There are many skills developed and practiced in every village in order for people to survive there.
These skills can be positioned and packaged for sale to the rest of the world as unique to the village and therefore commercially desirable.
Every village has a unique point of view: There were specific characters, happenings, and other events in the origin and survival of the village over its years: The Verbal History Of This Place is the way most have chosen to describe these unique place-specific experiences.
Stories of specific people, with particular personalities, what they did, how it affected them, how it affected their families. Personal stories are personal myths. They are remembered and retold because of their significance to the local village that is their audience.
The Verbal History Of This Place is the commercial tapestry that can be woven with its unique point of view in to a variety of expressions – a song, a garment, a houseware, an artifact – that can be sold under a coherent cultural metaphor.
The unique and very specific expression of life that every society in the world collects, and pours over, and celebrates.
Constructing these ‘coherent cultural metaphors’ involves drawings, music-making, collecting and recording the stories and the characters of the past and present village.
Such a ‘coherent cultural metaphor’ may involve several people or even several villages in a particular sector of province of a country. Packaging this local / provincial / regional cultural and selling it to the world becomes a Commercial ‘Money’ Crop that powers the prosperity of the village.
INDIVIDUAL COMMERCIAL EXAMPLES
Handmade blue & white rugs and colorful dishes are made and sold in the markets of the blue and white village of Sidi Bou Said on the Mediterranean shore of Tunisia. It was formed in the 18th century by Turkish governors of Tunis who built vacation residences seaside. During the 1920s, Rodolph d’Erlanger applied the blue-white theme all over the vacation resort town. Sidi Bou Said inspired crafts are made all over Tunisia sold locally, and on line.
I have seen young boys laying all day in hot, dark West African sheds in Togo, carving tall Zulu / Modigliani visions (warriors, women, animals – it is their imaginations) over and over trying to ‘get it right’.
I have seen dashiki shirts drying on a clothesline on the outskirts of Abijan from dyeing with local berries that have been fashioned by some local ladies for a market far away.
The Dashiki, (West African men’s garment covering the top half of the body) was made popular in the western world by Oba (King) Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi (born Walter Eugene in Detroit, Michigan in 1928) an African studies enthusiast who came upon the dashiki while on a trip to Haiti.
GDV’s Village Cultural Money Crop Initiative.
The Work Skills Program will recruit a commercial archivist to identify and collect each local village culture in its images, designs, characters, and stories. These elements will be the ‘raw materials’ from which a local hardware & software portfolio of each coherent local village cultural metaphor will be fashioned.
The Work Skills Program will identify local and regional artisans that wish to apply their skilled efforts to productizing local village cultures.
Each local ‘coherent cultural metaphor’ hardware and software portfolio [i.e., verbal storybooks, songs, poems, music, children’s illustrated books, shirts, sheets, quilts, rugs, dishes, statues, etc.] will be fashioned and marketed as a distinct culture’s point of view.
The Work Skills Program will identify indigenous entrepreneurs in the Host Country, and international entrepreneurs that offer potential markets for stories, garments, music, artifacts, and housewares of the local village cultures.
Each local ‘coherent cultural metaphor’ hardware and software portfolio will be a joint venture between the local village and the artisans that product the portfolio elements. The GDV Work Skills Program will act as the business agent responsible for funding the creation of the portfolio and negotiating sales agreements with regional and international market makers for these portfolio elements.
The Work Skills Program will utilize a unique website for each local ‘coherent cultural metaphor’ to illustrate, perform, and explain the context for its hardware and software portfolio.
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