PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

78experienced, and explored.” 152Because culture is the means by which we understand theworld around us, the visual images need to be analyzed in order to understandcontemporary America’s view of developing countries.Lutz and Collins argue that in the field of humanities a common question arisesabout how people represent the various kinds of human differences, such as racial, ethnic,gender and class distinctions. This question is a means to understand how theserepresentations help to create and reproduce social hierarchy. They write:At the least, those hierarchies have created small humiliations and rejections, andhave lessened opportunities. At the worst, they have abetted wars ofextermination, lynchings, and rape. Representations may be deployed for oragainst such horrors or indifferently in relation to them, but they are neverirrelevant, never unconnected to the world of actual social relations. Images ofthe non-Western world draw on and articulate ideas and thus, like all conceptualwork, become cultural and historical, mutable and political in intent and/oreffect. 153Photographic images, like those used by National Geographic or the Peace Corps, havesignificant potential for altering our unrealistic views of indigenous peoples.The organization has a tendency to idealize the people of developing nations, withan accompanying tendency to ignore poverty and violence. The photographs show thesepeople as cut off from the flow of world events, living peacefully in traditional ways.Our need to idealize the “other” goes hand in hand with our shifted image of publicservice. Public service consisted of sacrifice and hardship in the past, but today servicelooks more like a vacation. The “other” in popular media is quite often “portrayed as