Transcriber: Julián Molina Guillén Reviewer: Capa Girl
I'm Ed.
As you just heard, one of the problems is Richard just took
all my material 'cause I'm sort of talking on the same topic.
And, like he said, he's pushing me to the edge.
So, we're going to look at just a very slice of
this topic of globalization and the question --
I looked at it as a personal challenge,
'cause I thought of a list of questions.
And the question was:
Do we have room for disappearing cultures?
And I decided, that was one I want to take a shot at.
And I had to admit I'm not an expert in this.
I'm just an observer. Hopefully, a little bit less than
casual observer, but just an observer.
And I also have to admit that I don't have the answer.
But I'm going to explore some of the conflicts that
I think we see with this very interesting topic.
So, first of all, you have to understand where I'm coming from.
I've been in Bangkok since 1992.
And I really came from the private sector.
I've started a number of businesses and
that got me into teaching entrepreneurship and
I've always had this interest in technology.
I was an engineer from MIT and I always grew up believing
technology could solve all the problems of the world.
Certainly, believing an engineer could solve all the problems of the world.
So, this was the background that I have.
And probably the most important thing for
our discussion today is - I like to drive.
So, this takes me around the region.
This is actually up in North Eastern of Cambodia,
or down in North Eastern Cambodia, from here.
And, I have a chance to see different parts of Asia
outside the city, sometimes very far outside the cities.
And what's interesting when you go to a place like this --
there's two interesting things about this road, that I'm on here.
One is, as you can tell by the picture, it's a very remote area.
One thing you cannot tell about the picture is:
It is part of what will someday be --
if the UN and the Asian Development Bank have their way ,
something called the Asia Highway Network.
This is actually a road that is designated to be an Asian highway.
So, if they have their way, someday there will be
a multi-lane highway running down this dirt road.
And I think that's an interesting conflict.
A part of me likes to be here before the highway is built
and part of me likes to be here in a place where
there is incredible progress being planned.
So, these are the things I like to think about.
I'm a big believer in entrepreneurship
and that it can be a positive change
and we saw a whole bunch of examples in the previous
presentation, and I know we'll see a lot more today.
And I also hope that technology can be a driver for
social change and environmental change.
And because of my driving around, I'm always thinking,
particularly about Southeast Asia, about the general question:
How might development happen in a positive way? --
'cause when we use the G-word - "Globalization"
-- it can be a very emotional word and it can leave people
different ideas about what's good and what's bad.
So, if you have these interests I've been describing,
like I do, then you might run a business,
you might teach entrepreneurship, you might get involved
with technology licensing, which I also do.
And you also might get involved with social entrepreneurship.
And these are the 4 or 5 things that I'm mixing together today.
These are the things I mix together everyday in my life in Bangkok.
So, one of the things I've got involved with several years ago --
and I think it's a great organization to be involved with --
is the Global Social Venture Competition.
It was originally started by UC Berkeley and
now it's spreading around the world.
And they try to promote which might be positive forces of change.
As we're talking about: preserving culture,
or trying to prevent cultures from disappearing.
So: fair trade products, have the promise to allow
villagers who are making craft products or locally
produced products, like herbal medicines and folk wisdom --
try to preserve their way of life.
There are projects that we work with for trying to protect indigenous people.
In fact, we saw the presentation of Ylan earlier today --
these are great projects that are really trying to maintain a way of life.
Allow people to have a lifestyle that they can maintain
in an economically sustainable way.
So, we wanted to have our own project.
So we met this guy a few years ago,
who made these solar powered flash lights.
This was at a GSVC event several years ago in the US.
And we thought:
This would be a great project to bring to Southeast Asia.
And it would also give me a chance to go driving,
which is exactly what I told you earlier that I like to do.
So we got our students together in various universities,
and we raised money and brought these solar lights.
And we deployed them around Southeast Asia --
we put some in the Philippines,
and some along the border areas between Thailand and Myanmar.
And there's this particular little story I'm going to tell you
about a trip we made recently to Northern Laos.
So, we went all the way up to the Northern border of Laos,
in a province called Pongsali,
which is right up against the Chinese border.
And it's a very rugged mountainous area, very remote.
People live in with no access to electricity,
and we're hoping that by giving these solar lights to them
they've the chance to study longer --
perhaps to help them get a better education --
work longer maybe to try to break the cycle of poverty --
All these kind of things.
