Page 38 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

14 R.A. Martusewicz et al.

bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine,
industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic
technology. (p. 6)
Think for example of talking about a stream as a “drain,” or a farm as a “factory.”
What gets hidden, overlooked, or rationalized when we consider a cow as a machine
for milk commodities? Or, a flowing body of water a mechanism for moving liquefied
manure “away” from the farm?
While all cultural systems use metaphor and are socio-symbolic systems, many
non-western people use more organic or even familial/kinship metaphors to
describe their relationship to the cosmos. These different worldviews create very
different relationships to the living world. Thus, the Quechua people living in the
Andes, for example, use the word “Pachamama” to name the Earth and the living
cosmos. And, “chacra” means both a plot of cultivated land and nurturance as a
central metaphor for the most essential relationships among community members
(Apffel-Marglin 1998). The Ladakhis from northern India use the notion of “dependent
origination,” a Buddhist concept describing the complex interdependencies that
exist among all living things: nothing exists outside its relationship with other
things (Norberg-Hodge 1991). The world, in these views, is not a machine, it is,
rather an organic set of living relationships in which humans are nested and
participate.
The important analysis put forward by this part of the ecojustice framework is
that the ecological crisis is really a cultural crisis brought about by western indus-
trial culture. To understand the processes leading to the devastation of the world’s
diverse living systems or the impoverishment of communities, we must look at
historically codified patterns of belief and behavior. These powerful discursive
forms and practices result in social policies, economic decisions, and educational
institutions that continue to reproduce unsustainable overconsumption of the
resources we need to survive. Further, they produce subjective formations and col-
lective psychological patterns that make certain relationships seem normal, natural,
or universal. They even form the ways that we think about the ways we think! That
is, they influence what scientists and philosophers say about who we are as “rational”
self-reflective humans. The most obvious example of this is the way we have
learned to think of ourselves as dominant species by virtue of our abilities to “reason.”
Yet, we are the only species on the planet who has used this capacity to wage war,
marginalize whole groups as inferior to other groups, or create and dump chemical
toxins into our environment that are now bringing the life systems of the planet to
the brink of disaster. The words we use on a day-to-day basis help to maintain and
recreate “master narratives” that structure complex hierarchized systems of thought,
identity, value, and material realities that create and recreate violent, destructive
relationships and practices as if they are “normal” or “natural.”
Ecofeminists Val Plumwood, Karen Warren, Carolyn Merchant, and others
offer further insights on this sociolinguistic analysis. Plumwood’s detailed analysis
of what she calls “centrist” modes of thinking exposes the intertwined nature of
age-old patterns of hierarchized belief leading to both social and ecological
oppression. “A hegemonic centrism,” she writes, “is a primary-secondary pattern