Book
Decolonizing Knowledge

From Development to Dialogue

Development failures, environmental degradation and social fragmentation can no longer be regarded as side effects of `externalities'. They are the toxic consequences of pretensions that the modern Western view of knowledge is a universal neutral view, applicable to all people at all times. The very word `development' and its cognates `underdevelopment' and `developing' confidently mark the `first' world's as the future of the `third'. This book argues that the linear evolutionary paradigm of development that comes out of modern Western view of knowledge is a contemporary form of colonialism. The authors - covering topics as diverse as the theory of knowledge underlying the work of John Maynard Keynes, what the renowned British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was looking for when he migrated to India, the knowledge of Mexican and Indian peasants - propose a pluralistic vision and decolonization of knowledge: the replacement of one-way transfers of knowledge and technology by dialogue and mutual learning.

Table of contents
  1. 1. Introduction: Rationality and the World
    Frederique Apffel-Marglin
  2. Part I: Decolonizing Development Knowledge
    2. Development for ’Big Fish’ and ’Small Fish’?: A Study of Contrasts in Tanzania’s Fishing Sector
    Marja-Liisa Swantz, Aili Mari Tripp
  3. Part I: Decolonizing Development Knowledge
    3. The Economic Consequences of Pragmatism: A Re-interpretation of Keynesian Doctrine
    Nancy E. Gutman
  4. Part I: Decolonizing Development Knowledge
    4. Two Phases of American Environmentalism: A Critical History
    Ramachandra Guha
  5. Part I: Decolonizing Development Knowledge
    5. Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production to Regeneration
    Frederique Apffel-Marglin
  6. Part II: Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model
    6. Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge
    Stephen A. Marglin
  7. Part II: Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model
    7. Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution
    Gustavo Esteva
  8. Part II: Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model
    8. Why Haldane Went to India: Modern Genetics in Quest of Tradition
    Francis Zimmermann
  9. Part II: Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model
    9. Footnotes to Vavilov: An Essay on Gene Diversity
    Shiv Visvanathan
  10. Part II: Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model
    10. The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India
    Ashis Nandy
Show all
Endorsements

'Both Stephen Marglin and Gustavo Esteva provide interesting insights on the introduction of the Green Revolution in Mexico ... the book is useful in calling for dialogue and mutual learning, lest the arrogance of Western rationality perpetuate the colonisation of minds.' - Development Policy Review

'This volume takes a strong step in what strikes me as the right direction.' - Ann Grodzins Gold. Religious Studies Review. April 1998.