Grassroots Post-Modernism Is Daring in Its Thesis That the Real Postmodernists Are to Be Found Among the Zapotecos and Rajasthanis of the Majority World
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Grassroots Post-Modernism Remaking the soil of cultures Gustavo Esteva & Madhu Suri Prakash i 'Beyond its definite "No" to the Global Project, this book takes a stimulating glance at the renewed life of social majorities and offers good reasons for a common hope! GILBERT RIST 'Grassroots Post-modernism is daring in its thesis that the real postmodernists are to be found among the Zapotecos and Rajasthanis of the majority world. It is hard-hitting in its attacks against progressive commonplaces, like global responsibility, human rights, the autonomy of the individual, and democracy. And it is eye-opening in its illustrations of how ordinary people, amidst the rubble of the development epoch, stitch their cultural fabric together and unwittingly move beyond the impasse of modernity.' WOLFGANG SACHS 'Esteva and Prakash courageously and clear-sightedly take on some of the most entrenched of modern certainties such as the universality of human rights, the individual self, and global thinking. In their efforts to remove the lenses of modernity that education has bequeathed them, they dig deep into their own encounters with what they call the "social majorities" in their native Mexico and India. There they see not an enthralment with the seductions of modernity but evidence of a will to live in their own worlds according to their own lights. Esteva's and Prakash's reflections on the imperialism of the universality of human rights avoids the twin pitfalls of relativism and romanticism. Their alternative is demanding and novel, and deserves our most serious consideration. Grassroots Post-modernism is a much needed and most welcome counterpoint both to the nihilism of much post-modern thinking as well as to those who view the spread of the global market and of global thinking too triumphantly.' FREDERIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN 'Quite simply, a book which will transform how one sees the world.’ NORTH AND SOUTH ii iii ABOUT THE AUTHORS GUSTAVO ESTEVA is one of Latin America's most brilliant intellectuals and a leading critic of the development paradigm. Active in his own country, Mexico, and on the international scene, he has been by turns public servant, university professor and, for the past twenty years, grassroots activist working with Indian groups, peasants and the urban marginalized. He is the author of a dozen books. The many posts he has held include being President of the 5th World Congress on Rural Sociology, Interim Chairman of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Board, President of the Mexican Society for Planning, and Vice-President of the Inter-American Society for Planning. But the achievement for which he is now most well known is his role in helping found various Mexican, Latin American and international NG0s and networks. Convinced that only through autonomous, grassroots organizations can social change be genuinely oriented and imple- mented by the people themselves for their own benefit, he has been very active in building links between communities and grassroots groups. In recent years he has worked very closely with the Zapatista Army for National Liberation in Chiapas, whose exploits have captured the imagination of people everywhere. MADHU SURI PRAKASH has been Professor-in-Charge of Educational Theory and Practice at Pennsylvania State University since 1994. Educated originally at the University of Delhi, she did her doctorate in the philosophy of education at Syracuse University in 1981. She is the author of numerous chapters in books and articles in scholarly journals, including the American Journal of Education, Philosophy of Education and Teachers College Record. She has also been a guest editor for special issues of Holistic Education Review and Educational Theory. The book she is currently completing is provisionally entitled Gandhi's Educational Thought: Multiculturalism, Ecology and Postmodernism Re-examined from a Third World Perspective. iv GRASSROOTS POST-MODERNISM REMAKING THE SOIL OF CULTURES Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash ZED BOOKS London & New York v Grassroots Post-modernism was first published in 1998 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London NI 9JF, UK, and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Copyright © Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, 1998 Distributed in the USA exclusively by St Martin's Press, Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA The moral rights of the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Monotype Bembo by Lucy Morton, London SE12 Cover design by Andrew Corbett Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn All rights reserved A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for ISBN I 85649 545 0 Cased ISBN 1 85649 546 9 Limp vi CONTENTS ONE Grassroots Post-modernism: Beyond the 1 Individual Self, Human Rights and Development Grassroots Post-modernism: An Oxymoron? 