Stephen A. Marglin, “Towards the Decolonization of the Mind”, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, eds. Frederique Apffel Marglin & Stephen A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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Notes

• 1-2 – “Our criticisms are directed not at particular failures, which might be explained away as poor implementation of basically sound ideas, but at the theories which have undergirded and legitimized practice. But what is meant by development and modernization? Some might distinguish the two concepts, seeing development as a set of end states, and modernization as a means of reaching these end states. Development may then be defined in a variety of ways. At one extreme, development may be simply an extension of the idea of growth, taking into account growth in the capacity to generate consumption goods and progress towards a more equal distribution along with growth in consumption. Or development may be defined in terms of the fulfilment of basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. Alternatively, development may be defined in terms of the levels of individual functionings and capabilities.”
• 2 – “Of course, even with the focus on process there still remains a diversity of views about what development and modernization mean. However we probably shall not go far wrong if we place the following at the core: on the economic side, industrialization and urbanization, as well as the technological transformation of agriculture; on the political side, rationalization of authority and the growth of a rationalizing bureaucracy; on the social side, the weakening of the ascriptive ties and the rise of achievement as the basis for personal advancement; culturally, the ‘disenchantment’ of the world (to use Max Weber’s terminology), the growth of science and secularization based on increasing literacy and numeracy.”
• “This is for us the sticking point; to have economic growth, must we buy a whole package that changes the society, the polity, and the culture along with the economy?”
• 3 – “As in child development, so in the development of nations: since World War II, the West has provided the model by which to measure the progress of the rest of the world. Indeed, before the breakup of the European colonial empires in the aftermath of World War II, imperialism drew justification from the image of the colonized as ‘children’.”
• “The attractions of the Western model need no elaboration: the elevated levels of gross national product that have been achieved in the West permit broad masses of the population to enjoy levels of physical comfort to which only elites aspire in most of the world. But the Western model remains less than compelling. Environmental destruction, meaningless work, spiritual desolation, neglect of the aged — these are some of the characteristics of the Western model that make it a dubious example for the rest of the world to follow.”

 

• “. . . Tariq Banuri suggests that the intellectual dominance of the Western model has derived not from its inherent and unequivocal superiority, but rather from the political dominance of those who believe in its superiority, and who have been able to devote attention and resources to legitimizing modernization-as-Westernization. This legitimization has succeeded so well that social progress has come to be defined in terms of the modernization project; the other side of the coin has been the foreclosure of alternative paths of development more congenial to indigenous cultural tradition.”

 

