A Report on Self-Devouring Growth in Pakistan

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A Report on Self Devouring Growth in Pakistan In Light of Julie Livingston s Book About Self Devouring Growth A Planetary Parable Julie Livingston who is an American medical historian has worked at the crossroads of history anthropology and public health Livingston is concerned with the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness care as a social practice taxonomy and the relationships that subvert or upend it the relationship between species African thought and political and moral imagination and the environmental consequences of capitalism and economic growth She is also interested in writing and questions of formal expression From NYU Arts Science The book under consideration has been written using such a friendly way that anyone can enjoy giving it a read It has been narrated in the form of a story and Julie has played the role of a storyteller The story is filled with keen observations catchy remarks clever criticism and the unearthing of hidden realities This story takes place in Botswana which is a miracle land in southern Africa But Livingston is of the view that it is a story that everyone is familiar with and it can be observed in all the regions around the globe She talks of how parable and parabola have same origins how this journey of ours that we will trace through this parable is going to be parabolic We will end up at the same place we started at but a bit farther away This is what one actually feels while giving this book a study Although we are sitting at the same place we have learned a bit more we have developed a much deeper understanding of what is going on The different definitions of this concept of self devouring growth that Livingston introduced include a The ways that the super organism of human beings is consuming itself b A cascade of unseen consequences side effects c A set of material relationships something with physical properties being devoured This concept has the significance of highlighting the side effects of our deeds We human beings have this thing in our nature that once we are after achieving something we lose sight of at what price that gain will come Being conscious of the price one pays is very important This is what Julia argues in her book The writer believes that stories are effective mediums when it comes to revealing urgent at times uncomfortable truths that might be hiding in plain sight In relating this story she also wants us to locate ourselves in this story This is the motive of this paper After going through the research of Julie Livingston we are going to view such instances of self devouring growth in Pakistan The author is of the view that rather than blaming the scientific authorities on the surface level we should go to the root of the problem And the root according to her lies in complex economic and political histories which have their further roots in European colonialism as well as corporate capitalism This makes this book a critique on these two A deep and intellectual criticism of this capitalism that is forming today s global economy has been done by the writer Livingston is not against growth She acknowledges the fact that growth can be healthy too But growth becomes dangerous when it is done blindly ignoring the cost of it When there are only two extreme options of grow or die growth becomes self devouring This kind of growth has been analogized with cancer The author doesn t even find the technological solutions to be promisingly hopeful Because according to her the ultimate problem is human greed and its fulfilment and then more and more increase in it through corporate capitalism The problem as highlighted by her is that we have limited this term growth to economic sense We do not think outside this economic race And this race had turned us blind Due to colonialism and the concepts of enlightenment that were presented to us as being rational we ignored the collective wisdom of humanity because it was deemed as irrational But now we observe a world that is chaotic and irrational and it is the outcome of the so called rational thought and knowledge The world that there concepts have created turned out to be self devouring and suicidal in the long run We are standing at that moment in time and space where we need to go back Not to the older ways that we start living in the caves again But we need to get back to that collective creativity and humanity Julia also shares the view of Arturo Escobar 1999 when she wants us to redefine the concepts that have become corrupted with time Like the concepts of happiness growth absorption etc Her approach is like that for which Roy Rappaport 1968 had set the grounds but it is much more refined easily accessible and in depth Looking at the capitalist system as the root of the problems is an approach that Stuart Kirsch 2014 had used Her work seems a clever and to the point amalgam of all these approaches She has with clear proofs justified the extractive and consumer capitalism as being the basis of self devouring growth Moreover she has a deep linguistic and cultural understanding which she has mixed with a literary story telling way This renders her study an attractive and interactive position Rainmaking and Other Forgotten Things This is the first chapter of Livingston s research in which she highlights the water crisis She mentions water crisis as a global problem with in depth study of its causes effects and implications in the African region of Botswana Along with that she also sheds light on the change that has taken place in the concepts of politics She has talked about the change in trends that has taken place from humanity towards modernity from public healing towards public health from bios to telos from the unity of nature and human beings towards objectification of nature We see different definitions of happiness in this chapter how Batswana took it in a political sense the schadenfreude of German people and ending with a question that to what kind of happiness this technopolitics is taking us The happiness of Batswana had been entangled with water and the ultimate source of water for them was rain They used this water for making the best health systems But they also in the hands of the paradox of self devouring growth Their political system was based upon the concept of rain making In that system the leader took charge of what was going around After modernization this political conception has totally changed Now the leader has answers of the kind


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A Report on Self-Devouring Growth in Pakistan

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