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Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia: An introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2011

DAVID ARNOLD  and
ERICH DeWALD
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Extract

That technology matters—and matters profoundly—to the humanities and social sciences is no longer in dispute. But exactly how it informs our understanding of society, now and in the past, remains a matter of scholarly contention. It might be argued that, as the history and sociology of technology moves away from its principal point of origin in the study of Euro-American societies, the questions that technology poses have, if only by virtue of their relative novelty, a particular resonance for the constituent regions of modern Asia—and not least for the societies of South and Southeast Asia that form the subject of this special issue. It is not a question of adopting an approach as unsubtle and outmoded as technological determinism, or of simply extending to one corner of the Asian landmass a set of ‘global’ theories and histories, with technology as their underpinning, already established and familiar in other contexts. Rather, it is a case of finding and developing a perspective on technology which helps to illuminate the inner histories and local narratives of these regions and which brings to the wider discussion of technology something distinctive, distilled from the outlook and experience of one part of the non-Western world. A desire to move beyond scholarship's still-dominant paradigms of colonialism, nationalism, and development, to explore the multivalent nature of ‘everyday life’ and enquire into ‘the social life of things’ as locally constituted, to examine modernity's diverse material forms, technological manifestations, and ideological configurations, to locate the regional roots as well as the exogenous origins of social change and cultural transformation, to situate subaltern experience alongside middle class mores and elite appropriation—all these interlocking considerations have begun to form part of a collective inquiry into the technological histories and cultures of South and Southeast Asia. A scholarly search is clearly under way to establish new methodologies and meanings, new contexts, and conjunctures, which will inform and reinvigorate the history, sociology, anthropology, and geography of these regions and redefine their place within the burgeoning field of science and technology studies.

Type
Introduction
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1: Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia , January 2012 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 The conference, and the project on ‘Everyday Technology in Monsoon Asia, 1880–1960’ of which it formed part, was made possible by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. The authors wish to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for its support, and delegates at the conference for their keen participation.

2 The term ‘monsoon Asia’ might appear dated, but it helps capture some of the technological commonalities which affected societies across the wider region, as for instance in the cultivation and processing of rice as the staple food crop or in the socio-economic importance of plantation commodities like coffee, tea, and rubber. See Wickizer, V. D. and Bennett, M. K., The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1941), pp. 1–4Google Scholar.

3 Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; idem, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer on the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); MacLeod, Roy and Kumar, Deepak (eds), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1949 (New Delhi: Sage, 1995)Google Scholar; Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

4 There have been some significant pioneering studies that have begun to look at global goods, like the Singer sewing-machine, from an essentially local perspective, notably Gordon, Andrew, ‘Selling the American Way: The Singer Sales System in Japan, 1900–1938’, Business History Review, 82 (4), 2008, pp. 671–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a contrasting ‘global’ approach, see Andrew Godley, ‘The Global Diffusion of the Sewing Machine, 1850–1914’, Research in Economic History, 20, 2001, pp. 1–45.

5 On the issues raised by studying ‘big technologies’, see Krige, John (ed.), ‘Choosing Big Technologies’, Special issue, History and Technology, 9 (1–4), 1992Google Scholar; Cardwell, Donald, The Fontana History of Technology (London: Fontana Press, 1994), Chapters 17–18Google Scholar.

6 See Hunt, Nancy Rose, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for its invocation of the practical and symbolic role of the bicycle, and Moon, Suzanne, Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2007)Google Scholar, for small-scale technologies in Dutch colonial policy. For the theoretical and methodological issues involved, see Hecht, Gabrielle and Anderson, Warwick (eds), Special issue on ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science, 32 (5–6), 2002Google Scholar.

7 There is a wide theoretical literature on what constitutes ‘the everyday’, including Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I: Introduction, trans. Moore, John (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar; de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Randall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Harootunian, Harry, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8 Clancey, Gregory, ‘The History of Technology in Japan and East Asia’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 3, 2009, p. 529CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Nye, David E., American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

10 See especially Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas P. and Pinch, Trevor J. (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Bijker, Wiebe E., Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

11 Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John, ‘General Introduction’, in Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Societies: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

12 A classic example of this is found in Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

13 For the impact of ‘modernizing goods’ on another non-Western society, see Bauer, Arnold J., Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Chapter 5Google Scholar, though this account tends to downplay local innovation and adaptation.

14 Taylor suggests in her paper, as an example of this, Islamic pronouncements on the suitability or otherwise of Indonesian women riding bicycles. An example from India might be the annual practice among Hindus of marking machines, office equipment, and household goods to ensure their auspiciousness during the following year. See Slater, Gilbert, Southern India: Its Political and Economic Problems (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 164Google Scholar.

15 The conditions assumed from a Western perspective to favour technological innovation might be reconsidered in the light of such Asian examples. See Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

16 van Dijk, Kees, ‘Pedal Power in Southeast Asia’, in van der Putten, Jan and Cody, Mary Kilcline (eds), Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), pp. 268–82Google Scholar; Arnold, David and DeWald, Erich, ‘Cycles of Empowerment? The Bicycle and Everyday Technology in Colonial India and Vietnam’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53 (4), 2011, pp. 971–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick H. (eds), Technologies of the Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988), pp. 16–49Google Scholar.

18 On gender and techno-modernity, see the essays in Wenbau, Alys Eve, Thomas, Lynn M., Ramamurthy, Priti, Poiger, Uta G., Dong, Madeleine Yue and Barlow, Tani E. (eds), The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For an exploration of technology and gender, see Bray, Francesca, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

19 On rice-mills and their significance, see Yanagisawa, Haruka, ‘Growth of Small-scale Industries and Changes in Consumption Patterns in South India, 1910s–1950s’, in Haynes, Douglas E., McGowan, Abigail, Roy, Tirthankar and Yanagisawa, Haruka (eds), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 51–75Google Scholar; Arnold, David, ‘British India and the “Beriberi Problem”, 1798–1942’, Medical History, 54 (3), 2010, p. 302–11CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

20 Edgerton, David, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 In this sense techno-modernity might take on different registers and responses in different societies. Influenced by Gandhi and others, the Indian experience of techno-modernity appears very different, for instance, from that described in early twentieth-century Mexico: see Gallo, Rubén, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.