PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

79exotic; they are idealized; they are naturalized; and taken out of all but a single historicalnarrative; and they are sexualized.” 154The people of the third world in Peace Corpsphotographs reinscribe this sort of narrative.Anxiety about threats of chaos or decay does not exist in the photographs; ratherwe view an ideal world, free of suffering. This again, reinforces the narrative thatvolunteers are not entering service to solve problems because none exist. In thesephotographs, hard work and responsibility are downplayed, while the world’s peoplesbecome aesthetic objects to appreciate. 155The “other” is beautifully dressed, quietlyenjoying life, and smiling at the camera. These snapshots of reality capture an idealizedlife which may or may not exist.Finally, we can recognize images as a means of public identity. We know whowe are in contrast to those who we are not. Hariman and Lucaites articulate this point bystating that “the public sphere depends on visual rhetorics to maintain not only its play ofdeliberative ‘voices,’ but also its more fundamental constitution of public identity.” 156They argue that the public is a body of strangers grouped discursively through imagesand are addressed through the public image. Forces like the Peace Corps provide peoplewith a collective representation of a culture. The organization is responsible for offeringthe public an idealized face of the non-Western world. In photographs of the 1960s wesaw images of volunteers working along-side host country nationals. For example, inAaron J. Erickson’s pictorial history of the Peace Corps in the 1960s, images of manuallabor abounded. Nearly all of the images showed volunteers hard at work, participatingin hands-on training or talking with native peoples. In the over 200 pages ofphotographs, we never see volunteers sitting around, host country nationals at rest, or