Summary
A monoculture of the mind is what a dominant knowledge system leaves when it crowds out other ways of knowing, as a plantation replaces a forest. The image is from a 1993 essay and book by the physicist and activist Vandana Shiva. Western science, she argues, is no universal standard: “It is merely the globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition.” Local knowledge is first not seen, then dismissed as ‘primitive’ or ‘unscientific’. Her example is colonial forestry in India, which counted only timber and ignored what forest peoples knew of food, fodder and medicine. Dominant knowledge, she writes, “destroys the very conditions for alternatives to exist”.
Rationale
Part 1 mentions that relational traditions survived colonial suppression, and leaves it there. Shiva describes how the suppressing worked: knowledge went unseen, then the forest it lived in was cut.