NEWS ARTICLE

Caroline Gatt, anthropologist and Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Karl-Franzens-University of Graz

“The current crises are not disconnected. There are environmental catastrophes together with human ones caused by political situations, and they are all linked. For example, the fires in California and Canada, or the floods we had here in Austria, where people ended up homeless. There’s the genocide that is happening in Palestine, and the erosion of democracy in the US under Trump.

We can approach these challenges from the perspective of the South American political and scholarly movement called the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) project. Researchers in this project look at the colonialism of the Spanish and the Portuguese in South America. The urge for expansion was a search for riches because Europe at the time was so poor. Colonists brought ideas, people, plant materials, other riches to Europe, and the MCD scholars argue that it was this influx that enabled modernity to develop at all. But then Euro-centric histories discuss modernity as emerging only from European creativity.  It’s basically an extraction of knowledge, materials, people, wealth, which enabled Europe to become as powerful and rich as it did. And so when you think about the catastrophes that we have today, most of them arise due to that same form of extractivism, where all the wealth gets sucked into Europe and North America, thereby impoverishing the other parts of the world.”