Rediscovering Indigeneity

There is often skepticism towards indigenous life by European culture -- the testament to this is not just the problematic relationships of colonial presences, but the eradication of traditional ways in most of Europe itself. When Steiner was delivering the original Agriculture Course in 1924, he said that his original destiny had been to write a compendium of "peasant wisdom" but that now it was "impossible" because so much had been lost. Biodynamics is as close as Steiner ever got to that: condensing the wisdom of "illiterate" peasants who perhaps couldn't even spell their own names and yet could read the Book of Nature. This was a different time, but one that Steiner thought needed to be recovered -- not by regression, but by the trials of the scientific method. How do we put science in the service of life? That seems to have been one of Steiner's primary concerns. Biodynamics is an attempt to synthesize modern scientific conceptions of agriculture with paracelsian alchemy and earlier peasant wisdom.