• “Although the external critics [to modernization] have always existed, they have gained abroader hearing in recent years with the faltering of growth in the Third World, the emergence of social and economic problems within the West itself, and the global problems of the environment, ethnic violence, debt, and other growth-related concerns.”
• [SECTION: DEVELOPMENT AND MODERNIZATION AS EXPANSION OF CHOICE: A CRITIQUE]
• 3-4 – “Even if we define development and modernization as processes, should we accept without question the assumption that these processes — industrialization, technical transformation of agriculture, political rationalization, meritocracy, secularization, and the spread of a scientific outlook — are simply means towards other ends? Would it not make as much or more sense to focus on the expansion of choice and to see these processes as among new possibilities opened up as choices expand? From this vantage point, we would judge modernization and development as outcomes of, rather than as preconditions for, growth. The case would be that development and modernization reflect an expansion of possibilities.”
• 4-5 – “However, under both criteria well-being may be said to improve if people opt for the new alternative. Either way, a sufficient condition for welfare improvement is that people vote with their feet or their pocketbooks or their ballots for the modern over the traditional. Under the intrinsic criterion, the choice of new alternatives is evidence that the array [of choices] has indeed expanded, and, under the instrumental criterion, choice of the modern reveals that people rank the modern more highly than the traditional.// In both cases, however, it must be assumed that growth actually does expand choice in all relevant dimensions. For, on the one (intrinsic) hand, the possibility of the modern is not necessarily an enlargement of the domain of choice if the possibility of the traditional is removed at the same time. On the other (instrumental) hand, ‘revealed preference’ [having more than one choice, the choice of one over the other[s]] arguments fail if the new choice set does not include the old state. Now in the view that emerges from this book, a major problem is precisely that historically growth has expanded choice on in some dimensions while constricting choice in others. And if growth subtracts choices as well as adds them, we are in a position to argue that growth expands possibilities only if we are able to assume that an individual could reverse the process at will, and in effect could choose between two choice sets, the modern and the traditional. We could then defend growth-as-the-expansion-of-possibilities by arguing that the individual can choose between these two sets, which become the elements of a single meta choice set.// The problem with this characterization is that the development process is irreversible. Whether it proceeds in small steps or in one fell swoop, the result is generally the same: you can’t go home again. Irreversibility is not logically fatal to the argument; it would not matter that the process is irreversible if individuals were endowed with perfect foresight. However, the inability to foresee all the consequences of the first steps down a path makes irreversibility crucial. Not only can’t you go home again, but you can’t figure out whether or not you want to until it’s too late to change your mind.”
• 5 – “An example may help. Development has generally meant an increasing focus on the commodities one consumes as the source of the meaning of one’s life. Thus large numbers of people in the West are able to choose between Buicks and Hondons, but few can choose meaningful work. Lacking control over the work process and its product, most of us can endow our work with no more meaning that the pay-cheque at the end of the week. Even fewer of us would lay claim to transcendent social meaning in our work. By contrast, the humblest worker in Western society might once have found deep meaning as a participant, say, in the construction of a cathedral, as many people in non-Western societies regularly find transcendent meaning even in day-to-day activities.”
• 6 – “This is not to be read, I hasten to add, as a defence of slavery or serfdom, but as an illustration of the problematic nature of expansion of choice as a criterion for evaluating social change. The example also highlights the difference between the intrinsic and instrumental defences of freedom. An intrinsic defence of freedom might argue that emancipation constitutes an improvement whether or not the peasant is materially better off: freedom, it may be suggested, is more in keeping with the individual’s human essence, even if it makes him or her more vulnerable. This is not an argument likely to appeal to the instrumentalist.// However, even when expansion of choice is interpreted as intrinsically desirable, it is not clear whether political emancipation enlarges freedom. In the absence of a ‘social safety net’, freedom of contract may be the freedom to starve in situations where the wage labourer is solely dependent on his earning power for access to goods; and if with Sen we give weight to the freedom to live a long and healthy life as well as to freedom of contract, we may question whether the politically emancipated but economically dependant peasant is freer that [sic] his politically subservient but economically more secure brother.// As we have seen, the key problem from both the instrumental and intrinsic viewpoints, is that choice sets shrink in some dimensions even while they expand in others. There are various reasons why this shrinkage takes place, and economics has given labels to some of them, no doubt in the view that to name a devil is to exorcise it. A major problem is what economists call externalities. The emission of sulphur compounds as byproducts of electricity generation is in the process of destroying forests, lakes, and rivers in much of the temperate world. Acid rain diminishes the choice sets of all of us even as the availability of electric energy expands them.”
