictures, might be neededwithin exchanges with the diverse, possibly illiterate, makers of crafts through-out Peru. In addition, her writing and her conversations deal with issues of thedifficulties in keeping in touch with foundations, lenders, and buyers who alsoattempt to assist artisans. According to these NGO workers who promote,package, and sell handicrafts made by Peruvian artisans, imagination andpatience can be as necessary in crafting the communication systems used tomerchandize crafts as they are in producing the objects that are to be traded orsold.

This journal article is the sort of patched-together set of images and wordsthat many working with handicrafts in the nonprofit sector now employ inexchanges with both their patrons and clients. English is being used to describesome of the difficulties and strategies of one NGO in a nation in which Spanishand Quechua are dominant. In fact, the original report surrounding the majorityof these illustrations has had limited distribution in its original Spanish since itwas written for a non-Peruvian audience that, perhaps as a mark of globaliza-tion, now expects texts to appear in English. However, while the report’s verbalelements communicate to a Spanish-literate population only, its drawings havebeen used in many of the agencies’ operations, owing to the common NGOpractice of making each staff person and product serve many functions, and tothe belief that graphic elements can communicate more widely than the writtenword.

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PICTURES OF PEOPLE AND PIE CHARTS

Local and international intermediaries and producers involved with making andselling handicrafts as a form of economic development or assistance often areincorporated, at least in certain areas of activity, as NGOs and ATOs. This is donein order to benefit from the support system, funding, and tax exemptions availableto the not-for-profit sector, and to direct any money made to social services ratherthan to business owners’ bank accounts.3 The generally shared objective amongthese groups is to reinvest profits in poorer communities and=or traditional artforms through the small-scale and low-cost making and selling of goods. Many ofthose involved in the process also prefer that the goods themselves be connectedto local customs and techniques, although who within a community or agencymay decide what is ‘‘traditional’’ in form and method can be contentious [Mullin1995].

International investors, evaluators, and planners participate in this handicraftsector, and might also be incorporated with nonprofit and nongovernmental sta-tus, but typically are based in industrial nations in the Northern Hemisphere.Development and other types of project seek to assist peoples with various cul-tures and literacy levels, and exchanges between those funding and evaluatingagencies and local participants often call for the use of diverse and multiple lan-guages, techniques, and media. Local NGO practitioners who are in-between thesmall-scale regional artisans and large-scale international buyers and bankerslargely work with a polyglot style.

In fact, local NGOs and ATOs of any global region often employ a combi-nation of verbal, demonstrative, and visual representations, as they attempt tocommunicate across spoken-language differences when working with popula-tions in rural, remote, and low resource sectors. Like certain of the private-sectorenterprises and governmental agencies, NGOs have established the use of gen-erally low-cost and portable visual media in an effort to communicate withpersons from regional linguistic groups. Video and digital cameras and methodsof display might come into use where there is enough funding, and drawingsare ubiquitous where there is not.

An example of a low-cost resource developed for the common need for pic-tures is the book Where There is No Artist [Rohr-Rouendaal, 1997]. The title is arespectful reference to a well-used, and frequently translated, illustrated manualto deliver health treatment advice in impoverished areas, Where There is NoDoctor [Werner, Thuman, and Maxwell 1992]. The Rohr-Rouendaal graphicsmanual provides a sort of clip-art library and drawing instruction for develop-ment applications in both rural and urban settings. Generally, easily replicableand somewhat conventionalized images of traditional peoples such as this bookprovides—with certain costume touches and llamas, elephants, or giraffes todesignate specific regions—have become something of a universal form ofexpression and appear throughout the world. Thanks to such devices and thefamiliarity with local issues that they evince, an international institution fromwhich an NGO seeks financial assistance might rely on a local or regionalagency as a go-between, a sort of translator or broker, which is a role not entirelyuncomfortable for many of those in the NGO world [Figure 1].

