Dominating knowledge : development, culture, and resistance

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Bibliographic Information

Dominating knowledge : development, culture, and resistance

edited by Frédérique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin

Clarendon Press , Oxford University, c1990

Other Title

Dominating knowledge : from development to dialogue

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

Table of Contents

  • Stephen A. Marglin: Towards decolonization of the mind
  • Tariq Banuri: Development and the politics of knowledge: A critical interpretation of the social role of modernization
  • Tariq Banuri: Modernization and its discontents: A cultural perspective on the theories of development
  • Frederique Apffel Marglin: Smallpox in two systems of knowledge
  • Ashis Nandy, & Shiv Visvanathan: Modern medicine and its non-modern critics: A study in discourse
  • Arjun Appadurai: Technology and the reproduction of values in rural Western India
  • Stephen A. Marglin: Losing touch: The cultural conditions of worker accommodation and resistance

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