Hospicing Modernity, Part I
Death by monoculture
Imagine a field of corn.
Imagine harvesting the corn and piling them up on the ground.
Take a moment to list the words to describe the corn on display - the shape, size, color, texture, smell, taste…
Does it look something like this?
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes in Hospicing Modernity about beginning her workshops and seminars with NGO practitioners and educators with the prompt I shared at the beginning of this post. Then, she would show them a picture of Peruvian corn, that looks something like this:
The majority of the participants imagined the yellow corncobs, like I did. She used this analogy to highlight the danger of a single story. In the book, the yellow corncobs represented “social ideals in relation to health, education, governance, justice, work, ethics, relationships, and identity building, while rendering other possibilities unimaginable” (p.72). I found myself extending this analogy to the social norms and values of dreams - one that renders dreams inconsequential, simply a form of entertainment, or a neurobiological phenomenon that is reserved for psychoanalysis.
Vanessa explains that “the problem is not related to most people not knowing that multicolored varieties of corn exists (as an effect of ignorance), but to the omnipresence and value attached to the yellow corncobs (as an effect of universalism), curtailing our imagination and preventing us from even imagining the existence of other possibilities. This is one of the ways that modernity colonizes both physical and imaginative landscapes. (p. 72)”
I wonder how she might use her analogy to explore dreams and the ways in which modernity has worked them, too.
Where did the corn analogy take you? What new ideas, questions, confusion, and feelings about dreams and modernity emerged for you?