Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Fri 29 May 2009 05:47 PM PDT
Progress and Violence
by Shiv Visvanathan,
The technocratic and progress-oriented Nehruvian visions
dominated independent
The Marxist inspired Kerala Sahitya Shastra Parishad, a leftist
science movement in Kerala sought to take the scientific imagination and method
to the villages through mass quizzes and plays. It probably enacted more
versions of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo in Kerala than have been
performed anywhere else in the world.
Intermediate technologists such as Amulya Reddy at
A smaller set of groups centering around the Murugappa Chettiar Research Institute argued for opening up the black box called innovation, contending that science could not be democratized through public participation and knowledge diffusion; a review of epistemologies was needed. They felt that agriculture itself was an epistemology of soils, water, and seed, not just productivity, and they challenged the monoculture of the dominant scientific model. As someone said: “a society with 40,000 varieties of rice has 40,000 dreams of cookingâ€.
What the new
grassroots groups in
1) The
citizen is a scientist and an inventor and is a trustee of technology.
2) As a citizen, the Indian is responsible for the country’s 10,000 varieties of mango, because citizenship is trusteeship.
3) The democratic imagination needs to be reinvented, and the notion of rights is sadly inadequate when confronting diversity or obsolescence either as civilizational questions or as a problems of governance. Prevailing notions of rights cannot prevent assaults on diversity or disruptions of obsolescence; in fact, these notions cannot even provide a language for discussing such conflicts, let alone principles for governing them. The notion of governance needs new life affirming concepts to understand disasters, vulnerability, disappearance, and the new forms of enclosure created by globalization.
4) Liberal
democracy is an impoverished model for confronting science and technology. The
groups did borrow from it of choice, however,. For instance the Indian debates
on bio-technology are less hysterical than those in the West and more confident
about confronting bio-technology. But they take the issue of choice from the
individual consumer level into the collective arena. Choice and diversity
become creatively and critically related, bringing to mind a recent debate on genetically modified seeds between
Vandana Shiva and leftist activist Gail Omveldt, who argued that farmers should be
allowed the right to choose any
technology they thought fit. Shiva replied that choice is not only an
individual act but; collective choices determine the
availability of diversity and thus create availability of greater variety and
choice. Succumbing to multi-national agribusiness only creates monocultures,
which eliminate choice.
The recent impacts of globalization have caught these
movements a bit flatfooted, but the debates in
The views of
One must confront the
strange hubris of a high information society. America claims to be one, yet its
very creation myth is an act of genocide; its elimination of the indigenous
continuity, a program for museumizing or assimilating the other; and its
official future, one grand project of homogenization called globalization. Wes
Jackson put it succinctly when he observed that “
References:
Visvanathan, Shiv
Progress and Violence, from Living with the Genie ed. Alan Lightman,
Island Press
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