And the other interesting thing about the story is:
the people who live up there --
The people who live up there, are all hill tribe minority groups:
Hmong minority, Akha -- These various groups.
That have maintained their fairly distinct cultures for a long time.
Largely by virtue of the fact that they live in a fairly remote area.
And in this particular area their economic
sustenance comes from these tea trees
that were around 400 hundred years growing in the area.
They just harvest these trees and that gives them
enough sustenance to maintain their life.
Well, we went up and visited these guys and gave them solar lights --
So, these are some kids from a very small village.
This is in their Lao regulation national school uniform.
This makes some people upset, because they say:
"These kids should be preserving their cultural identity."
And it's true. When you're in this area, you see
a lot of people in what you would call traditional dress.
Many of the people still wear traditional dress.
But when they go to school they are required to wear
the national uniform. In all schools throughout Laos.
It also bothers many tourists to the area when they
see kids wearing a Manchester United football shirt.
Those are there too. You can see kids wearing
what would be called western clothes.
And that really bothers people.
And I'm bothered that people are bothered about this.
Because, why can't we let teenagers be teenagers
even if they're living in a hill tribe area?
And that's gonna be the main message that I'm exploring right here.
So, while we were driving up there, we spent a lot of time
on little roads, and that's part of the fun.
But we also see this kind of thing.
The previous picture and this picture are the same road.
Ok. A few hundred kilomiters apart.
But you can see the development is coming.
And you can look at this from a lot of different perspectives.
You can look at it from all the good perspectives --
and you can undoubtedly look at it from a lot of bad perspectives.
It's a very difficult challenge.
How do you deny development?
Or, how do you keep a way of life and still have development?
One of the things if you look at a bigger view on this --
I'm getting this from an expert. This is not from me.
This is something I read and I think it's atributed to another TED speaker.
The belief is, or the claim is made, that in a space of
two generations the world is losing half of its languages.
20 years ago or so, there were 6,000 languages in the world.
And it's going to be cut half in the space of two generations.
Now, the reason this statistic is important is because
it's hard to measure culture but it's relatively easy to
measure languages and people using languages.
So this is a kind of quantitative measure of disappearing culture.
And so I'm adopting language as the main unit for this short
example that I'm going to give you over the next few minutes.
So, we're not going to talk about culture so much,
we're going to focus right in on language
and talk about whether
how we preserve it or how we keep it from disappearing.
So, what is the right way?
Among all these challenges, what is the right way?
And you see these forces coming into play.
We've heard about globalization a few minutes ago: development, technology --
And technology today is being viewed as a positive force.
This thing called the Long Tail.
Now that we've got Internet we can communicate free anywhere around the world.
So people with a certain language,
even if there's a small number of them,
can preserve that language by talking back and forth.
And I'm going to give you two examples of that happening.
One is going to be with the people I just showed you
in Laos: the Hmong people.
But before I do that, I need to go back about 5 years to
a trip I made to Palo Alto.
I was in Palo Alto doing something with Stanford University
and I needed some money.
If you're in Palo Alto you use a lot of money,
it's a very expensive place.
So, I went to this ATM machine.
And the ATM machine took my card and said:
Choose your language.
English, Spanish and something else.
Ok?
And, if I were in a different venue we could have a whole
discussion about English and Spanish because there's people
worried that English is disappearing in the US and being replaced by Spanish,
which will soon be the most popular language in the US.
But we're going to talk about the third language here.
I didn't know what this language was.
I certainly didn't select it. I needed the money.
But when I got back to the office I looked it up.
It turns out that this language is Hmong.
The same people that I was showing to you a few minutes ago.
People that live in Northern Laos.
But the question is:
What is this doing on an ATM machine, in California?
Well, let's look a little bit at the history.
The Hmong have been around --
if you believe what I read - Wikipedia, we all read Wikipedia,
the Hmong have been around for 4,000 years.
They've been a very mobile people because they've
always been moving away from civilizations that tried to
esnare them and assimilate them.
So, they arrived in Southeast Asia around the 19th century
as they moved away from China,
and they just kept moving farther south.
In the 1950s, a written language was developed for them
by some western missionaries.
