Fair Trade: Focus on the Documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China - Essay Example

?FAIR TRADE: FOCUS ON THE DOCUMENTARY MARDI GRAS: MADE IN CHINA Fair Trade: Focus on the Documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China FairTrade: Focus on the Documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China Mardi Gras is a festival that occurs in the United States in the state of Louisiana in New Orleans. New Orleans is famous for the Mardi Gras celebration. The many traditions and mysteries of Mardi Gras make it a popular festival and people from all over the world go to experience this deeply cultural event. An irony of Mardi Gras is the commercialization, such as advertisements on the sides of floats, is forbidden by city laws. However, through many of the traditions of Mardi Gras exploitation of foreign manufacturing is taking place. The film Mardi Gras: Made in China is a documentary that shows how one of the most sexualized, but constant traditions of Mardi Gras is contributing to the exploitation of Chinese factory workers. The baggage that existed in approaching this topic consists of knowing that there are Chinese workers involved in creating the visual culture of Mardi Gras, creating bold and gaudy beads that are used for a consumer exchange of nudity for cheap products. However, the full understanding of what it means to be a Chinese factory worker was not known before doing research for this project. In watching the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China the visual presentation of culture by contrasting the wasteful and hedonistic culture of Mardi Gras compared to the austere culture of the factory workers was startling. Young women in Mardi Gras debase themselves by showing their breasts to get cheap beads, a party atmosphere infectious and transforming them into performing this ritual. In China, the stark reality of the young women who work in these factories opens up the eyes of the viewer to what it means to create these beads that are used so carelessly. The luggage in this story becomes wakening to the realities of what is essentially slave labor in China that is creating disposable items used for no real beneficial purpose. The cultural tradition of Mardi Gras is not that easy to understand from the outside. Goudet and McDonald (2003) quote a journalist who wrote that “The lesson seemed to be: get drunk, hunt chickens, eat well, kiss the dickens out of pretty girls, straighten your deportment for the next day, assume your place among your fellow men” (p. 11). The simple understanding of Mardi Gras is that it is a celebration that comes before the Catholic period of Lent. Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday, which refers to the tradition of eating rich, fatty foods before Ash Wednesday which begins a period of fasting and reduced pleasure in food. While Mardi Gras itself is celebrated in many cultures and just on that specific Tuesday, in New Orleans it is celebrated for the two weeks before lent which falls in February. The tradition was brought to New Orleans by the French who settled the region. The official colors of the festival, introduced in 1872 by the Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff, are purple which signifies justice, green which signifies faith, and gold which signifies power (Hale, 2007). Mardi Gras is ripe with tradition. Large scale parades are sponsored by ‘krewes’ which are racially and gender specific, making up the rich ethnically diverse history of New Orleasns. The parades are highly visual events with cheap beads, doubloons, and other items thrown each day from the floats. The air is filled with colorful items flying through the air and being caught by people in wild costumes that rival those on the people who populate the floats. Collecting these items during the celebration leads to disposing of them as trash at the end of the celebration. Mardi Gras is a time when sexual and social beliefs are suspended and people begin to behave in hedonistic ways. One of the traditions of Mardi Gras is that in exchange for showing their breasts and sometimes more, men will give women strings of beads. This commoditization of nudity in exchange for the collection of beads creates a sexualized exchange that in any other circumstance would be socially rejected. This tradition requires the manufacture of thousands of strung beads which are primarily bought from China. The beads are sold for pennies and the workers make very little money for their efforts. In a film that is intended to show the full cycle of the beads that are now thrown in Mardi Gras, Ashley Sabin and her partner David Redman formed Carnivalesque Films in order to film their first documentary that follows the manufacture of plastic beads in their journey around the world. Sabin (2010) writes that “The proliferation of plastic marks the emergence of a disposable culture. Following the plastic bead from China to the U.S. illustrates how the commodity chain is connected to different people along the alienated and seemingly disconnected route”. The journey of the plastic beads begins in Iraq where the oil based liquids for making the plastic is sold to China. The beads are made in China and then sold to distributers in the United States. A the end of the festival, the disposed of beads are then collected off the streets and some of them make their way into care packages for U.S. soldiers who are serving in Iraq who celebrate Mardi Gras by tossing the beads into the streets. This creates a full circle for the beads, starting as raw materials in Iraq and then ending up as discarded waste in their streets from the celebration traditions of U. S. solders (Sabin, 2010). The documentary, Mardi Gras: Made in China begins by contrasting leisure time with some young factory workers in China with leisure during Mardi Gras when the beads that they make are used for the exchange. The life in the factory is then explored. The factory employs 95% of their workers through girls, with some use of boys because they have more strength, according to the owner of the factory. He states that one of the reasons they hire mostly girls is because they are easier to control. The girls are stained from the dyes, dirty from the petroleum used in the products, and their hands are burned and cut up from the work that they do in making the beads. The impact of the visual contrasts between the beads flying through the air and the dirt, oil and stain on such young girls who are being exploited more than those in New Orleans is startling. The Chinese girls who work in the factory live on the compound sharing ten girls or boys to a room with only five beds. They use a communal bath and eat in a cafeteria. They are only allowed to leave on Sunday if they do not have to work. The girls can be as young as fourteen when they start working in the factory (Sabin & Redman, 2005). They earn according to the number of products that they make. However, punishment is frequent and comes through taking back some of their pay. They are punished by one day’s pay if they talk. They are punished by 5% of their pay if they do not meet their quota. They are fined if they forget to turn a machine off when they leave their area. They are fined if they leave their machine over a certain number of times, which the supervisor responds to by saying “Otherwise they will go to toilet too much” (Sabin & Redman, 2005). If the males or females are caught in the housing of the opposite sex, they have one month’s pay taken from them. They average $62 per month in pay. They work eleven hours a day, with time put on for their meal time which they are not paid for, which means they are at work for about fourteen hours per day, according to the documentary. The beads are initially made in large machines. A girl who is featured in the documentary talks about her job and says she pulls from the machine 3,000 times per day. The product that makes the beads is from petroleum. Both polyethanol and polystyrene are used to make the beads. