Decolonizing knowledge : from development to dialogue / edited by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin.n.

"A study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU/WIDER)."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Introduction: Rationality and the World / Frederique Apffel-Marglin -- Pt. I. Decolonizing Development Knowledge. 2. Development for 'Big Fish' or 'Small Fish'? A Study of Contrasts in Tanzania's Fishing Sector / Marja-Liisa Swantz and Aili Mari Tripp. 3. The Economic Consequences of Pragmatism: A Re-Interpretation of Keynesian Doctrine / Nancy E. Gutman. 4. Two Phases of American Environmentalism: A Critical History / Ramachandra Guha. 5. Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production to Regeneration / Frederique Apffel-Marglin -- Pt. II. Decolonizing the 'Transfer-of-Technology' Model. 6. Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge / Stephen A. Marglin. 7. Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution / Gustavo Esteva. 8. Why Haldane Went to India: Modern Genetics in Quest of Tradition / Francis Zimmermann. 9. Footnotes to Vavilov: An Essay on Gene Diversity / Shiv Visvanathan.

10. The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India / Ashis Nandy.

Development failures, environmental degradation, and social fragmentation can no longer be regarded as side-effects or 'externalities'. 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. The very word 'development' and its cognates 'underdevelopment' and 'developing' confidently mark the 'first world' as the future of the 'third'.

This book argues that the linear evolutionary paradigm of development that comes out of the modern Western view of knowledge is a contemporary form of colonialism. The authors - covering topics as diverse as the theory of knowledge underlying the work of John Maynard Keynes, what the renowned British geneticist J. B. S.

Haldane was looking for when he migrated to India, and the knowledge of Mexican and Indian peasants - propose a pluralistic vision and a decolonization of knowledge: the replacement of one-way transfers of knowledge and technology by dialogue and mutual learning.