ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern science was spread around the world, first as part of Europe’s imperialist expansion and, later, in the postwar era, as part of the “globalization” strategies of transnational corporations. Science is central to globalization, providing both a knowledge base for new products, as well as a cornerstone for the ideologies of positivism, scientism, and modernism which have helped to legitimize the destruction of other forms of knowledge. It has been in the name of science that a myth of progress has been constructed and upheld, according to which the diverse array of “non-scientific” human knowledges have come to be labeled “traditional” with all the negative and derogatory connotations that the term has come to imply.
