Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures

by Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Justice, Politics, Sociology, Philosophy, Activism

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 1998

About the author

Activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. He is one of the best known advocates of Post-Development.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books that I've read in the last few years. This book is a fascinating use of the postmodern theory that so many people find confusing, placing it in the context of globalism. Awesome book and really really interesting indictment of globalism.

[Xarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read the majority of this book .... and have no intention of completing it. Did not like the writing style nor really the message. I did not find the book at all approachable. In fact, I was mostly angry as I read it.

[Nic Paget-Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, personally, this book was very significant. It has helped me understand, interpret, turn upside down so many concepts and even historical processes and events which we have been taught to take for granted as one way when they are in fact another.

[Lauren Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic eye-opener in a post-modern, grass-roots, kind of way.

[Helen Perks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has a good ref list.