Grassroots Post-Modernism Remaking the Soil of Cultures

by Esteva, Gustavo; Prakash, Madhu Suri

• ISBN13: 9781856495462
• ISBN10: 1856495469
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-15
• Publisher: Zed Books

Summary

This remarkable book draws its inspiration from what its authors describe as the post-modern epic now unfolding at the grassroots. It portrays the ways in which the world's social majorities are now escaping from the monoculture of a single global civilization and regenerating their own cultural and natural spaces. In so doing, they are challenging the three sacred cows of modernity--the idea, entrenched in globalization, that there is only one, universally valid way of understanding social reality; the exclusive and general validity of Western-defined notions of human; and the notion of the self-sufficient individual, as opposed to people-in-community, which has grotesquely transformed how we see the human condition. This is quite simply, a book which will transform how one sees the world--North and South.

Author Biography

Gustavo Esteva is one of Latin America’s leading critics of the development paradigm and is a key figure in the NGO world. Madhu Suri Prakash is Professor of Education at Penn State University.

Table of Contents

From the Global to the Local * Beyond Neo-Liberalism to the International of Hope * Beyond the Self: Regenerating Ourselves * Human Rights: The Trojan Horse of Recolonization? * People’s Power: Radical Democracy for the Autonomy of their Commons * Epilogue: The Grassroots Post-modern Epic * Notes * Bibliography * Index