Image: Gertrude Duby Blom with Lacandan friend, date unknown.
“We formed the first governmental expedition of the State of Chiapas to establish contact with the Lacandon Indians. A contact not to exploit them, nor to study them anthropologically. The mules carried very little of our things, the majority of the cargo were gifts for the Lacandon from the government. Our goal was to investigate the necessities of these remote Indians, to construct modern houses and to establish a relationship between them and the government.”
- Franz and Gertrude Blom, La Selva Lacandona, Vol. 1, p.69, 1955.
“[Empowerment]: The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves. It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed. In Latin America, in educación popular, one of the great cradles of this kind of concept, the word itself didn’t exist until it was translated back from English. To many people, if they know it at all, the word empoderamiento sounds strange. It’s an NGO word, used by either volunteer or paid educators who view themselves as helpers of others or fighters for social justice, and is understood to represent the currently ‘politically correct’ way of thinking about ‘third world’, subaltern or marginalised people. But it remains a transitive verb, which places emphasis on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way. These good intentions, held also by 19th-century European missionaries, we know from experience do not ensure non-exploitation.”
- ‘The ‘Em-’ in Empowerment’, Research for Sex Work, 2000, 3, 15-16.
“Nowadays, to question ‘helping’ projects often causes anger or dismissal. A genealogical approach, which shows how governmentality functioned in the past, is easier to accept, and may facilitate the taking of a reflexive attitude in the present.”
- ‘Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities’, 2005, Rhizomes, 10.