Table Of ContentDecolonizing Knowledge
From Development to Dialogue
Edited by
FREDERIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN
and
STEPHEN A. MARGLIN
A study prepared for the World Institute for Development
Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU/WIDER)
CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD
DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE
UNU/WIDER
Studies in Development Economics embody the output of the
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CONTENTS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS vii
Introduction: Rationality and the World
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
PART I. DECOLONIZING DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE 41
Development for ‘Big Fish’ or ‘Small Fish’? A Study of
Contrasts in Tanzania’s Fishing Sector
Marja-Lisa Swantz and Aili Mari Tripp 43
The Economic Consequences of Pragmatism:
A Re-Interpretation of Keynesian Doctrine
Nancy E. Gutman 67
Two Phases of American Environmentalism:
A Critical History
Ramachandra Guha 110
Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production
to Regeneration
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin 142
PART I. DECOLONIZING THE ‘TRANSFER-OF-TECHNOLOGY’ MODEL 183
Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of
Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge
Stephen A. Marglin 185
Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of
the Green Revolution
Gustavo Esteva 249
Why Haldane Went to India: Modern Genetics in
Quest of Tradition
Francis Zimmermann 279
vi CONTENTS
Footnotes to Vavilov: An Essay on Gene Diversity
Shiv Visvanathan 306
10 The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western
Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in
Colonial India
Ashis Nandy 340
INDEX 389
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
FREDERIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Gustavo Esteva, Opcion Sociedad Civil, Oaxaca, Mexico
RAMACHANDRA GUHA, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi
Nancy E. GuTMan, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
STEPHEN A. MarGLin, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Asuis Nanpy, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
Margyjé-Lisa Swantz, WIDER, Helsinki
Att Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.
SHIV VISVANATHAN, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
FRANCIS ZIMMERMANN, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
Paris
Introduction: Rationality and the World
FREDERIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN
The fall of communism can be regarded as a sign that modern
thought—based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable,
and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized—has
come to a final crisis . . . It is a signal that the era of arrogant absolutist
reason is drawing to a close and that it is high time to draw conclusions
from that fact.
Vaclav Havel!
Vaclav Havel’s ‘arrogant absolutist reason’ has a lead role in the drama of
development, as it had in the communist experiment. The expertise in-
forming development projects earns its label precisely by being ‘based on
the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge
so obtained can be absolutely generalized’. The knowledge of the experts—
engineers, technicians, economists, anthropologists, and many others—can
be exported world-wide and applied in varying contexts because of this
premiss. Local knowledge, in contrast, is just that, local. Universality is the
privilege of this modern mode of thought. It is this privilege which has
enabled this mode of knowing to confidently override local ways of knowing
and doing, secure in its ability to deliver superior results. The First World
is ‘developed’ and the Third World is ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’. In
these phrases the telos of development stands revealed and the superior
results are there already, luring everyone ‘forward’. Simultaneously, this
logic transmutes ali alternative visions rooted in local knowledge as going
‘backwards’, a charge that acquires its clout wholly from a progress-
oriented notion of development.
At the end of the twentieth century the ideology of progress is badly
frayed. The downside of progress, from the latest revelations about US
radiation experiments on its citizens to the many grassroots movements
resisting development world-wide, along with the environmental disasters
this century has witnessed, has become visible to all. It is no longer just the
collapse of the former communist block that can predispose us to see reason
as arrogant and absolutist, but the daily reports in the press.
The romance with development gripping the governments of the so-
called Third World is undoubtedly rooted in the power that the modern
form of thought is able to deliver. Cartesian rationality has been the motor
2 INTRODUCTION: RATIONALITY AND THE WORLD
that has fuelled the Industrial Revolution as well as its spread world-wide.
The desirability of this form of thought seemed self-evident given the power
and the goods that it delivers. What seems to be emerging at the end of the
century is a realization that the price one pays for the goods industrializa-
tion and development bring is not only environmental destruction and
social fragmentation but the colonization of the mind. In other words the
undisputed validity, regardless of context, of this form of knowledge is
beginning to be questioned. What is at stake is the privilege that this form
of thought enjoys due to its claims to universality, not whether it is itself a
valuable addition to the repertoire of ways of knowing and doing.
It is not only animal and plant species that are becoming extinct at an
ever faster pace but human forms of life and thought. The latter can only be
justified by a belief in progress, in the replacement of ‘outmoded’ ways of
knowing and doing by more advanced ways of knowing and doing. The
downside of progress and of development is creating a mood congenial to
revisiting local forms of knowledge as well as to questioning the claims to
universality of modern thought.? What is happening in the world, whether
the First or the Third, looks more and more like loss: loss of environmental
integrity, loss of a diversity not only of plant and animal species but of
human ways of doing and knowing. What only yesterday looked outmoded,
today looks sustainable.
The claim to universality of this modern form of knowledge is challenged
in the essays gathered in this volume. Once the universality of Cartesian
rationality or more generally of the dominant modern form of knowledge is
questioned, progress begins to look less like improvement or advance and
more like colonization. Given the entrenchment of the developmental
enterprise in the ideology of progress, its kinship with colonization is
brought into focus by such an exercise.
A century and a half ago, Christianity was spoken of in Europe as a
rational religion and on that ground was confidently exported outside the
West for the people’s own improvement and/or salvation (see Detienne,
1981). We are perhaps approaching a time when more and more people are
perceiving the developmental enterprise as we now perceive the nineteenth-
century missionizing enterprise.
Like Vaclav Havel, I see a certain form of rationality to be at the heart of
the universalizing impetus of modern forms of thought. A brief perusal of
the emergence of this form of rationality in the West seems a fitting manner
of introducing the volume as a whole before turning to the individual
essays. My intent is not to offer an in-depth history of the emergence of
Cartesian rationality, a task historians are much better equipped to under-
take, but rather to highlight very briefly the cultural rootedness of this
particular form of cognition. This form of cognition will be contrasted with
other modes of cognition rooted in other cultural contexts. It is hoped that
by so doing one may begin to perceive this form of thought as only one
