TY - JOUR
T1 - "Stretching the Friendship": On the Politics of Replicating a Dairy in East Timor
AU - Shepherd, Christopher
AU - Gibbs, Martin R
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - In this article, we address the problem of how technoscience knowledge and practices are translated when they are relocated during the highly organized, international encounters between cultures, often called "development." We examine efforts to build a "model" Australian dairy and instantiate Australian dairy practices in East Timor following East Timor's recent emergence as a nation-state. Through this ethnography of development's construction of a heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage, we show how knowledge and power inform the practices that enable Western models of production and exchange to be reassembled in postcolonial spaces. In aiming to conduct a symmetrical anthropology of development based in the actor-network approach, we follow development's actors and actants as well as its epistemic divisions - nature and culture, human and nonhuman, us and them - into East Timor, arguing that the politics and agency of technology transfer is distributed among discourse, epistemology, and human and nonhuman actors.
AB - In this article, we address the problem of how technoscience knowledge and practices are translated when they are relocated during the highly organized, international encounters between cultures, often called "development." We examine efforts to build a "model" Australian dairy and instantiate Australian dairy practices in East Timor following East Timor's recent emergence as a nation-state. Through this ethnography of development's construction of a heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage, we show how knowledge and power inform the practices that enable Western models of production and exchange to be reassembled in postcolonial spaces. In aiming to conduct a symmetrical anthropology of development based in the actor-network approach, we follow development's actors and actants as well as its epistemic divisions - nature and culture, human and nonhuman, us and them - into East Timor, arguing that the politics and agency of technology transfer is distributed among discourse, epistemology, and human and nonhuman actors.
U2 - 10.1177/0162243906291866
DO - 10.1177/0162243906291866
M3 - Article
VL - 31
SP - 668
EP - 701
JO - Science, Technology & Human Values
JF - Science, Technology & Human Values
IS - 6
ER -