So, for the first time, they had a written language
which is what was showed up on the ATM machine.
Of course, the other important point here is the Indochina war.
So, around the 1950s into the 70s.
The Hmongs were on the side of the US.
The US had a bad time in that war.
And so, a lot of the Hmongs had to be moved out to the US and other countries.
And in fact, that's where we are here today.
And this slide right here represents the conflict that I don't understand.
First of all, in Asia, especially in Southern China --
Laos is a little behind, but they'll catch up --
there are Hmongs living in "eco-tourism locations,"
in cultural parks.
Where you are not allowed to wear Man U shirts.
You have to wear the traditional costume.
You have to live like you're a traditional Hmong.
Other Hmongs are being forced to assimilate.
In Laos they're being forced to assimilate as a part of the national culture.
And there are 120,000 Hmongs living mostly in the US,
in a couple of states - California, Minnesota, Wisconsin.
And they're growing up as American teenagers.
Doing all the American teenage things except --
traditional festivals are being kept alive
and the Internet is keeping this link.
So, a lot of kids are chatting back and forth in Hmong on
the Internet and on different electronic devices.
The question I cannot figure out is:
Which is the best way to preserve a culture?
There's good and bad in every one of these examples.
That leads me to another example
which I also want to bring up as a parallel:
Not Hmong but Cherokee.
Cherokee people are native Americans in the US.
In North America, but in this case, primarily in Georgia,
Alabama, and then they moved westward.
And, they are interesting for our discussion because
it is the only group of native Americans that have a written language.
So, they developed a written language,
and you can see the script up here.
And what is also interesting for our story today is:
The person responsible for developing this language, a guy named Sequoia --
his name would eventually become the name of a venture capital firm,
but before that, it was the name of a tree.
But Sequoia was in the Cherokee tribe and
he was determined that for that culture to survive
it needed to have a written language.
So he created this written language.
He spent 12 years on the work.
And, it lead to the development of the only native American
newspaper in its own language: The Cherokee Phoenix.
Today, and again I contrast this to Hmongs,
as we just saw a few minutes ago,
the Hmong have 120,000 people living around the US.
8,000 people remain who are literate in the Cherokee language
and most of them are over 50 years old.
So, this is a challenge.
Is this is a disappearing culture?
Interestingly, December 2010, just last month,
Apple announced that the Cherokee language would be
the 51st language available on iPhone
and eventually on the iPad.
This is a very select list of languages.
Cherokee is one of them.
And the Cherokee nation was very excited.
Now, our teenagers, just like the example I gave you before,
our teenagers will work together, be able to communicate in Cherokee.
Be able to use their Blackberry and their iPads and everything in Cherokee.
That just got me thinking.
Here's what a teenager does with culture, in English:
I got this from my student, by the way.
I don't know if it's correct.
If they're not correct, you can't blame me 'cause I don't know what they say.
And even the rabbit here.
Does this look like a rabbit to you?
I'm told told this looks like a rabbit.
I got it in an e-mail from one of my students:
Happy New Year!
Now, I think this is very clever.
Just with very simple symbols
we're able to create a very colourful language.
And I think it's also interesting.
Because I grew up in the 70s and 80s
using machines that only had alphanumeric characters.
And we thought we were so restricted.
And then, when graphics came along,
it was the most incredible thing in the world.
We've regressed.
Any of the teenagers of today are able to create
a much more colourful language than we ever had in the old ASCII system.
So, now let's take a look at what the Cherokee language looks like.
See, this is what we can do with some numbers and some English letters.
Here's what Cherokee looks like:
87 consonants!
What is a Cherokee teenager going to be able to do
with this wealth on a Blackberry or an iPhone?
And I'm saying this slightly humorously.
But I actually believe there's a wealth of culture yet to be
developed when somebody is on their Blackberry.
But I also ask the question:
Is that Cherokee culture?
Or, what will the Cherokee older generation think of this culture?
Certainly there's a huge backlash about English
for people who were writing in the previous slide.
And I wonder how the Cherokee language
is going to evolve once teenagers get a hold of it.
So I leave you with one question.
Because this is the conflict I see.
If we try to preserve culture,
are we actually risking making it disappear?
Are we actually relegating a culture to history?
Because I think a culture is a living thing.
It's not something that can be preserved and frozen in space.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)