Gastvortrag KWI: Dr. Katharine Nora Farrell

Eine Veranstaltung des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Instituts und des Fortschrittskollegs FUTURE WATER.

It is proposed that Resource Economics for the Anthropocene must not only take into account but also learn from the traditional knowledge systems and wisdom of the indigenous peoples of our planet. As modern science endeavours to come to terms with an existential dilemma caused by the interrogative success of reductionism, the fruits of that success – industrialisation, modern agricultural production techniques and massive urbanisation, to name a few – are bringing modern humans and modern attitudes regarding the production and preservation of knowledge deeper and deeper into the last remaining enclaves of preserved indigenous knowledge. Precisely at the moment in history when we, as scholars, have come to appreciate, for empirical and methodological reasons, the importance of complex, holistic, physically embedded, locally relevant forms of distributed and place specific knowledge, we are in the process of destroying the last remaining, painstakingly accumulated living libraries of the indigenous peoples of this planet. While there is, of late, much discussion within the discourses on ecological economics and sustainability science, about the importance of consulting local indigenous knowledge, there is a lack of contemporary economic theory that specifically address how the institutional principles embodied in these modes of production might be used to inform normative institutional theory regarding the urgently needed transformation of 21st century food production systems. One exception to this Disneyfication of indigenous wisdoms is the Latin American social theory discourse cum political movement Buen Vivir (in Quechua, Sumak Kausay; in English, Living Well). Using conceptual tools provided by Elinor Ostrom, in her early work on governing the commons, and by Georgescu-Roegen, in his flow/fund theory, this lecture will explore how the telos of a given economic process is related to its social and material organization and thereby to how it impacts upon that which environs it.

Ort: Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut: Raum 106, Goethestr. 31, 45128 Essen

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