Page 39 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

3 EcoJustice Education for Science Educators 15

of attribution that sets up one term (the One) as primary or as centre and defines
marginal others as secondary … as deficient in relation to the centre. Dominant
western culture is androcentric, eurocentric and ethnocentric, as well as anthropo-
centric” (2002, p. 101).
In this mindset, “Reason” and associated terms such as “intelligence” and
“mind,” tend to be understood as exclusively human qualities, legitimating the
“radical exclusion” of that which is not human and their positioning as objects of
exploitation. Such an orientation to the world can be traced as far back as Plato,
through the “age of reason” in the work of Rene Descartes and other Enlightenment
thinkers, and into the modern world. Specifically, we have inherited and internalized
a form of thinking that divides the world into a naturalized system of hierarchical
oppositions – man/woman, reason/emotion, body/mind, culture/nature – where the
first term in the pair not only has more value, but is given the “natural” right to
define, control, and even exploit the other. There is no interdependence among
these terms, only dependence of the second “weaker” term upon the first.
Ecofeminists recognize this ideological foundation as the basis for the oppression
of women and other marginalized groups that are represented within western discourses
as either part of nature or closest to it. Thus, we see close ideological ties among
anthropocentrism, patriarchy, and ethnocentrism. All interweave via these dualistic
assumptions mapped onto our consciousness through our daily conversations, and
within our cultural institutions to form a deeply embedded set of assumptions that
underlie and lead to both the ecological crises and social crises plaguing our
communities.
It is important to note the role that science has played in these processes. For
example, the historical deprivation and exploitation of enslaved African communities,
or the genocidal actions taken against Native Americans was rationalized historically
via analogic comparisons of non-white peoples to “savages,” “beasts,” or “farm
animals.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientific evidence was
provided comparing the size of the skulls of different “races” of people in order to
argue for the inferior capacity for reason of peoples of African descent. So powerful
were these narratives that even those victimized by them were captured in their
definitions. Slave narratives reveal, for example, a discursive double bind as they
struggled to be considered “human” rather than mere animals (Haymes 2001), thus
accepting the dominant logic of domination that defined animals as fundamentally
inferior to humans, thus reproducing the structure of their own oppression.
Similarly, examination of the history of the Scientific Revolution in Enlightenment
thought exposes the ways “Woman” as a cultural category is historically defined as
the inferiorized opposite of “man” based on her “lack of reason and closeness with
objectified nature … constituting a lower order of life” (Plumwood 2002, p. 102).
Thus, she is the social and political analogue of radically excluded nature. And,
here as in the above example, science was used as the rationalizing epistemological
framework to assert such truths.
Today, as the ideas of western industrial culture are globalized in the name of
“modernity,” “development,” and “civilization,” diverse and centuries-old patterns
and practices that acknowledged ecological limits and human interdependencies