Non-Governmental Organizations 291

In fact, cross-cultural visual communications can be useful within any inter-national trade industry in an attempt to overcome difficulties with unsharedlanguages and literacy levels among participants. Intercultural trade throughouthistory typically has included graphics, since, for example even highly literateNew York curators of art might not be able to read Japanese shipping alerts onpacking freights. The military forces of modern nations warn their personnel withfrightening examples of incidents that have occurred when new technology andweaponry have only untranslated verbal instructions. Catalogs of clothing andtextile goods may include drawn rulers and outlines on their order forms to helpthose using different measurement systems to make purchases. Tags with ironing,

Figure 1 Propuesta Tecnologica y Gestionaria para la Transformacion Manual de losDerivados de la Alpaca ½The route to markets�.

292 J. Henrici

dry cleaning, and washing instructions tend to be in symbols accompanied by textwhether the item to be purchased is machine- or hand-made.

Further, those involved with handicrafts in any part of the world usuallyassume that attempting to share ideas and instructions among producers of var-ious linguistic groups requires standardized and simplified nonverbal expressionsto supplement efforts at learning one another’s languages. Diagrams, photo-graphs, and prints thus commonly appear as guides, illustrations, and patternsthroughout the histories of these media and of many crafts. If an individual wantsto carve a bookshelf or stitch a quilt, patterns and illustrations form the bulk of theavailable directions; if an individual wants to order knitted caps or low-firedpottery, photographs and drawings are used wherever samples or originals areunavailable. In folk art and handicraft production as well as sales, the participa-tion of artisans who speak only nondominant dialects and languages, and ofbuyers from various nations, fosters the usefulness of graphics to illustrate, warn,and offer suggestions to those who craft the pieces as well as those who willhandle or use them [Figure 2].

Thus, NGOs working with lower-income communities where more than onelanguage or literacy level appears, NGOs working with the international shipmentof goods, and NGOs working to communicate craft designs or models, all mightemploy a variety of graphics, and such NGOs might be expected to do so often.However, NGO workers find it difficult to receive communication in equallyclarifying graphic form from those in the Northern Hemisphere who order pro-ducts and supply funding assistance. This problem exists in spite of presumablygreater resources available among Northern agencies to afford and provide verbaland visual translations in locally-legible forms.

Another issue is that although native speakers of regional languages, whetherartisans or NGO-ATO workers, work to learn multiple dialects or languages aswell as visual media to accomplish their transactions, many of those seeking toprovide funding seem to stick with English, even though their original languagemight be German or French. For a Lima-based NGO-ATO operating betweenregional artisans and international agencies, the expense of acquiring the ability towrite in English has become necessary in all exchanges with those in the NorthernHemisphere, although local NGO workers try to invest in graphics to substitute orexpand on the English where possible, since such designs, symbols and patternscan also be used throughout Peru.

A third challenge arises in attempting to describe regional conditions and goodsso that presumably literate donors, evaluators, planners, and consumers maybecome better informed [Figure 3]. This is significant in part because the demandsmade by importers typically fail to acknowledge local conditions for crafts pro-ducers. In addition, when such demands are not met, rather than request sug-gestions or comments on the part of the artisans about what might work better,Northern advisors often either issue new demands or stop their assistance. Mis-understandings that lead to a loss of revenue, or to assistance directed elsewhere,can affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of small-scale producers. Artisanshave formed, at certain times, a significant portion of the national population ofdeveloping nations [Henrici 2002].


Meanwhile, NGOs and ATOs of whatever type, not only those dedicated toartisans and their crafts, have an expanding global influence that incites growinginterest among many policy-makers and researchers. Some evaluators and criticsspeculate concerning the ability of nonprofits worldwide to provide social,financial, and political services, particularly when faced with competition fromstandardized and exclusively commercial entities. Every aspect of a local nonprofitorganization’s efforts receives scrutiny from politicians and funding sources, andthis includes the methods of communicating that an NGO uses with those it seeksto serve. If gaps exists in communication between NGOs or ATOs and their

Figure 2 Retablo model that artisans use

294 J. Henrici

funding sources or policy-makers, then evaluative standards applied by the latterset of agencies to the former are problematic as a result of that, if of nothing else.

