Infrastructure in the Making: The Chao Phraya Dam and the Dance of Agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakkrit Sangkhamanee

AbstractThe article explores the process behind the construction of the Chao Phraya Dam, the first World Bank-funded water infrastructure project in Thailand, developed during the 1950s. Employing Andrew Pickering's ‘dance of agency’ concept in examining the process of turning financial and technical assistance into a workable project, I argue that development infrastructure, like the Chao Phraya Dam, provides a space to explore the dialectic operations – accommodation and resistance – of agency and the unstable associations among diverse actors, expertise, institutions, and materials, as well as practices. Recounting the history of the dam in the making, I explore a series of entanglements through different dances of agency, namely initiation, assessment, mobilisation, negotiation, adjustment, confrontation, and settlement. Such a multiplicity of dancesinsideandin the makingof infrastructure reflects the techno-political entanglement encompassing the manifold negotiation and adjustment of conflicting goals, interests, recognition, and cooperation among different agencies. The dam, often portrayed as an engineering achievement of the state, is in fact the result of unanticipated relations and the responses to the temporal emerging forms of practices.

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 499-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES MARK

This article explores the middle-class response to life under the early Communist state in Hungary. It is based on an oral history of the Budapest bourgeoisie, and challenges some of the dominant indigenous representations of the central European middle class as persecuted victims who were forced into ‘internal exile’ by the Stalinist state. Despite being officially discriminated against as ‘former exploiters’, large numbers achieved educational and professional success. Their skills were increasingly needed in the rapid modernization of the 1950s, and the state provided them with semi-official opportunities to remake themselves into acceptable Communist citizens. Middle-class testimony revealed how individuals constructed politically appropriate public personas to ensure their own upward mobility; they hid aspects of their pasts, created ‘class conscious’ autobiographies, and learnt how to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty. The ways in which individuals dealt with integrating into a system which officially sought to exclude them and which many disliked ideologically is then examined. In order to ‘cope with success’, respondents in this project invented new stories about themselves to justify the compromises they had made to ensure their achievements. These narratives are analysed as evidence of specifically Communist middle-class identities.


Author(s):  
Jiří Voráč

CZECH FILM AFTER 1989: THE WAVE OF THE YOUNG NEWCOMERS THE history of Czech cinema has been frequently marked and stigmatized, more than the non- industrial and more individual art disciplines, by large historical social upheavals which the Czech lands experienced in this century. During its hundred-year-long history, the Czech film survived five different social systems. Its origins (the first films on the Czech soil were presented by Jan Kříženecký in 1898) are rooted in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, it continued its development in a free and democratic Czechoslovak Republic which was after two decades destroyed by the Nazi Germany. A fundamental systemic change occurred in 1945 when the Czechoslovak film was nationalized i.e., that the state (and after 1948 the Communist establishment) completely controlled all film activities in the entire country.(1) After the demise of the Communist dictatorship in...


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-246
Author(s):  
Hung-yok Ip

To examine the history of Chinese Buddhism in the early Communist regime, I propose to study Xuyun (虛雲, 1840–1958), one of the pre-eminent monks in modern China. I will delineate the ways in which Xuyun brought his religion in line with Marxist politics. To help Buddhism secure a place in the early People’s Republic of China, he took part in the construction of a new Buddhism compatible with socialist ideology. However, I would venture to conceptualize as resistance some of Xuyun’s efforts to preserve Buddhism. This article examines his resistance at two levels. First, while working hard to prove the value of Buddhism to the state, Xuyun mounted what can be regarded as rightful resistance. When possible, he confronted policies and authorities that hurt the sangha, but did so without challenging the legitimacy of theccp. Second, in the 1950s, Xuyun strove to instruct Chinese Buddhists in self-cultivation. As he shared his experience and knowledge about spiritual practice with fellow Buddhists, he showed them, especially monastics, how to uphold Buddhist ideals in a political context marked by hostility towards religions.為了探究五十年代中共政權下的佛教歷史,本文探討現代中國最傑出的法師之一,虛雲法師 (1840–1958) 如何調整自己的宗教来適應馬克思主義政權。為了使佛教能夠在新中國成立之初生存,虛雲法師參與了構建與社會主義意識形態相適應的新佛教。但是,本文進一步嘗試把虛雲法師保存佛教的一些努力定義為抗爭,細究他在如下兩個方面的反抗:首先,在向國家證明佛教價值的同時,虛雲始終在正當性的名義下進行抗爭。在不挑戰中共政權合法性的前提下,他試圖抵抗對僧團不利的政策和政治權威。其次,虛雲法師在50年代堅持延續佛教、特别是禪宗的修行傳統。他希望佛門弟子,尤其是僧人,能在反宗教的政治氣候下繼續延續佛教的理念—这,對虛雲而言,是更重要的抗爭。


