From Obstruction to Decolonization? 149
and human rights”.
13 The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
began the same year, with the U.S. designated as its first, temporary headquarters. Only recently have scholars chronicled the history of FAO ( Pernet &
Ribi Forclaz, 2019), its close relationship with the Green Revolution, and its
developmentalist orientation (Ribi Forclaz, 2019); throughlines emerge however, such as the foundational discourse of modernizing the world’s food and
agricultural systems.
The temporality of modernity obscures how limited liberal internationalism
has been. With progress as the central framework, the present dominates over
the past – with the former deemed advanced, and the latter primitive. From this
developmentalist perspective, the recentness of its reign confers its relevance.
It overshadows other non-linear temporalities that value TK and center ancestral legacies. Paradoxically, the modernity-coloniality at the heart of international liberalism deploys the attribute of “traditional” as its necessary antithesis;
it deploys a reductive vision of “the traditional” and positions it as pitied Other,
from which to allegedly advance and progress.
This temporal paradox of international liberalism comprises a longstanding tension even in Biocultural Community Protocols: the colonial legacy of
objectifying indigenous people and agricultures as subjects of the past, to be
discovered, collected, and preserved. Studied by the colonial gaze, they come
to constitute expertise itself. From this light, modernity is constructed in oppositional relation to traditional – with modernity meaning dynamic, adaptive,
forward-oriented, while traditional is, and must stay by definition, static and
historical. This imposes a linear temporality, of linear progress and development.
Modernity/coloniality seeks “production” of knowledge and data, with epistemological assumptions of individualized innovation, and corresponding proprietary intellectual property regimes and enclosures.
Modernism hinges on modern nation-states, but goes further into epistemologies of “nature” as such. Activists and scholars have long chronicled the Western
tendency to dichotomize nature and culture. Invoking the plurality of ontologies
helps show how this Eurocentric materialist worldview is in fact one of many,
and not the universal worldview it purports to be. Building on decolonial theory,
Mario Blaser shows that modernist ontological assumptions impose reductive
framework on science, culture, nature, and alleged expertise thereof. Phillipe
Descola wrote that:
it is not enough to show that the opposition between nature and culture
is meaningless for non-modern societies, or that it emerges lately in the
course of the history of the West; it must be integrated to a new analytical
framework within which modern naturalism, far from constituting the
template which allows to gauge cultures that are distant from ours in space
and time, would be but one of the possible expressions of more general
schemes regulating the objectification of self and non-self.
(Descola, 2009, p. 150)
and human rights”.
13 The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
began the same year, with the U.S. designated as its first, temporary headquarters. Only recently have scholars chronicled the history of FAO ( Pernet &
Ribi Forclaz, 2019), its close relationship with the Green Revolution, and its
developmentalist orientation (Ribi Forclaz, 2019); throughlines emerge however, such as the foundational discourse of modernizing the world’s food and
agricultural systems.
The temporality of modernity obscures how limited liberal internationalism
has been. With progress as the central framework, the present dominates over
the past – with the former deemed advanced, and the latter primitive. From this
developmentalist perspective, the recentness of its reign confers its relevance.
It overshadows other non-linear temporalities that value TK and center ancestral legacies. Paradoxically, the modernity-coloniality at the heart of international liberalism deploys the attribute of “traditional” as its necessary antithesis;
it deploys a reductive vision of “the traditional” and positions it as pitied Other,
from which to allegedly advance and progress.
This temporal paradox of international liberalism comprises a longstanding tension even in Biocultural Community Protocols: the colonial legacy of
objectifying indigenous people and agricultures as subjects of the past, to be
discovered, collected, and preserved. Studied by the colonial gaze, they come
to constitute expertise itself. From this light, modernity is constructed in oppositional relation to traditional – with modernity meaning dynamic, adaptive,
forward-oriented, while traditional is, and must stay by definition, static and
historical. This imposes a linear temporality, of linear progress and development.
Modernity/coloniality seeks “production” of knowledge and data, with epistemological assumptions of individualized innovation, and corresponding proprietary intellectual property regimes and enclosures.
Modernism hinges on modern nation-states, but goes further into epistemologies of “nature” as such. Activists and scholars have long chronicled the Western
tendency to dichotomize nature and culture. Invoking the plurality of ontologies
helps show how this Eurocentric materialist worldview is in fact one of many,
and not the universal worldview it purports to be. Building on decolonial theory,
Mario Blaser shows that modernist ontological assumptions impose reductive
framework on science, culture, nature, and alleged expertise thereof. Phillipe
Descola wrote that:
it is not enough to show that the opposition between nature and culture
is meaningless for non-modern societies, or that it emerges lately in the
course of the history of the West; it must be integrated to a new analytical
framework within which modern naturalism, far from constituting the
template which allows to gauge cultures that are distant from ours in space
and time, would be but one of the possible expressions of more general
schemes regulating the objectification of self and non-self.
(Descola, 2009, p. 150)