P012: Technology and the Everyday across Post-War Asia

Organizer(s)

• AG

  Arunabh Ghosh

  Harvard University, United States

Chair(s)

• DB

  Dwaipayan Banerjee

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• AG

  Arunabh Ghosh

  Harvard University, United States
• 

  Sarah Teasley

  School of Design, RMIT University, Australia
• NM

  Nikhil Menon

  University of Notre Dame, United States
• JA

  Jennifer Altehenger

  Oxford University, United Kingdom

Discussant(s)

• DB

  Dwaipayan Banerjee

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

Session Abstract: The papers in this panel interrogate the concept of “everyday technology” in post War Asian history. Drawing upon evidence from China, India, and Japan, they illustrate how local work in realms as diverse as hydraulic management, furniture manufacturing, and data collection had wide-ranging economic, political and socio-cultural implications. In doing so, the papers pay as much attention to questions of innovation and creativity as they do to cultures of maintenance, repair, and refurbishment. Bringing together this diversity of perspectives—both geographic and thematic—will generate a fruitful dialogue on the place of (everyday) technologies in Asian history.

Moving past narratives that have focused on large-scale dam building, Ghosh examines people's handbooks to illustrate how small-scale dams and reservoirs were constructed and maintained by villagers in 1950s China. Teasley then asks how new machines and techniques of mechanization were localized in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s, revealing consumer and user interest but also resistance to promises of technological innovation. Moving to 1950s India, Menon traces the role of the state and state-sponsored statistical work in measuring and evaluating people's everyday material lives. Statistics, he shows, became an everyday technology everyone had to contend with. While each of the first three papers deals to varying degrees with the introduction of new technologies, Altehenger explores the revival of individual carpentry work in the PRC during the 1960s and 1970s to demonstrate how traditional technologies of furniture manufacturing and repair became subjects of state sponsorship and criticism at the same time

Presentations:

• Everyday Hydraulics in 1950s China
  

  Paper Presenter: Arunabh Ghosh – Harvard University
• Measuring the Everyday: Sample Surveys and Household Industries in 1950s India
  

  Paper Presenter: Nikhil Menon – University of Notre Dame
• CAD and everyday design practice in Japan, 1968-1975
  

  Paper Presenter: Sarah Teasley – School of Design, RMIT University
• The Changing Fate of Carpentry in High Socialist China
  

  Paper Presenter: Jennifer Altehenger – Oxford University