2020 ◽  
pp. 180-202
Author(s):  
Alex Dowdall

Chapter 6 discusses the relationships of refugees from the front-line towns to the bombarded communities they left behind. It outlines the size of the refugee populations from the front-line towns, and maps their destinations within the French interior. It demonstrates that most refugees from the front-line towns experienced forced displacement alongside others from their home communities, and that this geography of displacement allowed refugees to remain socially, emotionally, and imaginatively involved in their bombarded home communities. In this way, refugees remained members of the front-line communities, even while displaced. To date, the refugee history of the First World War has focused on the attitudes of the state and host communities in the interior towards refugees. This chapter, in contrast, makes a significant contribution to the historiography by focusing on the attitudes and actions of refugees themselves. Using refugee newspapers, diaries, and a previously unknown collection of letters, it argues that refugees from the front-line towns were not merely the passive recipients of state and charitable aid, but could actively shape the conditions of their exile by remaining invested in their abandoned home towns and making appeals based on their French citizenship.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 8-19
Author(s):  
Urangua Khereid Jamsran ◽  
◽  
Polyanskayа Oksana N. ◽  

The article is devoted to one of the historic periods of Mongolia of the 20th century, when the Mongolian People’s Republic built the foundations of a socialist society, and key modernization processes took place with the support of the Soviet Union. The economic component of Soviet-Mongolian relations was dominant at that time. However, the assistance from the People’s Republic of China played a definitely important role in the economic development and formation of modern Mongolian society. Labour constraint was one of the main difficulties in promoting industrial economy in Mongolia. The study of the Mongolian-Chinese economic cooperation is also relevant today, despite the influence of the “third force” in Mongolia’s foreign policy. Russian and Chinese directions are in priority. In this regard, it is important to refer to the experience accumulated by countries in the field of economic interaction, which determined the purpose of the publication ‒ to study one of the aspects of Mongolian-Chinese cooperation in the 1950s and early 1960s, namely, the employment of Chinese labour in Mongolia based on a rich source base, including both the published documents and documents from the National Archives of Mongolia, as well as historical works by Russian and Mongolian authors, and to consider such issues as the role of foreign labour, in particular, Chinese workforce in the industrialization of Mongolia, traffic of foreign workers into the Mongolian People’s Republic, and then their family members, the employment of Chinese workers, ideological and cultural events organized by party officials of the Chinese Communist Party. The research methodology is specified by the principles of scientific objectivity, historicism and historical determinism. The work uses both universal scientific methods and special methods of historical research determined by the formulated problem and includes problem-chronological method, comparative analysis method, and systemic method. The study revealed that the employment of workers from the PRC in Mongolia took place within the framework of the diplomatic relations established in 1949 and based on the agreements reached in 1956, 1958 and 1960 in respect of providing economic and technical assistance. It was emphasized that Chinese workers became an integral part of the changing Mongolian society for almost a decade, from 1955 to 1964. The Mongolian side fulfilling bilateral agreements on the working conditions of Chinese employees opened schools for Chinese children, created additional medical centers where Chinese doctors worked, and so on; all this introduced some adjustments to the everyday life of Mongolian society in the mid-20th century. Today, the process of rethinking, re-evaluating the path traversed by Mongolia throughout the 20th century continues, the external conditions of the Mongolian People’s Republic are being revised, so a detailed reference to its history can contribute to the formation of a more objective approach to this process.


Author(s):  
V. A. Maruev

The article features an analysis of projects of congresses of gold miners in Transbaikal and correspondence concerning the organization of these congresses in 1898 – 1919. It is the first time a number of documents of the State Archive of Irkutsk region and the State Archive of the Transbaikal region have been examined. The article describes the history of the origin and development of the Congress of prospectors, as an independent institution. It illustrates the evolution of the role of the Congress as a body representing the collective interests of gold industry entrepreneurs. The article reveals contradictions between the gold miners they faced in addressing the issues. The research identifies the key interests and problems of gold miners at the turn of XIX – XX centuries On the basis of documents on the organization of congresses it examines the situation of workers, development of medical Affairs, the condition of routs of communication in the mines. The conclusion is made about the value of the documents of the congresses for the study of issues of social, technical and financial challenges of gold mining. The archival data reveal the effect of Russia's participation in the RussoJapanese and First World wars on its gold production. The obtained results allow a more detailed study of the gold mining past of this region. 


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