I'm so excited Vandana Shiva is coming to New Zealand for the food conference in February. I absolutely love her work. One of my supervisors asked me to write a bit about Shiva as I'm looking at using her writing as theory in my thesis. This is what I wrote:
Vandana Shiva is both a geneticist and an
environmental activist and thinker. Her work is particularly focussed on
threats to biodiversity and the impacts of biotechnology (Shiva 2005, 2012). In Earth
Democracy (2005) Shiva is outspoken against corporate globalisation which destroys
grassroots democracy through “new enclosures of the commons” which are based on
violence:
Instead of a culture of abundance,
profit-driven profit driven globalization creates cultures of exclusion,
dispossession and scarcity. In fact, globalization’s of all beings and
resources into commodities robs diverse species and people of their rightful
share of ecological, cultural and political space. The “ownership” of the rich
is based on the “dispossession” of the poor. It is the common public resources
of the poor which are privatised, and the poor who are disowned economically,
politically and culturally (2005, 2).
Shiva is particularly
critical of the patenting of genetics and the concept of ‘ownership’ of life
and the rhetoric of ‘ownership society’ which she describes as ‘anti-life’. She
argues that from this perspective living things have no intrinsic value and no
integrity. She argues that the commons
are the “highest expressions of economic democracy” (2005, 3). She also
describes the movement against corporate globalisation as one toward ‘Earth
Democracy’ the fate of which concerns the wellbeing of all living beings on
earth. She describes an intentional shift from “vicious cycles of violence in
which suicidal cultures, suicidal economies and the politics of suicide feed on
each other to virtuous cycles of creative non-violence in which living cultures
nourish living democracies and living economies (sharing resources equitably to
create meaningful livelihoods)” (2005, 5).
Earth Democracy, then
is not just a concept but incorporates diverse practice reclaiming commons,
resources, livelihoods, freedoms, dignity, identity and peace – rooted locally
but also interconnected with the world and universe (2005, 5). Shiva
argues that ecological security and ecological identities are our most basic
and fundamental: “We are the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we
breathe. And reclaiming democratic control over our food and water and our ecological
survival is the necessary project for our freedom (2005, 5). Earth Democracy
enables us to create living democracies of participation in decisions regarding
our food, water and air, systems which are based on intrinsic worth of all
aspects of the environment, including people.
It includes the “ancient wisdom and tradition of non-severability and
interconnectedness” along with “the values, worldviews and actions of diverse
movements working for peace, justice and sustainability” (2005, 7).
In Monocultures of the mind (2012), Shiva
discusses the importance of local knowledge systems which are disappearing and
being colonised by dominant Western knowledge and the globalising system. She
argues that although Western knowledge
has been constructed as universal, it is actually just a globalised version of
a local parochial system based in a particular culture, gender and class (2012,
9). Therefore, the common dichotomy between universal and local is misplaced
when applied to Western and indigenous traditions because what is perceived as
‘universal’ is actually a local system “which has spread world wide through
intellectual colonisation” (Shiva 2012, 10). Shiva argues that a genuine
universal knowledge system would spread through openness, whereas the globalising
system spreads through violence and misrepresentation, the first level of which
is “not to see them (local/indigenous) as knowledge,” but as ‘primitive’ and
unscientific (2012, 10). This undermines
local epistemologies, making them invisible and vulnerable to collapse against
the force of the uniquely ‘scientific’ and universal Western. Shiva argues this is actually less connected
with knowledge than it is with power:
The models of modern science which have
encouraged these perceptions were derived less from familiarity with actual
scientific practice and more from familiarity with idealised versions which
gave science a special epistemological status. Positivism, verificationism,
falsificationism were all based on the assumption that unlike traditional,
local beliefs of the world, which are socially constructed, modern scientific
knowledge was thought to be determined without social mediation. (2012, 11)
This notion that
Western science is somehow objective and devoid of social influence, is something
Shiva is highly critical of, along with the conception that the broader Western
knowledge paradigm is superior. That Western knowledge is fashioned as
scientific “assigns a kind of sacredness or social immunity to the Western
system,” which is above the indigenous traditions that it excludes.
Just as intensive corporate farming
practices create unsustainable biological monocultures which erode diversity,
the dominant scientific paradigm “breeds a monoculture of the mind” (2012, 12) It
makes local alternative knowledge systems disappear by destroying the possible
conditions required for alternatives to exist.
It does this through its ‘superior’ exclusivity and through a violent
separation which destroys diverse local meaning. Shiva states that in local knowledge systems
there is no artificially imposed separation between ‘resources’: “the forest
and the field are in ecological continuum” and local agriculture is modelled on
forest ecology and both supply food (2012, 14). In contrast the supposedly ‘scientific’
system segregates forestry from agriculture. Forestry is reduced to resources
like timber and is no longer connected to food. “Knowledge giving systems which
have emerged from the food giving capacities of the forest are therefore
eclipsed and finally destroyed, both through neglect and aggression” (2012,
14). Shiva uses the examples of
‘scientific management’ based on narrow commercial interests and enforced
through legislation in India to illustrate her arguments on the destruction of
diverse knowledge systems (2012, 18).
The existing principles of scientific forest
management leads to the destruction of the tropical forest ecosystem because it
is based on the objective modelling of the diversity of the living forest on
the uniformity of the assembly line. Instead of society being modelled on the
forest, as it is in the case of forest cultures, the forest is modelled on the
factory... which transforms the forest from a renewable to a non-renewable
resource. (Shiva 2012, 19)
Shiva argues that the
dominant knowledge system is inherently colonising and culturally fragmenting
in its effects. It alienates knowledge from wisdom. The political implications of such a system
system are fundamentally inconsistent with sustainability, equality and social justice.
For these reasons it is a particularly dangevous, violent and destructive
monoculture of the mind. In the face of
this reality, Shiva advocates for the democratisation of knowledge as “a
central precondition for human liberation because the contemporary knowledge
system excludes the humane by its very structure” (2012, 60). She envisions
this democratisation involving the redefining of knowledge so that local and
diverse become legitimate and indispensable, and globalisation and
universalisation are conceived as abstractions which have violated this reality.
This shift, according to Shiva, is:
…important to the project of human freedom
because it frees knowledge from the dependency on established regimes of
thought, making it simultaneously more autonomous and more authentic.
Democratisation based on such an ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledge’ is both
a viable and necessary component of the larger processes of democratisation
because the earlier paradigm is in crisis and in spite of its power to manipulate,
is unable to protect both nature and human survival. (2012, 62)
References:
Shiva, V. 2012. Monocultures
of the mind: perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. New Delhi:
Natraj.
Shiva, V. 2005. Earth
democracy: justice, sustainability and peace. Brooklyn: South End Press
