Shiva, Vandana, “Monocultures of the Mind,” in The Vandana Shiva Reader (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015), 71-112.
Notes
- 71 – SECTION: THE ‘DISAPPEARED’ KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
- “The desaparecidos, or the disappeared dissidents, share the fate of local knowledge systems throughout the world, which have been conquered through the politics of disappearance, not the politics of debate and dialogue.”
- “The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant Western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is vry easy in the distant gaze of the globalizing dominant system. The Western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. HOwever, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class, and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense. It is merely the globalized version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonizing culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonizing.”
- “The knowledge and power nexus is inherent in the dominant system because, as a conceptual framework, it is associated with a set of values based on power that emerged with the rise of commercial capitalism. It generates inequalities and domination by the way such knowledge is generated and structured, the way it is legitimized and alternatives are delegitimized, and by the way in which such knowledge transforms nature and society. Power is also built into the perspective that views the dominant system not as a globalized local tradition but as a universal tradition, inherently superior to local systems. However, the dominant system is also the product of a particular culture.”
- 72 – “The universal/local dichotomy is misplaced when applied to the Western and indigenous traditions of knowledge, because the Western is a local tradition that has been spread worldwide through intellectual colonization. The universal would spread in openness. The globalizing local spreads by violence and misrepresentation. The first level of violence unleashed on local systems of knowledge is to not see them as knowledge. This invisibility is the first reason why local systems collapse without trial and test when confronted with the knowledge of the dominant West. The distance itself removes local systems from perception. When local knowledge does appear in the field of the globalizing vision, it is made to disappear by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it the adjectives ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific.’ Correspondingly, the Western system is assumed to be uniquely ‘scientific’ and universal. The designation ‘scientific’ for the modern systems and ‘unscientific’ for the traditional knowledge systems has, however, less to do with knowledge and more to do with power. The models of modern science that have encouraged these perceptions were derived less from familiarity with actual scientific practice and more from idealized versions that gave science a special epistemological status. Positivism, verificationism, falsificationism were all based on the assumption that unlike traditional, local beliefs of the world, which are socially constructed, modern scientific knowledge was thought to be determined without social mediation. Scientists, in accordance with an abstract scientific method, were viewed as putting forward statements corresponding to the realities of a directly observable world. The theoretical concepts in their discourse were in principle seen as reducible to directly verifiable observational claims. New trends in the philosophy and sociology of science challenged the positivist assumptions but did not challenge the assumed superiority of Western systems.”
- 73-4 – “Over and above rendering local knowledge invisible by declaring it nonexistent or illegitimate, the dominant system also makes alternatives disappear by erasing and destroying the reality that they attempt to represent. The fragmented linearity of the dominant knowledge disrupts the integrations between systems. Local knowledge slips through the cracks of fragmentation. It is eclipsed along with the world to which it relates. Dominant scientific knowledge thus breeds a monoculture of the mind by making space for local alternatives disappear, very much like monocultures of introduced plant varieties lead to the displacement and destruction of local diversity. Dominant knowledge also destroys the very conditions for alternatives to exist, very much like the introduction of monocultures destroy the very conditions for diverse species to exist.”
- 74 – “As metaphor, the monoculture of the mind is best illustrated in the knowledge and practice of forestry and agriculture. ‘Scientific’ forestry and ‘scientific’ agriculture split plants into artificially separate, non-overlapping domains on the basis of the separate commodity markets to which they supply raw materials and resources. In local knowledge systems, the plant world is not artificially separated between a forest supplying commercial wood and agricultural land supplying food commodities.”
- 79 – “When modeled on the factory and used as a a timber mine, the tropical forest becomes a nonrenewable resource. Tropical peoples also become dispensable. In place of cultural and biological pluralism, the factory produces nonsustainable monocultures in nature and society. There is no place for the small, no value for the insignificant. Organic diversity gives way to fragmented atomism and uniformity. The diversity must be weeded out, and the uniform monocultures — of plants and people — must now be externally managed because they are no longer self-regulated and self-governed.”
- “Those that do not fit into the uniformity must be declared unfit. Symbiosis must give way to competition, domination, and dispensability. There is no survival possible for the forest or its people when they become feedstock for industry. The survival of the tropical forests depends on the survival of human societies modeled on the principles of the forest. These lessons for survival do not come from texts of ‘scientific forestry.’ They lie hidden in the lives and beliefs of the forest peoples of the world.”
