Development failures, environmental degradation and social fragmentation can no longer be regarded as "side effects." 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. This work argues that the linear evolutionary paradigm of development emerging from the modern Western view of knowledge is a contemporary form of colonialism. The work proposes a pluralistic vision and a decolonization of knowledge: the replacement of one-way transfers of knowledge and technology by dialogue and mutual...

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...

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...

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...

Even in the twenty-first century, some two-thirds of the world's peoples 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 human beings in all their activities. In Subversive Spiritualities, 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...

Even in the twenty-first century, some two-thirds of the world's peoples 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 human beings in all their activities. In Subversive Spiritualities, 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...

This book details the remarkable potential of terra preta, the recently rediscovered sacred soil of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Amazon rainforest, to reverse some of the most the catastrophic damage that has been visited on our environment. The authors lay out a fascinating description of how utilizing the biochar embedded in this highly fertile, living soil offers a way to free ourselves from dependency on petrochemicals, restore the health of our soils, and remove carbon from our overheating atmosphere by fixing it back where it belongs--in the earth. They predict that biochar...