Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (Critique Influence Change)

“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 civilisation and regenerating their own cultural and natural spaces. In so doing, they are challenging the three sacred cows of modernity - the idea, entrenched in globalisation, 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. Winner of the AESA (American Educational Studies Ass) Critics’ Choice Award” With the publication of this remarkable book in 1998, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash instigated a complete epistemological rupture.Grassroots Post-modernism attacks the three sacred cows of modernity: global thinking, the universality of human rights and the self-sufficient individual. Rejecting the constructs of development in all its forms, Esteva and Prakash argue that even alternative development prescriptions deprive the people of control over their own lives, shifting this control to bureaucrats, technocrats and educators. Rather than presuming that human progress fits a predetermined mould, leading towards an increasing homogenization of cultures and lifestyles, the authors argue for a'radical pluralism'that honours and nurtures distinctive cultural variety and enables many paths to the realization of self-defined aspirations.This classic text is essential reading for those looking beyond neoliberalism, the global project and the individual self. In this classic text Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash examine the post-modern epic unfolding at the grassroots and the mass movement away from the monoculture of a single global society. A unique look at how the experience of fear prevents political change, with instructions and examples of how to overcome it from leading figures on the left