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AI: I, from my reading of the book, I certainly got a sense that there was a huge impact on you, all the village experiences, and the experience that you're contrasting with the urban experience, even within India. That there's a huge, huge gap now between the urban lives that people live, and those who are outside in the village and countryside, and that the, the shift in values that come, you spoke quite a bit about that.

PJ: Right. That was a, that was probably the biggest thing that I saw, and it's the biggest thing that's made me look at and question globalization and... I mean, what was funny is that it was, I didn't have a background in globalization at all before I went. And I also was not involved in any of the kind of new-age spiritual movements here before I went. But going there and really seeing a way in which people lived their lives in connection with the rest of the world, very central concept of Buddhism, or any of these other... I'm going to say traditional cultures in India, it's -- or Africa, I saw it in Africa, too. It was so wonderful, and then to see sort of the loss -- and it's not like it's a romantic, I mean, I struggled with this the whole way through the book, and people would say, "You're being romantic," and, "You're romanticizing everything." And I know that you can do that, and it's not that I think that everything old is wonderful. The caste system is a really horrific system. There's lots of discrimination and prejudice and dowry deaths and all kinds of things that occur because of the, because of traditional life. But there is a centrality of the human experience that we've lost, I think, in the modern world. And I think it's the center of a lot of the problems in the West. And so I think seeing how traditional life worked, it was like I got to see these extremes. I got to see what life was like here -- which wasn't all perfect -- but there were many really amazing things about it, and then I got to see varying pieces of the continuum towards "progress," and question what we really call progress, and whether that's really what we're striving for or not.

And I was also very actively involved, towards the last part of my fellowship, with people who were, whose families and who were themselves very involved in the 'Quit India' movement and getting the British out. And so it was a lot of kind of anti-Western sentiment, and I think partly through hearing their perspectives of sort of how -- and it was also the time when McDonald's had just come in, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and so there was all this -- and Coca Cola, so there was all this backlash against U.S. corporations and against globalization going on at that time. It was a fascinating time in India. In 1991, India's economy was opened up and liberalized, which meant that all this investment was able to come in, and so it was just a, kind of a perfect moment to be looking at what happens when you "open up," quote, "open up" a country, and the effect of a dominant culture through media. It was phenomenal to me how 98 percent of villages had access to television, and how quickly that changed everything. And Richard Critchfield has this book called -- well, he's got two books called -- he was a famous anthropologist and journalist, and one book called Villagers and one book called Villages. And in there, he writes about how technology can affect change more quickly than any political ideology. So if you look at how long it took for Communism or Marxism or any -ism to affect social and political change, and you look at technology, and you look at the introduction of farm-, modern farming tools and how dramatically that changed entire societies, and how they functioned and what they valued, it's pretty, it was pretty fascinating. So I looked at a lot of that in India. I think I was really kind of obsessed with a lot of those issues during my time there.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.