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Purdue University It all looks intellectually appealing and coherent...but what if I come from a tradition, community etc. where material well-being and productivity is not the primal concern of individuals, societies? I am aware that this sounds utopian, naive and unrealistic to many modern eyes, but not to me; as well as hundreds of people I met throughout my life. Yes, we might have difficulty in finding one such society today since 'substance' is all our eyes see today, but there existed such societies in history (especially before western-European colonialism quite efficiently pacified and homogenized thousands of localities and local identities) whose priority was NOT to improve their material well-being. Taking material well-being as a universal unit of measurement is nothing but entering into the realm of Eurocentrism from the front door, once again. I wonder why the Chinese who had the fifteenth century ship technology of Europeans as early as the twelfth century didn't want to discover what lied beyond the horizons of the oceans. I wonder why the medieval Muslim merchants didn't carry guns in their commercial ships until the Portuguese introduced that habit. When it turned out that armed conflict was the only solution to resist Western expansionism in South Asia in the sixteenth century, natives simply preferred to abandon their territories rather than fight. Here is how Anthony Reid interpreted this: "...absence of [physical and conceptual] clear safeguards for private property [at a time of] rapid market development . [and this fact] did not allow Southeast Asians to develop short term solutions to alternative routes to sustained economic property." This is again a Eurocentric explanation. Here is a question: How do we know that southeast Asians set "sustainable economic growth" as their objective? What if that was not a concern, priority, or a goal for them?
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