Criticism exists of the unilateral assertion of power connected to larger globalpower relations by one set of participants in the development world, primarily

Figure 3 Product labels that graphically and in English text present the making of arpilleras andbaskets


located in the Northern Hemisphere, over others, often in the Southern [e.g.,Escobar 1995; Lewis 1999]. Regardless of this, practitioners as well as evaluatorsthroughout the global market continue to accept criteria from ‘‘ the North ’’ injudging agency success at all exchanges irrespective of the geographic location ofthe operation. Thriving as an organization, even in their own terms, becomesdifficult for local NGOs if income disappears as a result of a negative review or, inthe case of those trying to operate on a margin of handicraft export prices,decreased sales. Small-scale artisans, their community-based associations, and thenetwork of support to assist them, rely on an exchange of expectations that faultycommunications can render fragile if not break.

In addition, according to some analysts, those working in nonprofits and NGOsgenerally must speak in at least one code or style to those served and anotheraltogether to those who provide funding or other assistance. The stakes continueto rise within what is called ‘‘professionalization’’ and the worldwide shift that hashappened to nonprofits and NGOs. Now, social capital investment demands thatnonprofit agency workers in their communications with those in ‘‘ the North ’’ notonly be proficient in a Western written language, primarily English, but be able touse that language in a sort of for-profit business management speech style[Markowitz and Tice 2001]. The split between styles of communication to clientsand to patrons seems to widen, and NGOs and ATOs that are in-between arecompelled to stretch in order to reach both.

Effective exchanges with financing and buying institutions thus are critical tosmall-scale artisans and to the NGOs and ATOs that work to assist them, butdifficulties exist. Even as patrons working with NGOs increase pressure forcommunications to be clearer and business practices to be more ‘‘accountable,’’those same institutions can add communication barriers and costs by expectingand transmitting text in a commercial style of English that omits clarifyingtranslations into locally-legible languages and images. Foundations and buyers ingeneral then come to assume that English translators are affordable and thatillustrations, videos, and charts are mere supplements to their written texts, andthat the information that they receive is somehow complete. The pie charts andgraphs that have become ubiquitous in transnational communications, summar-izing volumes of ideas and conflating quantities of disparate data, may beexpected to appear in documents from both financial sources as well as from thelocal NGO, and to satisfy those in ‘‘the North.’’ [Figure 4]. Conversely, adding tothese simple charts and English translations some rather complicated handmadedrawings of people and symbols along with text in local languages becomes partof a struggle for expression on the part of local NGOs directed both at those wholend support and to those who produce handicrafts.

DESIGNING IDENTITIES

Graphic artwork can form part of an attempt to educate against stereotypes andpresuppositions that largely come out of a lack of familiarity with aspects of cul-tures and customs. Nevertheless, graphic and other forms of communication fromnonprofits and NGOs often seem restricted to an economy of stylized depictions ofethnic groups within this effort at improved understanding. The images emphasize

296 J. Henrici

social and cultural differences with contemporary European, Asian, and U.S.peoples and their spreading middle-class cultures, and can yield new problems.

A native development worker might try to respond to a common difficulty withATOs and for-profit importers by simplifying graphics. For example, the parti-cular problem that might be addressed is that foreign importers often requirechanges from local craft producers in handicraft ornamentation or design, basedon nonregional consumer fashion seasons without recognition of artisans’ regionallabor cycles. A subset of the problem is that, when producers express frustration,international funding institutions repeatedly respond with rudimentary trainingprograms for already skilled artisans despite ongoing pleas for other assistance. Tocounter, a NGO worker might try to address this problem by sensitizing, througha few images, a nonnative policy-maker to the local norms surrounding traditionalagricultural and religious practices affecting craft production schedules. The NGOworker’s intent would be that the importer would incorporate the local routine inplacing orders just as it might take into consideration Daylight Savings Timedifferences between the U.S. East and West Coasts, or religious and bankingholiday differences among the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Unfortunately, theimporter’s probable response would be to continue to value buyers’ schedules assacrosanct but now regard the artisan’s habits as more limited by cultural beliefsor customs than are those in ‘‘the North.’’ Year-round goods and mass manu-facturing flexibility then may be sought elsewhere despite an ongoing claim onthe part of many importers to be helping, or at least working with, small-scalecraft-makers.

Figure 4 Propuesta pie chart


In fact, rather than attempt something as ambitious as changing foundation andimporter calendars to respond to local schedules, NGO representations of thosewho make handicrafts usually try merely to show a bit about the conditions underwhich the items are made at any one time. The context then has the unfortunateside-effect that it can become for the viewer a fixed structure of costumes, tools,surroundings, and people involved. The standardized imagery about traditionallifestyles becomes an example of a problem that continues to frustrate anthro-pologists, of a false timelessness in any ethnographic representation.

