JUDITH RAFFERTY Page 10 RAIN September/October 1985 one generation and has established breastfeeding as a norm in spite of the countervailing views of the service technologists. Indeed, it was just a few years ago that the American Academy of Pediatrics finally took the official position that breastfeeding is preferable to nurturing infants from canned products. It was as though the Sauk Indians had recovered the Wisconsin prairie and allowed it once again to nourish a people with popular tools. The fourth element to be weighed is the “hidden curriculum" of the service technologies. As they are implemented through professional techniques, the visible message of the interaction between professional and client is, “you will be better because I know better." As these professional techniques proliferate across the social landscape, they represent a new praxis, an evergrowing pedagogy that teaches this basic message of the service technologies. Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the social fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew. It is clear, therefore, that to assess the purported benefits of service technologies they must be weighed against the sum of the socially distorting monetary costs to the commonwealth, the inverse effects of the interventions, the loss of knowledge, tools, and skills regarding other ways, and the anti-democratic consciousness created by a nation of clients. Weighed in this balance, we can begin to recognize how often the tools of professionalized service make social deserts where communities once bloomed. Community Busters Unfortunately, the bereavement counselor is but one of the many new professionalized servicers that plow over our communities like John Deere's sodbusting settlers. These new technologists have now occupied much of the community's space and represent a powerful force for colonizing the remaining social relations. Nonetheless, the resistance against this invasion can still be seen in local community struggles against the designs of planners, parents' unions demanding control over the learning of children, women's groups struggling to reclaim their medicalized bodies, and in community efforts to settle disputes and conflicts by stealing the property claimed by lawyers. Frequently, as in the case of La Leche League, this decolonization effort is successful. Often, however, the resistance fails and the new service technologies transform citizens and communities into social deserts grown over with a scrub brush of clients and consumers. This process is reminiscent of the final British conquest of Scotland after the Battle of Culloden. The British were convinced by a history of repeated uprisings that the Scottish tribes would never be subdued. Therefore, after the battle, the British killed many of the clansmen and forced the rest from their small crofts into coastal towns where there was no choice but to emigrate. Great Britain was freed of the tribal threat. The clans were decimated and their lands given to the English Lords who grazed sheep where communities once flourished. Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the social fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew. My Scots ancestors said of this final solution of the Anglo Saxon, “They created a desert and called it freedom." Our modern experience with service technologies tells us that it is difficult to recapture professionally occupied space. We have also learned that whenever that space is liberated, it is even more difficult to construct a new social order that will not be quickly coopted again. A vivid current example is the unfortunate trend developing within the hospice movement. In the United States, those who created the movement were attempting to detechnologize dying—to wrest death from the hospital and allow a death in the family. Only a decade after the movement began, we can see the rapid growth of “hospital-based hospices" and new legislation reimbursing those hospices that will formally tie themselves to hospitals and employ physicians as central “care givers." The professional cooption of community efforts to invent appropriate techniques for citizens to care in community has been pervasive. Therefore, we need to identify the characteristics of those social forms that are resistant to colonization by serving technologies while enabling communities to cultivate and care. These
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