region, in the growth of the space in the face of the reduction of place, i.e., of the local world (see Table 1-10). “Place”— which is where the local, peasant-indigenous languages, cultures, rituals, knowledge and wisdom and AKST systems are, with all of life, for the last 60 years, in particular—has been eroding significantly due to the policies that accord priority to the growth of the homogenizing space related to modern single-crop agriculture (Blazer, 2004; Gonzales, 2009).

In the last 60 years modern agriculture and as a result the system of agricultural education, research and extension work was strongly emphasized by agricultural development policies. This conventional/productivist agriculture is based on the mechanistic scientific outlook that arose in western Europe (Figure 1-10). Eurocentrism,7 in for-

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⁷ Eurocentrism “is the imaginative and institutional context that informs contemporary scholarship, opinion and law. As a theory, it postulates the superiority of Europeans over

mal education generally and in agricultural education in particular, has contributed crucially to the dissemination and growing dominance of the mechanistic outlook (Rengifo, 1998; Bowers, 2002). Basic scientific knowledge on and for manipulating agriculture has been and is being generated

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non-Europeans. It is constructed on a set of assumptions and beliefs generally accepted without prejudices by educated Europeans and North Americans who commonly accept them as the truth, as supported by “the facts” or as “reality.” A key concept behind Eurocentrism is the idea of diffusionism. Diffusionism is based on two assumptions: (1) most communities are hardly inventive and (2) a few human communities (or places, or cultures) are inventive and are, accordingly, the permanent centers of cultural change or “progress.” On a global scale, this results in a world with a single center—Europe— and a periphery that surrounds it” (Battiste and Youngblood Henderson, 2000). For further thoughts, see Lander (2000),
Quijano (2000).