• 6-7 – “Another reason why choice sets contract is that many activities are indivisible and require a minimum scale to be feasible. The substitution of mass-produced articles for local craft products is conventionally seen as an enlargement of choice. And for many consumers this is exactly right: plastic buckets win out over clay pots in the market place because they are cheaper and more durable. But if the local market for pots shrinks to the point that it is no longer feasible for village artisans to carry on, not only are the potters adversely affected — their choice sets are almost certain to contract — but those villagers who might have continued to patronize the local producers also find their choice sets diminished.// In a longer view, the whole community may be the poorer once the potters’ knowledge dies out. For this loss of knowledge is not likely reversible even if tastes, economics, or ecology reverses the ranking of clay and plastic. The force of this example, as the philosopher Bernard Williams has reminded us, is not limited to technical knowledge. Traditional ethical (and, one might add, aesthetic) knowledge may also be crowded out by the modern.”
• 7 – “In short, the argument that growth expands choice fails to take adequate account of the many reasons why growth eliminates some choices at the same time it adds others. Hence one cannot interpret the rise of modern institutions in the Third World either as evidence for the expansion of choice sets or as the revelation of preferences for the modern over the traditional.”
• [SECTION: DEVELOPMENT AS COERCION]
• 10 – [SECTION: FREEDOM AS A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION]
• 10-11 – “On the one hand, the instrumental justification of inferring the superiority of the modern over the traditional from the choices people make is marred by the assumption that the values which guide choices are invariant with respect to the choice sets. Even if choice sets expand in all relevant dimensions, it must be recognized that ‘preferences’, as these values are misleadingly called, are endogenous and change dramatically during the process of growth. If a modernized person opts for a modern configuration of goods and social practices, this casts little light on the status of the traditional person’s choices.// The intrinsic valuation of freedom of choice would appear to be more resilient to criticism, for a great deal of cross-cultural agreement surely exists on the undesirability of oppression. However, oppression is defined so variously that this agreement can hardly be equated to a common desire for freedom in the sense this term has in the West, where individual autonomy is privileged as the core meaning of freedom, and constraints on autonomy become the central meaning of oppression. This disposition to universalize a peculiarly Western interpretation does very little for cross cultural dialogue and even less for mutual understanding. Indeed, in large parts of the world, the Western notion of freedom sounds suspiciously like licence, and the difficulties of distinguishing between the freedom to do one’s own ‘thing’ and the freedom to become one’s own person do not make it any easier to dispel these doubts.”
• 11 – “W. Arthur Lewis, awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his studies of the growth process, once defended development in terms that suggested this identity not as a cultural construction, but as an obvious and self-evident truth. ‘The case for economic growth’, he wrote, ‘is that it gives man more control over his environment, and thereby increases his freedom.’ Outside the West, adaptation may commend itself as a better basis for freedom than control, a basis that might indeed spare the environment the despoliation that has been associated with development, arguably the consequence of the value attached to control in the Western model.”
• [SECTION: OUR SCIENCE, THEIR SUPERSTITION]
• [SECTION: CULTURAL DIVERSITY AS A GLOBAL ASSET]
• 15-6 – “It still might be claimed that nothing really valuable is lost in the process of modernization, apart from what might capture the attention of the folklorist or anthropologist. But the issue is hardly folklore. It is rather the terms of change. Traditional does not mean fixed and unchanging. Tradition is actively constructed an dynamic — except when it is artificially frozen in an archaic pattern. The issue i the preservation of a space for a relatively autonomous transformation of indigenous cultures, not the preservation of cultures as static systems.// This alters but does not answer the basic question. It may still fairly be asked what the positive case is for maintaining a space in which traditional cultures can change on their own terms rather than in terms of the WEstern model. The answer must depend on whose viewpoint we adopt. From the vantage-point of those whose cultures are being undermined by modernization on the Western model, the question may appear the height of arrogance. From inside, the need to defend one’s traditional culture may arouse anger and resentment when the same question is not put to Westerners. ‘Because they are ours’ may be all an insider feels required to say in defence of traditional ways.// From outside, the defence of traditional culture must be more self-conscious. A step in the right direction is the recognition that the present cultural dominance of the West is not the result of any intrinsic superiority in Western culture — unless one defines superior cultural fitness in terms of economic and political power, in which the West has surely excelled over the last five hundred years.// But even here the argument is hardly compelling. Are, say, rationalization and secularization necessary for material progress? If necessary under Western historical conditions, does a unique logic of growth compel Westernization as the price of growth? We know too little about the options that uncritical acceptance of the Western model has closed off to be able to answer these two questions with any degree of certainty.// The positive case for exploring these options is, or ought to be, obvious: the Western model of development, notwithstanding its considerable economic successes, has yet to produce an acceptable model for relationships between people or with nature. It is in our own self-interest as well as the global interest to promote cultural diversity, and a corresponding diversity of development models.// The argument is evidently one from uncertainty. Within the human species culture rather than instinct bears the primary load of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. We cannot today know what crises we shall face in the twenty-first century — from nuclear holocaust to ecological despoliation to social disintegration, none can be ruled out. Nor do we know that the West will find the cultural resources within its own tradition to cope with these or other, less dramatic, contingencies. As in ages past, we may find that we have much to learn from outside the West. Should this come to pass, it would be a cruel irony to find the world remade in our own image.”
