Concepts
In Ecofeminism (1993) authors Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies critique modern science and its acceptance as a universal and value free system. Instead, they view the dominant stream of modern science as a projection of Western men's values. The privilege of determining what is considered scientific knowledge has been controlled by men, and for the most part of history restricted to men. Shiva and Miles list examples including the medicalization of childbirth and the industrialization of plant reproduction.
These authors argue that the medicalization of childbirth has marginalized midwife knowledge and changed the natural process of childbirth into a procedure dependent on specialized technologies and appropriated expertise. Similarly, the dependence of agriculture on industrially produced seed and fertilizer makes a natural, regenerative process dependent on technological input.
A common claim within ecofeminist literature is that patriarchal structures justify their dominance through binary opposition, these include but are not limited to: heaven/earth, mind/body, male/female, human/animal, spirit/matter, culture/nature and white/non-white. Oppression is reinforced by assuming truth in these binaries and instilling them as 'sacred' through religious and scientific constructs.
Read more about this topic: Ecofeminism
Famous quotes containing the word concepts:
“When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)