Self and Dissenting Futures

In his presentation, Nandy takes issue with current thinking on the nature of the global soul/mind. He searches for ways out of the poles of soul/mind as explained by development in brain science as well as classical essentialist understandings of the soul/mind.

More pressing is moving away from the discourse of universalism, as the dominant strand of universalism is grounded in a European world view that accepts as absolute the superiority of the human, the masculine, the adult, the historical, and the modern/progressive over the non-human/sub-human, the feminine, the child, the ahistorical and the traditional /savage. Thus in present times, the dream of 'one world' has become a nightmare, and a threat to the survival of non-modern/western cultures. It portends a homogenized, hierarchized world that is sharply categorized into the modern and the primitive, the secular and the non-secular, the scientific and the unscientific; the normal and the abnormal, the developed and the underdeveloped, the vanguard and the led, the liberated and the salvable".

Alternative visions and interpretations of the global soul/mind are crucial if we wish to engage in global action that does not reproduce yet another nightmare.

Bio: Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist and sociologist of science who has worked on cultures of knowledge, visions, and dialogue of civilizations. At present, he is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, both located in Delhi .

Nandy has coauthored a number of human rights reports and is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies, and cultural survival. He is a member of the Executive Councils of the World Future Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development, and the People's Union for Civil Liberties. Nandy has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull , and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh . He held the first UNESCO Chair at the Center for European Studies, University of Trier , in 1994.