In addition, the details chosen for depiction affect interpretation as well. Forexample, if the picture is crowded with people and their clothing is frayed, thesense for the nonlocal recipient can be one of disorder and deprivation. If it issparse and their clothing fully-threaded, those in the North imagine tranquilityand income. To give a sense of the resilience as well as the vulnerability of peopleor traditions is difficult in anymedium, but its expression in a deliberately simplisticimage or design seems especially so.

Dealing with reductive representations of cultural difference is particularlyproblematic for an organization attempting to provide aid. Handicraft NGOs andATOs, even as they might take advantage occasionally of a romantic and idealizedimage of native producers, must nevertheless mitigate notions of traditionalartisans and their crafts as either unchanging and ‘‘authentic’’ or easily altered and‘‘simple.’’ The objective is to negotiate with granting agencies and internationaldistributors a system of getting sales out of international buyers and some sort ofprofit back to local communities. However, NGO workers are not only affected bystereotypes and idealizations but by the dominant, verbal, communication formsas well. In order to avoid being restricted, NGO workers directing their services toartisans work creatively in response.

A mixture of the verbal and visual thus appears often within exchanges amongNGOs and their patrons and clients. The aim of the graphic imagery on the part ofthe Peruvian handicraft NGO-ATOMinka is to reach both audiences, regardless ofthe written languages used. Through nonverbal as well as verbal depictions,agency workers attempt to communicate with both member artisans who laborand live throughout Peru and those who seek to buy and sell the goods withinnations primarily of the Northern Hemisphere.

Graphic imagery shown opposite [Figure 5] attempts to avoid the quandary ofidealization and over-simplification by varying the depictions used so that ele-ments indicating the clothing styles and work settings of certain ethnicities ormaterially poorer persons are not continuously repeated. Nevertheless, a certainfocus on "tradition" often sustains all NGO-ATO workers in their struggles even asit helps sell the handicrafts and attracts support. So it is perhaps unsurprising thateven the self-conscious effort made by Minka workers involves some simplifiedimages that emphasize sustained and pervasive cultural difference.

One of the most common pieces of information to be communicated withsymbols and drawings is that natural fibers and those dyed with vegetable tintswill never occur in large, uniform batches of identical colors as would syntheticthreads or those with chemical treatments. This is something that patrons andadvisors should know without taking into consideration cultural difference, butnevertheless often complain about during transactions. NGOs also employ gra-

298 J. Henrici

Figure

5Section

ofEnglish-langu

ageversionofMinka

poster,‘‘The

Andean

Produ

cerandtheCom

mercialCircuit(Peru’sCase:AlpacaFibre

andHandi-

craftTextiles)’’

299299299

phics to convince wholesale importers of another fact not unique to small-scaleartisans: hand-made items both need more time to complete and will seldom haveentirely identical markings or uniform shapes [Figure 6].

There are many generous and eager-to-assist-the-poor importers and alternativetrading organization that buy from local NGOs within lower-income regions.Some of these importing businesses have the stated mission of ensuring thatgreater profits than would otherwise appear within entirely commercial exchan-ges will go to the original craftspersons. Nevertheless, even these well-meaningagencies often transmit letters and orders to NGOs and ATOs with demands andrequests to be made of artisans that indicate a lack or understanding of the basicfeatures of goods that are ‘‘hand-made’’ and ‘‘natural.’’

Most local agencies working with handicrafts, meanwhile, try to develop rela-tively simple and easily modified patterns that craftspersons can use to producesteadily while maintaining their farms and families, and they try to keep quan-tities of high-demand goods in stock both in the exporting and importing regions.However, to adapt even slightly to a newly fashionable color or fit among Eur-opean, Japanese, and U.S. customers requires more than last month’s or even lastseason’s marketing announcements. Several months are necessary before shiftingmethods and materials among craftspeople who must hike hours in the mountainsor jungle to carry their bundles of ceramics, carvings, and sweaters in order toarrive at a provincial center [Figure 7]. From that provincial center a car can carrytheir goods eventually to an airport or to the coast for export and return withdrawings, photographs, and numbers indicating new orders, allowing the processto begin over again in reverse. Even for those craftspersons who make itemswithout modification or refashioning, rapid fluctuations in demand and pricing,for which the artisan may receive no warning unless the intermediary NGO cananticipate and provide some guidance, are huge problems with respect to payingbills, buying staples, and maintaining families.

