Last Bit on Guyana

Final thoughts on Guyana (for now). The other day I discussed how a multinational corporation was coming into the area and demanding certain levels of safety. Jenna from my class thought that this was a very good thing to happen. 

It's interesting she brought this up. It's tough I believe to impose our own moral standards on other groups of people. In the Guyana example I mention above, there may have been an acceptance of taking jobs in a dangerous environment with the understanding that you could be hurt or killed, but for those workers who made it home each day, they were happy to have accepted the risk and gotten the pay check. It's our own moral standard that says those risks shouldn't be acceptable, but when the choices are so stark, maybe our level of acceptance would be different. 

I was reading in another class a passage written by Battacharya (2017) about this that states: "this model of qualitative research has come under attack from various groups such as "Third World" scholars, feminists, scholars of color, et. These scholars question the notion of telling stories about someone else's culture from a Western perspective. They claim that someone who is trained in Western philosophies and science cannot possibly see the world in a ways of people who might not have been exposed or trained in the same philosophies. Margaret Mead was criticized for imposing her progressive upbringing on Samoan women by calling them oppressed. Oppression and liberation look different to Samoan women than they do to Margaret Mead" (p. 8). 

In this case I agree with Jenna, that it would have been more beneficial, particularly to the worker who is injured or killed, and to his family, if there were stricter and more Western oriented safety controls and standards than the ones that were being used, and I was proud to have been a part of the effort and hope it continues. 

References

Bhattacharya, K. (2017). Fundamentals of qualitative research: A practical guide. Left Coast Press.