Why It's Called The "Third World"

[WildCat]

This (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6998-2003Aug17.html) (very simple registration required) is the sickest thing I ever heard of.
He's known as "the cleanser," one of hundreds of thousands of men in rural villages across Africa who sleep with women after their husbands die to dispel what villagers believe are evil spirits.
As tradition holds, they must sleep with the cleanser to be allowed to attend their husbands' funerals or be inherited by their husbands' brother or relative, another controversial custom that aid workers said is causing the spread of HIV-AIDS. Unmarried women who lose a parent or child must also sleep with the ritual cleanser.
:eek: :eek:

[American]

That doesn't even qualify as Third World. Don't put that in any other category except near-animal.

[UnrepentantSinner]

This falls into that "boy is he lucky but that is sooooo wrong" category.

Of course if the "cleanser" has to bump uglies with a lot of 60 year olds, I'd have to rescind my lucky comment.

[The Fool]

Originally posted by American
That doesn't even qualify as Third World. Don't put that in any other category except near-animal.
Lol.....
Its just a cultural thing... Americans and Australians have many such rituals. I remember in highschool ....Girls had to sleep with me or they would not be allowed to graduate (well, thats the story I spread around).

[Reginald]

Somehow I dont think this would work in suburban London.

[The Don]

Eastbourne on the other hand.........

[crocodile deathroll]

IMHO it had its origins back on the cold war. Western Europe, America and their allies were the first world. Eastern Europe the USSR and other communist countries of the time were the second world and the underdeloped world in Africa and Latin America were the third world.
But I could be wrong, I will stand corrected if someone has a better explanation.

[BillyTK]

Originally posted by crocodile deathroll
IMHO it had its origins back on the cold war. Western Europe, America and their allies were the first world. Eastern Europe the USSR and other communist countries of the time were the second world and the underdeloped world in Africa and Latin America were the third world.
But I could be wrong, I will stand corrected if someone has a better explanation.

Pretty much spot on, except that "third world" was intended to mean unaligned with the first or second world, rather than under-developed. The term is thought to originate with the non-aligned "the third estate" from the French revolution.

As for the "cleanser", definitely icky, but not exactly unique; see sutee (http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/hindu/sati.htm), for instance. Strange that women who lose husbands need to be "purified", but not men who lose wifes...

[a_unique_person]

Hail to the high and mighty, you are without guilt, and are therefore permitted to cast the first stone.

[shemp]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Hail to the high and mighty, you are without guilt, and are therefore permitted to cast the first stone.

Listen you, I demoted you to altar boy awhile back! I'll have no paraphrasing of scripture from you! Now get back there and mop the priests' washroom!

[Mike B.]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Hail to the high and mighty, you are without guilt, and are therefore permitted to cast the first stone.

Ummm...
Remember that when you are throwing your daily stones at Israel.

[RandFan]

Originally posted by crocodile deathroll
IMHO it had its origins back on the cold war. Western Europe, America and their allies were the first world. Eastern Europe the USSR and other communist countries of the time were the second world and the underdeloped world in Africa and Latin America were the third world.
But I could be wrong, I will stand corrected if someone has a better explanation. "The term 'Third World" comes from a Frecnh theorist, Alfred Sauvy who wanted to compare the poor nations of the world to the French third estate (made up of poor peasants) before the French Revolution of 1789. What is called the "third world" encompasses most of humanity. It is constitutued by many diverse and varied countries. But there are some underlying characteristics that set them apart."

Edited to fix Alfred Sauvy's name. I think it is right now.

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by Mike B.


Ummm...
Remember that when you are throwing your daily stones at Israel.

I cast them at people who murder without consideration of the consequences, who's own citizens don't condone their actions. The majority of Israelis don't want the West Bank.

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by shemp


Listen you, I demoted you to altar boy awhile back! I'll have no paraphrasing of scripture from you! Now get back there and mop the priests' washroom!

There's still two bottles of altar wine left.

[RandFan]

But then again...

"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that the term "Third World" was initially coined in 1955 by those emerging from the "old" world order: "the initial attempt in the Bandung Conference (1955) to establish a third way -- neither with the Eastern nor within the Western bloc -- in the world system, in response to the seemingly new world order established after the Second World War, was not accompanied by a commensurate intellectual effort. The only idioms deployed for the nurturing of this nascent Third World in the cultural field belonged then to positions emerging from resistance within the supposedly 'old' world order -- anti-imperialism, and/or nationalism" (270).

KumKum Sangari argues that the term "Third World" not only designates specific geographical areas, but imaginary spaces. According to Sangari, "Third World" is "a term that both signifies and blurs the functioning of an economic, political, and imaginary geography able to unite vast and vastly differentiated areas of the world into a single 'underdeveloped' terrain" (217). Sangari is critical of the way "Third World" is used by the West to indiscriminately lump together vastly different places. "

[RandFan]

Sorry but I thought I knew this one.

"The economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America."

[WildCat]

Originally posted by RandFan
"The term 'Third World" comes from a Frecnh theorist, Alfred Savigny) who wanted to compare the poor nations of the world to the French third estate (made up of poor peasants) before the French Revolution of 1789. What is called the "third world" encompasses most of humanity. It is constitutued by many diverse and varied countries. But there are some underlying characteristics that set them apart."
Well, this explains why I've never heard of a "Second World". I should have titled this thread differently.
Originally posted by BillyTK
As for the "cleanser", definitely icky, but not exactly unique; see sutee, for instance. Strange that women who lose husbands need to be "purified", but not men who lose wifes...
That practice in India is almost unheard of today, what struck me about the cleanser article was that there are hundreds of thousands of them around today. I can't believe I had never heard of this before, or that it is only now getting the attention of those struggling to prevent more cases of AIDS in Africa.

[crocodile deathroll]

Originally posted by RandFan
"The term 'Third World" comes from a Frecnh theorist, Alfred Sauvy who wanted to compare the poor nations of the world to the French third estate (made up of poor peasants) before the French Revolution of 1789. What is called the "third world" encompasses most of humanity. It is constitutued by many diverse and varied countries. But there are some underlying characteristics that set them apart."

Edited to fix Alfred Sauvy's name. I think it is right now.

Yes I now stand corrected on its origins even though to more contemporary definition in the cold war era was different. The term third world may soon be coming a little archaic or the "second" world may have to reinvent itself in millitant Islam rather than Communism.

[Dancing David]

No stranger than some of the stuff in the Bible,
remeber you new husband that first off Yahweh gets your firts born 'that which is first out of the matrix shall be mine' , a practise that was later modified by abraham,
and when your wife has her meses she must retire to her hut, just as she must after childbirth.

Sounds like some firtility thing to me, and who know what they require of a man whose wife dies.

[American]

"Nonononono... Class, we have to RESPECT their culture..... Now let's all sing Lesbian Seagul. A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, four!"