Handicraft trade is full of contradictions even where importers and fundingagencies might be entirely familiar with, sympathetic toward, and accommodatingof local customs and standards. They include disagreements among producers,aid workers, collectors, and scholars about what should and can be sold. Thefundamental contradiction is that, for some who are involved, an item that issupposedly pure, sacred, and of the highest price value is inherently not-for-sale,so that which is for sale is tainted. ‘‘Real’’ artists and artisans within this dominantglobal marketplace often are imagined as extraneous to commerce and withoutneed of profit even as they become noteworthy once their work sells. Ethnicity,gender, labor, and age stereotypically retain dignity or glamor when uncorruptedby sales, but paradoxically are the very characteristics that seem to make itemsand individuals ready for market [Henrici 1999]. For the person in the middle, inthis case the NGO-ATO worker mediating between artisans and internationalagencies and buyers, retaining respect for unromanticized concerns on the part ofthe crafts producers while maneuvering within expectations and stereotypes onthe part of those with money can be difficult. Taking the mediation into an artform that is largely Western European is even trickier, since the photographs anddrawings reduce the idiosyncrasies of individual and ethnic handwork to linesand shadows [Figures 8–11].

300 J. Henrici

Figure 6 Steps in weaving a sweater


Figure 7 Packaging and shipping

302 J. Henrici

Figure

8–11

Handicraftcatalogillustrations.

303303303

304 J. Henrici

306 J. Henrici

Often, the staff of Minka respond to this by using strongly outlined and nar-rowly detailed images of people in an ornamental, all-over composition. This stylereferences the ancient Andean art form of needle-worked and burnished gourds atthe same time as it directs viewers in a winding but Western narrative fashion tothe time-intensive quality of handicrafts in production. In other words, the visualstyle of the graphics used here deliberately alludes to local ethnicities, depicts localethnicities, attempts to explain something about local ethnicities, and does sowhile anticipating a left-right and top-down literacy on the part of nonlocalviewers. The handicrafts made and sold are, like the clothing and customs of theartisans, mixtures of the indigenous and introduced, and so are the graphics thatdescribe the crafts to others. [Figures 12–17]

CONCLUSION: EXCHANGES SOUTH AND NORTH, NORTH AND SOUTH

Norma Velasquez and her coworkers have used visual aids in the product labels,the accompanying tags, the buyers’ orders to workers’ guilds, cooperatives, andhouseholds, and the web site of their NGO. In addition, graphic reproductionsof drawings accompany grant proposals and publications, that try to explain tothose in the Northern Hemisphere something of the context of artisans’ daily lives.According to Norma and her coworkers, an irony of NGO-ATO work is thatgraphic expressions have come to seem just as important for explaining manycomplex issues to the diverse, generally literate, patrons and developmentworkers in the Northern Hemisphere as to the farmer=hunter-artisans throughout Peru. NGO workers argue that trying to deal with buyers,lenders, and donors who want to purchase or to provide funding to craft

Figure 12 Propuesta illustration: ‘‘Typical Farming Family’’


Figure

13Propuesta

illustration:‘‘T

hePrice

totheConsumer

ofHandicrafts...’’

308

producers also demands nonverbal media. Perhaps, they suggest, the need is evengreater than with the already skilled artisans. It seems to those of Minka that thecraft producers who ask for assistance are generally quick as well as willing tolearn, while buyers from ‘‘the North’’ can be unreceptive to new information,particularly when it is expressed in an unfamiliar verbal or graphic form.

