Concrete, Power, Soil, and Dirty Hands: Technology and Society in Asia View Digital Media

Colloquium
Alexander Bay,  Cameron Daddis,  Gerald Figal,  Ian Miller  

We explore histories of technologies in Asia – power grids, maps, surveys, and concrete – to reveal the co-productive processes of knowledge making, environmental and social engineering, and resistance from the natural world. Our papers are all interested in the interplay (and the murky distinction) between the man-made and the natural, questions of the agency of non-human actors (does soil or the dysentery bacillus have agency?), and the mangle of turning discourse into practice; we intersect the themes of the conference in terms of knowledge production and a longue durée look at the role of technology and social change. Bay examines the role of surveys in dysentery epidemiology in postwar Japan. Public health hoped to pinpoint disease outbreak but were dismayed by the low-level of hygiene practiced by the masses. Dysentery resisted antibiotics and dysentery carriers resisted quarantine and treatment. Miller examines a 1901 court-case in Japan that shifted power from the public to the private domain and in doing so turned energy into a commodity. Figal charts how coastal concrete in the form of tetrapod wave blocks have acted in post-WWII Japan to blur hard lines between what is “natural” and “artificial,” prompting a rethinking of the agency of nature itself. Daddis examines how the East India Company geologists who mapped the rich soil in the Deccan plateau failed to incorporate the natural agency of the land, as well as indigenous labor, in their reports. These failures, coupled with relentless imperial extraction, manufactured famine in the late nineteenth century.