Book description
In five essays, followed by extensive notes and bibliographies, Ivan
Illich embarks on a major historical and sociological analysis of modern
man's economic existence. He traces and analyzes options which surpass
the conventional political 'right-left' and the technological
'soft-hard' alternatives and presents the concept of the 'vernacular'
domain: "...to name those acts of competence, lust or concern that
we want to defend from measurement by Chicago Boys or Socialist
Commissars...the preparation of food and the shaping of language,
childbirth and recreation, without implying either a privatized activity
akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and
primitive procedure." Illich deals provocatively with the
controlling uses of language and science and the valuation of women and
work. Drawing on unfamiliar historical sources, he lays bare the roots
of much of the social ordering which affects industrial man: his own
creation, but one which, at the same time, connives at his own
oppression.
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish
mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later
learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient
Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter,
he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence
(Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University
in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the
author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment,
Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the
Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind,
Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and
Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the
United States, he died in 2002.
