Why local culture matters for global impact | Jonathan Rider | TEDxOxford

thanks very much indeed I'd like to start with a question that I imagine everybody in this room has been grappling with for many years and the question is this what can traditional archery teach us about International Development humanitarian Aid and peace building now by traditional archery I mean of course wooden bosen arrows the sort of thing that conr an image of Robin Hood or the Battle of aen and by International Development peace building and humanitarian Aid I mean those efforts that Charities and governments often overtake in fragile countries they think building schools um infrastructure development programs Civil Society reform schemes that kind of thing now I admit that the question might seem somewhat off kilter um but by day I run this company called Alf and what we do is measure the impact of the sorts of programs and By Night quite often during the day when I get a bit distracted I make traditional English Longbow we've all got our thing I trust there's no judgment this is Ted X after all um so since the theme of the series is storytelling I've got a short story to share with you all last year I traveled to nuristan which is a province in the northeast corner of Afghanistan it's a part of the country that's been isolated really for mill Millenia largely thanks to its hostile uh geography but also because the people that live there are very very very independent some of the best Empire Builders the world has ever seen had a crack at nuristan and couldn't get in Alexander the Great had a go and failed tamaran failed some 1600 years later and for almost a thousand years nuristan withheld the advance of Islam converting only at the point of the swords in 1896 when its name changed from kafiristan the land of the unbelievers to uran the euphemistic land of light and subsequently neither the Soviets nor the recent us-led Coalition was able to secure any form of lasting peace or Security in the region and to this very day it retains a highly distinctive cultural heritage and identity it's famous for its spectacular wooden architecture and for its intricate wood carving it's famous for its costume for its myth Cycles its stories its d ing its music but perhaps less wellknown is the fact that people here still practice a former traditional archery that hasn't changed hundreds if not thousands of years and if that's not cool I don't know what is but nuristan is also one of the poorest provinces um in Afghanistan almost two decades of continual conflict longer in fact have meant that um people live here the majority of them live well below the poverty line life expectancy is short there's barely a paved kilometer of Road in a province that's pretty much the size of Cornwall and Devon combined but it's a place that I grew up reading about in fact it was one of the reasons I quit my job in London in 2012 to move to Afghanistan and I spent four years in carbal um learning how to do nuristani woodworking in the evenings in the hope of somehow qualifying myself as a cultural expert so that I could travel to nuristan and work on the conservation of historic beautiful buildings like the one you saw on the previous image but it was never to be because of the insecurity to make matters worse in 2021 as I'm sure everybody remembers the Taliban swept to power it seemed for many people in Afghanistan and aded around the world like a nightmare had come true women and girls were swiftly banned from educ from the workspace from public places and human rights were being tramed more or less at every turn the Taliban even started destroying musical instruments and they banned music and singing and dancing the last time the Taliban were in power in 2001 you'll remember that they blew up the two Giant Buddha statues that had stood guard over the baman valley for many hundreds of years it seemed as if Afghanistan 's very Heritage and identity were under threat once more but with the withdrawal of international forces the war in Afghanistan effectively ended and that meant that large parts of the country that had previously been inaccessible due to insecurity were for the first time open for business meant that Charities could extend their programs into parts of the country that had been inaccessible and unfortunate though the circumstan were I thought well here potentially is a window a brief period where I might be able to go back to nuristan and to see whether or not this idea for a cultural protection project is going to be possible now I thought I was quite nervous about going back to Afghanistan under the Taliban control we've all seen the news stories but then I had a genius idea I thought well if I take a bow and arrow with me perhaps I'll be considered such an oddity and I know I am here that that perhaps it will deflect unwarranted attention and I'll be given greater latitude to move about than if I was coming there with a ostensively worthier cause in mind so I agonized over the design of my bow now this picture behind me might look rather simple but you'll have to trust me when I say it's an absolute Masterpiece um I'd like to draw your attention to the very clever uh joint at the handle so I can take this apart and put it on an airplane sling it in the back of a car and carry it with me the the arrows that you can see on the far left hand side of the image here have little feathers neatly glued onto them and every aspect of this was agonized over I needed something that was lightweight but also something that was long enough to resist being broken when people stretched it and pulled it in a variety of different directions so I was very pleased with the end result I made it to caral without too much trouble and made straight for the ministry to get my permission letter so you have to get permission from carbal before you can travel any further a field and these letters were given to me quite quickly and easily I was struck by how receptive government officials were to these sorts of cultural projects at a time when they were Banning things like music and the dancing they were actively encouraging the conservation of historic buildings and monuments in other parts of the country so my idea to travel to nuristan to look at old buildings and wood carving traditions and to take part in the archery as ridiculous as that might have sounded actually was met with great approval and I was given permission to move on pretty quickly culture I was learning opens doors in some very surprising places we then set off uh from Carell to nuran and along the way we passed lots and lots of villages where archery ranges had been set up it seemed as if archery was very much a living parts of the Region's Heritage and identity when we got to the sort of end destination I said about learning as much as I possibly could about the archery um the rules are are pretty straightforward you have two sticks stuck in the ground about 100 meters apart and you fire one Arrow from each end aiming for the stick at the other end when I was there there were two teams of 12 uh archers competing against one another at any given moment and to say that health and safety wasn't a front- of Mind issue would be a very gross understatement so you can imagine that by the time the last person is firing his Arrow at the Target he's effectively firing into a group of 23 other archers who have already fired their arrows and are waiting for his Arrow to land at their feet and that's to say nothing for all the children the livestock and the other Spectators who have gathered around to get the prime view of the arrows hitting the target I've got a very short clip here to to show you just to