Frédérique Apffel-Marglin – författare

This collection presents a new perspective on the role of culture in shaping the ambivalent attitude towards economic development of many marginalized people. The strength of this volume lies in how the essays provide examples from both within India and without, to illuminate old Dalit/Savarna and also Hindu/Muslim dynamics specific to India. The volume clearly defines how asymmetrical complementary relationships between Dalits and Savarnas are being replaced by short-term contractual labour relations that no longer involve long-term intergenerational reciprocal obligations. The essays draw attention to the non-modern, non-Western agents that have rendered invisible the dynamics of cyclicity, bio-cultural regeneration, and social and ecological reproduction (SER). What the volume achieves is an understanding of the specifics of Western modernism and modernism in India. Also, through specific examples in India, the US, and elsewhere, it clarifies some of the profound differences between modern, capitalist processes of marginalization as well as non-modern ones.

This book addresses the role of knowledge in economic development and in resistance to development. It questions the conventional view that development is the application of superior knowledge to the problems of poor countries, and that resistance to development comes out of ignorance and superstition. It argues instead that the basis of resistance is the fear that the material benefits of Western technologies can be enjoyed only at the price of giving up indigenous ways of knowing and valuing the world, an idea fostered as much by present-day elites, who have internalized colonial elites who ruled before them. A prerequisite to decoupling Western technologies from these political entailments is to understand the conflict between different ways of knowing and valuing the world.This book differs from previous critiques of development because it addresses neither the strategy nor the tactics of development, but the very conception itself. Its focus is on knowledge and power in the development process. The book argues that `modern' knowledge wins out in the conflict with `traditional' knowledge not because of its superior cognitive power, but because of its prestige, associated both with the economic and political ascendancy of the West over the past 500 years and with the cultural history of the West itself.

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.

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples--the world's social majority--quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature--she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples--the world's social majority--quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature--she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

This landmark collection of essays by Third World activists highlights two major world changes which, they argue, have been neglected by Freire and his many followers: the Third World grass-roots cultural resistance to economic globalization, and the ecological crisis.One source of the activist-authors' criticisms of Freire's pedagogy is rooted in their attempts to combine consciousness raising with literacy programs in such diverse cultural settings as Bolivia, Peru, India, Southern Mexico, and Cambodia, where they discovered that Freire's pedagogy is based on western assumptions that undermine indigenous knowledge systems. Equally important, these authors make the case in various ways that a major limitation with Freire's ideas, and which is reproduced in the writings of his followers, is that he did not recognize the cultural implications of the world's ecological crisis.Several essays in the collection focus directly on how the cultural assumptions Freire took for granted were also the assumptions that gave conceptual and moral legitimacy to the Industrial Revolution--and continue to be the basis of the thinking behind economic globalization. The essays also explain why cultural diversity is essential to the preservation of biological diversity, and how intergenerational knowledge and patterns of mutual aid within different cultures provide alternatives to a consumer dependent lifestyle.In his Afterword, C.A. Bowers addresses the need to adopt a more ecological way of thinking--one that recognizes the many ways the individual is nested in the interdependent networks of culture and how diverse cultures are nested in natural systems. It also stresses that one of the tasks of educators is to help students recognize the patterns and relationships of everyday life, and to assess them in terms of their contribution to less consumer dependent relationships and activities. As the essays in this volume affirm, this involves facilitating students' awareness of differences between cultures, the impact of consumerism on ecosystems, and the connections between hyper-consumerism and environmental racism and the colonizing relationship of the South by the North. Re-Thinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis is a major contribution to this critical endeavor.

This landmark collection of essays by Third World activists highlights two major world changes which, they argue, have been neglected by Freire and his many followers: the Third World grass-roots cultural resistance to economic globalization, and the ecological crisis.One source of the activist-authors' criticisms of Freire's pedagogy is rooted in their attempts to combine consciousness raising with literacy programs in such diverse cultural settings as Bolivia, Peru, India, Southern Mexico, and Cambodia, where they discovered that Freire's pedagogy is based on western assumptions that undermine indigenous knowledge systems. Equally important, these authors make the case in various ways that a major limitation with Freire's ideas, and which is reproduced in the writings of his followers, is that he did not recognize the cultural implications of the world's ecological crisis.Several essays in the collection focus directly on how the cultural assumptions Freire took for granted were also the assumptions that gave conceptual and moral legitimacy to the Industrial Revolution--and continue to be the basis of the thinking behind economic globalization. The essays also explain why cultural diversity is essential to the preservation of biological diversity, and how intergenerational knowledge and patterns of mutual aid within different cultures provide alternatives to a consumer dependent lifestyle.In his Afterword, C.A. Bowers addresses the need to adopt a more ecological way of thinking--one that recognizes the many ways the individual is nested in the interdependent networks of culture and how diverse cultures are nested in natural systems. It also stresses that one of the tasks of educators is to help students recognize the patterns and relationships of everyday life, and to assess them in terms of their contribution to less consumer dependent relationships and activities. As the essays in this volume affirm, this involves facilitating students' awareness of differences between cultures, the impact of consumerism on ecosystems, and the connections between hyper-consumerism and environmental racism and the colonizing relationship of the South by the North. Re-Thinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis is a major contribution to this critical endeavor.

This volume assembles for the first time in English a selection of the work which a group of Peruvian development specialists of peasant background have initiated since 1987. Their starting point is that development itself is the problem because its epistemologies and practices are alien to the indigenous peasantry.Instead, they believe that the native cultural and agricultural systems in the Andes are very much alive, environmentally respectful, and embody a viable, even if totally different, mode of being and understanding from the industrial West. The contributors to this volume, all of them Peruvians, present different facets of this Andean worldview which, while able to absorb elements from other cultures, exists on its own terms and within its own ongoing cosmology.