• 17 – “The purpose of this volume is to explore the cultural dimension of the encounter between the modern, the Western, and the traditional. None of the authors of its several chapters would claim to be inside the traditional cultures we explore. Our claim is rather to a critical comparative perspective, which at the very least does not presuppose that Wester theory and practice represent a standard to which others should aspire. From this perspective, indigenous practices which appear as backward, irrational, superstitious, obscurantist, or just plain absurd – when viewed against Western norms — turn out much more positively. This is so even in terms of economistic criteria which give no weight whatsoever to the role these practices play in the maintenance of the integrity of the indigenous cultural fabric. It is all the more the case when a ‘holistic’ attitude is adopted.”
• 24 – [SECTION: CULTURES AS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS]
• “But what is culture? We are all accustomed to thinking of culture as a set of rules, largely tacit and unconscious, that structure our social interaction and at another level the values that underlie those rules and give them — and our actions — meaning. We have no reason to deny this conception of culture. But we have every reason to go beyond it.// In our view culture is not only rules and values, but ways of knowing. A culture is composed of many systems of knowledge. In Chapter 7, a knowledge system is defined in terms of four characteristics: epistemology, transmission, innovation, and power. Each system has its own theory of knowledge (or epistemology), its own rules for sharing knowledge, its own distinctive ways for changing the content of what counts as knowledge, and finally, its own political rules for governing relationships both among insiders to any particular knowledge system and between insiders and outsiders.”
• 24-25 – “All the chapters in this volume utilize the notion of knowledge systems, although all do not use it the same way. Banuri conceptualizes different knowledge systems in terms of the axis of personal versus impersonal relationships. In this view the distinguishing and pathological feature of Western knowledge systems is the subordination of the personal to the impersonal. The characterization in Chapter 7 includes the personal-impersonal dimension but only as one of many oppositions that characterize distinctive knowledge systems. In the West, the knowledge system of management, particularly ‘scientific management’, is characterized not only by impersonality, by its insistence on logical deduction from self-evident axioms, as the only basis for knowledge, but also by its emphasis on analysis, its claim that knowledge must be articulate in order to exist, its pretence to universality, its cerebral nature, its orientation to theory and empirical verification of theory, and its odd mixture of egalitarianism within the knowledge community and hierarchical superiority vis-a-vis outsiders. This system is called episteme in Chapter 7. By contrast, labour’s knowledge — called techne — is not only personal, it differs from episteme in other fundamental ways. The sources of knowledge of a techne range from intuition to authority; it defies the analytic decomposability of episteme; it is often implicity rather than articulate; recognizing the limits of context, it makes no claim to universality; it is tactile and emotional where episteme is cerebral; it is practical rather than theoretical, and geared to discovery rather than to verification; finally, techne reverse the power relations of episteme: it is hierarchical internally but pluralistic externally.// In my view, the accommodation of labour to capital owes much to the systematic subordination of techne to episteme in Western culture. The problem is that workers, sharing the dominant values of their culture, also share the devaluation of their own knowledge.”
• 25 – “The other chapters in this volume are principally concerned with the encounter between the dominant knowledge system of the West, episteme, with the traditional knowledge systems — the technai — of India. For Banuri, for Apffel Marglin, and for Nandy and Visvanathan, the central problem of the encounter is the imperialistic pretension to universality made on behalf of Western episteme and the total inability of its adherents to regard competing systems with anything but contempt, the inability indeed even to contemplate the existence of competing systems. Other systems of knowledge, particularly when they are embedded in myth and ritual, become superstition, the very antithesis of knowledge. The encounter is often fatal for indigenous systems because the supreme confidence of Westerners or Westernized elites in their knowledge is coupled to the superior means of political and economic force at their disposal.”
• “All of this puts resistance to new technologies in a different light. What appears as obscurantism and superstition to the outsider can be at the same time resistance to alien cultural values, explicit or tacit, to the resisters.”
• 26 – [SECTION: DECOUPLING TECHNOLOGIES FROM THEIR ENTAILMENTS]

 

• “It is precisely to preserve the option of organic growth for non-Western cultures that we are critical of the deference accorded to Western systems of knowledge, particularly to Western episteme, half a century after the process of dismantling the Western systems of empire got under way. WE see this deference as an important obstacle to the empowerment of non-Western peoples, and, indeed, of Western peoples as well. The next round of decolonization, the decolonization of the mind, will require a critical re-evaluation of both Western and non-Western cultures, and the encounter between them. This re-evaluation is already taking place. We intend this volume as a contribution.”

• “We have indicated that it is not our intention to call the growth of production and consumption of material goods into question; nor are we critical of the technologies that have brought material abundance to the West. Rather, our criticism is against the cultural and political entailments with which these technologies present themselves to the Third World. Once it is recognized that the threat to indigenous cultures and the real target of popular opposition mobilized in the light of this threat is the entailment rather than the technology itself, then a possibility opens up to separate, to decouple the technologies from the entailments.”

 

• • This definitely applies to the Mexican case, as in Roberto Gonzalez’s and Eugene Hunn’s noting that the Zapotec adopted certain of the Green Revolution technologies on their terms, without the “entailments,” even if they didn’t use these terms.