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has found that styrene is a narcotic that is also a central nervous system toxin and both products can cause cancer when they are melted and inhaled. There are no masks in the factory and the girls are working with their hands. In the United States, OSHA has determined that the effects of styrene require special precautions because of their effects on workers, which include disorientation, neurological damage, and toxic addiction to the substance styrene. Laws passed in 1970 under The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 requires workers to be protected by these chemicals in the United States (Howard, 2010, p. 237). No such protection is provided for the workers in China. The visual impact of these contrasts drives home the statistics that are included in this documentary. The concept of exchange is very important in this discussion. Gotham (2002) calls it the commoditization and spectacle on which the concept of exchange is created in New Orleans. The theory discusses how the event creates the context of the exchange while the items for exchange are actually without much value. The way in which the beads are a part of the visual culture of the celebration is a core aspect of their use. One of the workers in the film, when told what the beads were used for, said that she wanted to tell people in the United States that the beads are ugly and not worth the exchange. The meaning behind the exchange is culturally relevant, however, and is meaning is not in either the flashing of breasts or the gain of beads. The experience is the value that the participants perceive and the beads are only symbolic of that value. One of the people interviewed in New Orleans was shown footage of the factories and conditions that young girls and boys were under. Her response was emotional, stating that she thought maybe she should take off her beads and abandon the tradition (Sabin & Redman, 2005). Through seeing the factory, the meaning of the beads begins to change. Lipsitz (1988) discussed the problem with eliminating traditions in favor of politically correctness. The problem that arises is that the narratives of culture are changed which is further influenced by a commoditized mass-culture that reflects none of the nuances of ethnically individual cultures. The young men and women who work in the factories in China would not desire to see their work come to an end. Most of them expressed wanting to work and make money for their families. The work is a necessity. The changes that the workers in the factory want to see is better work conditions, better pay and the idea of punishment abandoned. The conditions in the factory are oppressive. As stated earlier, they are punished for talking, going into the rooms of the other sex, for not meeting quota, and a series of internal infractions. They are not allowed to leave the grounds Monday through Saturday and not on Sunday if they have to work. The place has barbed wire on the walls and looks like an institutional facility. What is needed is worker reform rather than cultural reform in New Orleans. Before viewing the film on Chinese workers in factories that made Mardi Gras beads, the idea of the Chinese factory was vague and something that did not happen close to home. The baggage of this topic was a vague understanding that factory conditions were oppressive and violated human rights, but there was no concrete idea about the direct affect on workers and the supply chain of goods. Before viewing the film there was no awareness of the custom of flashing breasts in exchange for beads in Mardi Gras. The festival was foreign and its details were unclear. While the exchange of sexualized visual culture for beads is offensive, this tradition promotes the use of beads and creates an industry for China. The luggage that comes from learning about the conditions of the factories in China is that there is a responsibility for creating change in these industries. The film creates a conduit to the knowledge of how the Chinese factory functions through visually documenting the events that take place there. The exchange of goods for money is an important part of the new economy in China. Until the 1980s the factories were in Hong Kong, but the change of focus to a free enterprise system in China has meant that many factories have relocated to the mainland. With building industry there is a responsibility to the people who work in those industries to provide safe and fair employment. The chemicals used to make the beads create toxins that the workers are breathing that will cause them harm. As well, their long hours and confinement to the compound does not promote healthy lifestyles that lead to well-being. Through working with the buyers and the Chinese industries involved, a solution to worker satisfaction can be formulated in order to create change. It is through visual culture that an understanding of the relationship between the Mardi Gras beads and the Chinese factory can be made. The film makers are able to reveal this issue because they become voyeurs into the cultures of both New Orleans and China. Where Mardi Gras is a highly visual world, the factory is not and provides a contrast that shows how people can turn a blind eye to the factory conditions. Because it is not typically seen, it is not a reality. Through taking cameras into the factory it becomes a real place and the problems in the factory become legitimate as they become a part of the visual culture of the West. In contrasting the very public visual culture of Mardi Gras with the private and virtually unseen world of the factory, the way in which cultures intersect is made painfully and explicitly clear. Resources Gaudet, M. G, & McDonald, J. C. (2003) Mardi Gras, gumbo, and zydeco: Readings in louisiana culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gotham, K. F. (2002). Marketing Mardi Gras: commodification, spectacle and the political economy of tourism in New Orleans. Urban Studies, 39(10), 1735-1756. Hale, Viktorya. (12 February 2007). Mardi Gras: A colorful New Orleans tradition. Yahoo Voices. Retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/mardi-gras-colorful-orleans-tradition- 193285.html (Accessed 25 April 2013). Howard, J. (2010). OSHA standards-setting: past glory, present reality and future hope. Empl. Rts. & Employ. Pol'y J., 14, 237-355. Lipsitz, G. (1988). Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans. Cultural Critique, (10), 99-121. Sabin, A. (producer), & Redman, D. (director) (2005) Mardi Gras: Made in China [motion picture] United States: Carnivalesque Films. Sabin, A. (1 February 2010). Mardi Gras: Made in China. The Etsy Blog. Retrieved from http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2010/mardi-gras-made-in-china/ (Accessed on 25 April 2013). Read More