Acknowledging cultural and resource differences while trying to broker com-munications between groups of people can be an opportunity both for respect andfor disrespect within any situation, and any depiction of difference is difficult. Atthe same time, focusing on one set of cultural distinctions in verbal and visualcommunications can ignore actual inequities among those at every juncture of anexchange, and this is a large point to consider in itself.4 A concentration onvisually-portrayed cultural details in particular can suggest that the peoplereceiving and those providing payments are partners in equal exchanges, analo-gous to one another and unified in that respect, but distinct in cultural traits thatappear reducible to something that might be adapted and temporal. If culturalnorms and expectations formed the only divide between those participating inglobal transactions, then mutual benefits and parity arguably would exist amongthe nations, individuals, communities, and agencies involved.

However, more than culture distinguishes those who are involved withininternational commerce from one another, and while material and economic dis-parity might be targets of development practice, they also can be its effects as apeople try to work with a set of demands on them that increasingly cannot be met.Whether the Northern importer is ‘‘alternative’’ and striving for what she calls‘‘fair trade’’ to attempt parity by ensuring that the maximum of profits remain in

Figure 14 The Ideal Alternative Trading Organization System


Figure 15 Exterior Packing Case Label in Three Sizes for Artisans and Minka

310 J. Henrici

Figure 17 Minka staff members Ruben Arias (graphic artist) and Dina Vasquez (quality control-ler). Photograph by Jane Henrici

Figure 16 ‘‘Sur Peruano’’


local circulation, or whether the importer seeks only to maximize profits for theimport business owners, those who wish to develop long-term exchanges withlocal producers and intermediaries might do better to communicate their ordersmore explicitly and simply and in turn become more attentive to requests anddirectives, and even evaluations, that appear from their partners and clients in theSouth.

NOTES

1. NGOs may incorporate a branch agency such as an alternative trade organization (ATO) that cangenerate profits which in turn are reinvested into the social services provided by the NGO or non-profit organization.

2. Minka, S.R.L., Norma Velasquez, Director; please address questions for more information to Barce-lona 115, Lima, Peru or [email protected]

3. The term ‘‘nonprofit’’ is typically used in the U.S. to refer to a group’s incorporated and tax-exemptstatus within that country, while ‘‘non-governmental organization,’’ with its host of permutations,tends to be used internationally to label agencies working in ‘‘aid-recipient nations’’ [Lewis 1999: 4].

4. This illusion of a lack of socioeconomic differentiation I have elsewhere discussed as an expressionof what Pierre Bourdieu termed misrecognition [Henrici 1999: 162–163]. Bourdieu’s concept impliesthat there is no one participant in an exchange entirely responsible for controlling the pretense ofparity, but rather that any and all of those involved might maintain the fiction through the very pro-cess of the exchange. Although Deborah Poole [1997] primarily examines photographs in her ana-lysis of depictions of Andean people and cultural elements rather than drawings, she also indicatesin her work that representations should neither be considered as fixed, nor exclusively from onesource as dominant, but that images and those who exchange them can be in shifting and circulatingrelationships.

REFERENCES

Escobar, Arturo (ed).1995 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World,

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Henrici, Jane1999 Trading Culture: Tourism and Tourist Art in Pisac, Peru. In Tourism and

Cultural Conflict. Mike Robinson and Priscilla Boniface, eds. Pp. 161–179.London: CABI.

2002 ‘Calling to the Money’: Gender and Tourism in Peru. In Gender=Tourism=Fun? Margaret Swain and Janet Momsen, eds. Pp. 118–133.Elmsford, NY: Cognizant Communication Corporation.

Lewis, David1999 International Perspectives on Voluntary Action: Reshaping the Third Sector.

London: Earthscan Publications.

Markowitz, Lisa, and Karen W. Tice2001 Precarious Balance of ‘Scaling Up’: Women’s Organizations in the Americas.

East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Working Paper no. 271,Women and International Development.

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Mullin, Molly H.1995 The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art ‘‘Art, Not Ethnology.’’ In

The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. George E. Marcusand Fred R. Myers, eds. Pp. 166–198. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Poole, Deborah1997 Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rohr-Rouendaal, Petra1997 Where There is No Artist: Development Drawings and How to Use Them.

London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Velasquez Traverso, Norma1996 Propuesta Technologica y Gestionaria para la Transformacion Manual de los

Derivados de la Alpaca. Lima: Minka, S.R.L. Internal Document.

Werner, David, Carol Thuman, and Jane Maxwell1992 Where There is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook. Berkeley:

Hesperian Foundation.


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