Go to TOES '97 Home Page
"Amilcar Cabral, the African freedom fighter, spoke of the 'permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people' as the very core of colonialism. Cabral also seemingly recognized the corollary of such an understanding: that the reaffirmation of cultural traditions could not but be the heart of all authentic anti-colonialism.
"There is another reason why a theory of culture has to be the core of any theory of oppression in our times: a stress on culture reinstates the categories used by the victims. A stress on cultural traditions is a defiance of the modern idea of expertise, an idea which demands that even resistance be uncontaminated by the 'inferior' cognition or 'unripe' revolutionary consciousness of the oppressed. A stress on culture is a repudiation of the post-Renaissance European faith that only that dissent is true which is rational, sane, scientific, adult and expert - according to Europe's concepts of rationality, sanity, science, adulthood and expertise.
"Technological transfers to the Third World which do not challenge the content or epistemology of modern science; critiques of the existing world order which take for granted the modern nation-state system; and the social criticisms which vend the belief that if you displaced the elites or classes which control the global political economy, you could live happily with the modern urban-industrial visions ever after, are simply not adequate.
"No theory of oppression can make sense unless it is cast in native terms or categories, that is, in terms and categories used by the victims of our times. As a corollary, no native theory can be taken seriously unless it includes a subtheory of oppression. The living traditions of the non-Western civilizations must include a theory of the West.
"I am speaking of the primacy that should be given to the political consciousness of those who have been forced to develop categories to understand their own suffering and who reject the pseudo-indigeneity of modern theories of oppression using - merely using - native idioms to conscientize, brainwash, educate, indoctrinate the oppressed or to museumize their cultures. The resistance to modern oppression has to involve, in our part of the world, some resistance to modernity and to important aspects of the modern theories of oppression. The resistance must deny in particular the connotative meanings of concepts such as development, growth, history, science and technology. These concepts have become new mystifications for new forms of violence and injustice.
"Cultural survival is increasingly a potent political slogan in India. Today, when the juggernaut of modernity threatens every non-Western Culture, it is a plea for minimum cultural plurality in an increasingly uniformized world. The resistance to modern oppression has to involve, in our part of the world, some resistance to modernity.
"The links between culture, critical consciousness and social change in India are not a unique experience, but a general response of societies which have been the victims of history and are now trying to rediscover their own visions of a desirable society, less burdened by the post-Enlightenment hope of 'one world' and by the post-colonial idea of cultural relativism.
"It is a culturally rooted, non-modern understanding of the civilizational encounters of our times for which I am trying to create a space in public discourse."
- Ashis Nandy
"Economic development is a scientific project. It represents the contemporary rituals of the laboratory state. As a project, it is composed of four theses ingrained in the logic of Western science, and in the concept of modernity as technocracy:
"Economic development as a technocratic project includes all four themes. In effect, they are tantamount to death warrants, and they should be regarded as genocidal in intent."
- Shiv Visvanathan
Organizers:
Speakers:
Go to TOES '90 Program
Go to TOES '97 Home Page