The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Chapter 4. Developmental Shifts: Changing Feelings about Compassion in Korea

101 When I was a child, my family supported a “foreign” child through an organization called Compassion International with a monthly financial commitment that provided food, education, and clothing for him. We even became pen pals with the child until his family managed to send him to his relatives in Canada, with its relatively friendly immigration policies. Since the child-support program had officially been set up in the names of me and my brother, I continued to receive reports from the organization for years. Compassion is a large, Christian-affiliated (no specific denomination ) organization that runs a child-sponsorship program. Using development language with an evangelical twist, the organization describes itself as a “Christian child advocacy ministry that releases children from spiritual , economic, social and physical poverty” (“About Us”). Through Compassion, individuals in “developed” nations provide approximately thirty dollars per month to make education, sanitation, food, and other locally determined necessities available to one specific child. Letters go back and forth between the child and the sponsor, and the support is designed to continue until the child achieves the local equivalent of a high school diploma. I remember feeling curiosity, concern, and affection Changing Feelings about Compassion in Korea Matt Newcomb Developmental Shifts 4 102  Matt Newcomb for the child we sponsored, but I also had a strong sense of distance that letters back and forth did not particularly overcome. In her chapter in this edited collection, Rebecca Dingo observes that the relationship between the donor and the recipient in a context of development is both financial and affective: “One does not only lend or give money to a poor woman, but that lender/giver also presumes to connect to and then extend intangible support that will seemingly enable some form of financial agency for her.” For my family, much of the sponsorship was about the letters we wrote to the child, usually about his education, to somehow encourage him in his quest for a more stable financial (and presumably personal) future. The gift of money came with the letters and emotional connection, which could be both a gift of a different sort and the strings attached to the money. “Will you sponsor this child?” Like Compassion, numerous aid and development organizations pose this question to potential donors, asking them to give a certain amount of money each month in support of their development efforts. Development is portrayed as something happening at the individual more than societal level in this child-focused approach. Such an appeal is both too particular to be a megarhetoric (as a site where multiple levels, layers, and disciplines of rhetorical work interweave), and yet can be so global and symbolic that the images travel (differently) anywhere. The donor gets an indirect emotional connection from the direct sponsorship of a particular child, with whom he or she then corresponds by mail. The relationship is structured around compassion and gratitude. On a larger scale this transaction is between the developed and developing world. Although individuals may be “transformed” through sponsorship, the feelings and discourse about donor and recipient nations usually do not change quickly. However, on occasion the developmental identity of a nation or particular issue undergoes a significant discursive and affective shift. This chapter addresses the notion of a change in affective identity of a nation—the Republic of Korea (or South Korea; like its citizens, I will call it Korea)—through the literature of aid work, particularly the history Compassion International tells about itself. I do not focus on a change in how people in a specific location understand their own culture or community , but rather address a change in the rhetoric and affective responses about a place and situation. Aid and development organizations are key sources for the language and cultural attitudes and feelings about spatially and socially distant places in need, even as that sense of need is already based on cultural conceptions of places. Aid organizations have a vital role in reinforcing the development-based categories Westerners use to think about the globe. Cultural critic Sara Ahmed has suggested that objects get Developmental Shifts  103 feelings attached to them (1–3) and that this attachment is fundamentally social rather than personal (8–10). The feelings that get attached to Korea, as the nation exemplifying affective change in this analysis, are deployed through a variety of texts and expectations, and it is the change in emotional attachment that shows the...