1 Peoples beyond Modernity: Sagas of Resistance and Liberation 4 David and Goliath 6 Interlocutor and Audience 7 Beyond the Three Sacred Cows 9 Who are "The People"?11 Content and Structure of this Book 14 TW0 From Global to Local: Beyond Neoliberalism to the 19 International of Hope Global Thinking is Impossible 22 The Wisdom of Thinking Small 23 Downsizing to Human Scale 26 Escaping Parochialism 27 Clothing the Emperor 28 The Power of Thinking and Acting Locally 32 Non-provincial Localism: Forging Human Solidarities 33 Settling in a Pluriverse 36 Beyond the Nation-State 39 Beyond Global Neoliberalism: The International of Hope 42 THREE Beyond the Individual Self: Regenerating Ourselves 50 Dis-membering 5o Re-membering 55 Remaking the Soil of Cultures 63 Communal Memory: Remembering to Escape Dis-membering 67 Who am I? From Calling Card to Knots in Nets 76 Return and Re-membership: Regenerating Soil Cultures 80 From Tolerance to Hospitality 86 vii Beyond Waste: Composting, Remaking Communal Soil 94 Hospitality Abused: Demarcating Post-modern Limits 99 FOUR Human Rights: The Trojan Horse of Recolonization? 110 Human Rights Universalized: Liberation or Abuse? 110 Gandhi: Liberation without Modern States or Human Rights 114 From Beijing: Global Platforms and Universal Rights 117 Moral Progress or Aberrations? 119 Celebrating the Pluriverse 125 Torture and Violence: The Bottom Line 132 The Kitsch of Human Rights: The Last Moral Resort for Recolonization? 136 The Current Threat 138 Beyond the Violence of Human Rights 142 Towards New Intercultural Dialogues 143 FIVE People's Power: Radical Democracy for the 152 Autonomy of their Commons Democracy Today: Subversive or Dead? 152 The Rise and Fall of Democracy 154 Radical Democracy 158 Like the Shade of a Tree 187 SIX Epilogue: The Grassroots Post-modern Epic 192 No New Truths, Reopening Our Horizons 199 Regenerating Public Virtues 200 Bibliography 208 Index 217 8 ONE GRASSROOTS POST-MODERNISM: BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL SELF, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT An epic is unfolding at the grassroots. Pioneering social movements are groping for their liberation from the “Global project”1 being imposed upon them. Seeking to go beyond the premises and promises of modernity, people at the grassroots are reinventing or creating afresh intellectual and institutional frameworks without necessarily getting locked into power disputes. Ordinary men and women are learning from each other how to challenge the very nature and foundations of modern power, both its intellectual underpinnings and its apparatuses. Explicitly liberating themselves from the dominant ideologies, fully immersed in their local struggles, these movements and initiatives reveal the diverse content and scope of grassroots endeavours, resisting or escaping the clutches of the "Global Project." This book is an attempt at sketching the first rough outlines of the unfolding post-modern epic at the grassroots. GRASSROOTS POST-MODERNISM: AN OXYMORON? The fallen Soviet giant lies broken, scattered. The Berlin Wall no longer divides the capitalists from the socialists. The champions of the "Global Project seize the opportunity provided by the end of the Cold War to announce the creation of One World. Five billion present, and the 1o billion waiting around the corner of the new century can all live together in the "global village." Finally, every individual (man, woman and child) can begin to claim human rights - the moral discovery of the modern era. The modern era, however, is also ending. From their think tanks and ivory towers, deconstructing the castle of modern certainties, postmodern thinkers are slaying the modern dragons: science and technology; objectivity and 1 rationality; global subjugation by the One Culture - the "culture of progress" spread across the world through the white man's weapons of domination and subjugation. While classified under the single banner of "post-modernism," slayers of the modern hydra emerge from ideologically incommensurable academic camps of the modern academy. Feminist post-modernists speak in a voice alien to the cars of post-modern pragmatists. American postmodernists underscore their departures from European post-modernism. Post-modern poetry does not draw its inspiration from post-modern architecture. Post-modern professional philosophers do not attend the same conferences as the theorists of post-modern art. Yet, located within the same modern academy, these different ideological camps share an often unspoken consensus