give a sense of what it's like hopefully the audio will [Music] work running out the there [Music] I'm glad you chuckled at that uh that's terrifying by the way so yeah I think the idea behind it is that if you you know hold your hat in front of the Target or flash a mirror or a mobile phone that somehow you'll guide or or help your your teammates to hit the mark but I mean this was just a practice session there weren't many people there the actual event there were lots of people around there and apparently injury uh and worse is not unheard of so it was with I think a fairly understandable degree of nervousness and trepidation that I sort of stepped up and threw my hat into the ring and said let me take part remember it sort of 100 MERS there isn't a huge margin of error so if your arrow is either side just by a fraction the chances of hitting somebody are extremely high so at the beginning of the competition everybody sort of steps up and they they sort of bring out their bows and their arrows and they're all you know testing the arrows for straightness stringing their bows giving them a good old stretch and I got mine out and I thought well everybody is going to be blown away by this incred thing I've made this wonderful magic bow that combines all these incredible features um and I was wrong they weren't in the they weren't in the least bit impressed by it um the general gist of it was that it was too weak and too big and wouldn't be any use whatsoever but the the thing the thing that they they took the greatest offense at was the fact that my arrows didn't have big sharp points on the end as theirs did they had rubber safety blunts on them rather sensibly I thought that was a good precaution to take under the circumstances but no that that was considered to be somehow incredibly feeble um so I think I was the underdog from the start and I must admit I gave as good as I God I looked at I looked at their bows and I thought they were somewhat short they sort of come up to about here quite simple um and the arrows they didn't have any feathers on them so they really are just a piece of bamboo with a little Notch cut at one end and then An Almighty Spike at the other and I thought you know I'm going to show you guys a thing or two so I sort of stepped up to the mark Drew my bow let fly and the arrow hit the target first time spit the stick in half and everybody was just flabbergasted complete silence obviously didn't happen by the way not at all very far from it the arrow didn't even make it halfway down the range hit a rock smashed into a thousand pieces they were absolutely right the bow was complete load of rubbish um and it became very immediately obvious that this this imported idea of infection this bow that I'd spent so much time building and making agonizing over the design about clearly wasn't up to scratch there's no match whatsoever for the local bows so I beat a pretty Hasty Retreat and under the very kind and patient guidance of a local Carpenter built a new bow in the local style what was wonderful about that experience was that as cheesy as this might sound he and I could communicate with one another though we didn't have really much more than a single word in common because we were using the same tools we were using materials that we were accustomed to using and it was just a great little experience it did absolutely nothing to improve the quality of my shooting um the bow still the bow turned out rather well and it's still in my office but uh I decided to bow out of the competition when one of my arrows um landed very very close indeed to a small group of children there was just a little voice in my head that said if you keep going it's probably not going to end very well so I stepped back but the final igny of the whole experience the final humility was that uh I wanted to give my bow to somebody my original bow to somebody at the end of the tournament as if to say you know thank you very much for for the kindness and the enormous Hospitality I've been shown but no one wanted it I could I couldn't give this thing away and I tried I tried really hard but nobody wanted it in the end I think some poor chat took it me and probably slung it in his bread oven the next morning and then you know we w't speak of that again but at this point you're probably asking yourselves what on Earth does any of this have to do with International Development humanitarian Aid and peace building well this wouldn't be a TED talk if I didn't try and distill some wisdom and some key insights from from the story I'll come to those in a moment but for a bit of context though culture is often overlooked as a means of development or of humanitarian recovery it's often considered a luxury how can you possibly invest in projects to documents and protect cultural heritage or to work with culture in contexts when people need food shelter water and all of these other sorts of things well my message isn't particularly new or or complicated culture is actually a critical driver of precisely these sorts of development initiative and there are three reasons for this the the first is that context is everything there's a tendency to overlook the importance of local knowledge local Insight in favor of so-called International best practice so just like my bow and my arrows which shattered into a thousand pieces when I missed the target I'm wary of anything that claims Universal application just because an education program was very successful in one country doesn't mean for a moment it's going to work in another and just because a system of government was particularly effective in one place certainly doesn't mean it's going to be exported to another place just as easily the second reason is that culture creates opportunities to work in contexts or at times when other types of project might seem more difficult remember at a time when the Taliban and Western governments were and still are at loggerheads with one another over important issues like human rights it felt at the time that there was quite a permissive space for cultural programs culture can be seen as non-threatening and and can therefore create opportunities for engaging with people I was able to have really surprisingly Frank conversations with people that began with archery and ended in topics like religion and faith I was quizzed very insistently about my own faith on a number of occasions but very politely and I had incredible conversations with about pre-islamic pagan belief systems and all of this with people who have been branded religious Hardline fundamentalists culture creates opportunities to engage the third reason and the final and perhaps most important reason is that culture untangles that complicated relationship that exists between the sort of traditional Aid giver and Aid recipient model it allows you to engage as equals now I'm not star eyed about this I'm completely alive to the chasm of inequality that that lies between someone like me and then the people I was staying with in uran but there were genuinely moments where we were engaging with one another as equals be that shoulder-to-shoulder at the archery range or dodging arrows as they landed at our feet and these three rules if if if any must be the basis of development programs humanitarian Aid and peace building if we don't align our our initiatives with these things they're destined to fail with that I end thank you very much indeed

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 759

Keywords: Culture, English, Global Issues, Heritage, International Affairs, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:57064]

Id: 1uVLmjZr8VQ

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024