A joint initiative between the University of Bergen
and CMI – Chr. Michelsen Institute
Welcome to a guest lecture with Eric Tagliacozzo.
When can “machines be seen as the measure of men”, as the historian Michael Adas so beautifully opined?
This talk with Eric Tagliacozzo focuses on three moments when technology became crucial in “wiring” maritime Asia into larger landscapes of modernity and colonization.
First, he examines the laying of telegraphs across Indochina’s coasts en route to China, as the French started to plant flags in this part of the world. Second, he looks at the notion of building a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in what is today southern Thailand, and what was then the semi-independent kingdom of Siam.
Finally, he also analyses the spread of lighthouses as Foucauldian instruments of coercion in the Anglo-Dutch sphere of Insular Southeast Asia, in land-and seascapes that currently comprise Malaysia and Indonesia. He argues that all of these Asian processes were inter-related, and that they show in regional miniature the shadow and shape of larger forces that were then sweeping the globe.
The event is organised by the research project Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilises in and out of the South China Sea, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Research Professor Edyta Roszko.
A light lunch will be served.
Eric Tagliacozzo is John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also directs the Comparative Muslim Societies Program and the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and edits the journal INDONESIA.
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Edyta is an anthropologist with interest in maritime territorialisation, militarisation of oceans and seas, human security, markets and historical anthropology.
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Eric Tagliacozzo is John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also directs the Comparative Muslim Societies Program and the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and edits the journal INDONESIA.
He is the author, editor, or co-editor of fifteen books on Southeast Asia, and its place in the wider seascapes of Asia writ large.
Edyta is an anthropologist with interest in maritime territorialisation, militarisation of oceans and seas, human security, markets and historical anthropology.
After her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology / Martin Luther University (Halle, Germany – 2011) which focused on religion and politics in Vietnam, Edyta did ethnographic research on Chinese and Vietnamese fisheries and militia in the common maritime space of the South China Sea. Bridging different historical periods and countries, the question of mobility, migration and connectivity of fishers compelled her to historicize fishing communities and to work in relation to and beyond the nation-state, security concerns and territorially bounded fisheries. By combining anthropology, political science, economy and history Edyta seeks to contribute to the wider discussion on globalizing fisheries, maritime enclosures and marine ecologies in past and present.
Bergen Global is a joint initiative between the University of Bergen and Chr. Michelsen Institute that addresses global challenges.
