Papers

• A Brief History of Lao Infrastructure: Looking Back and Far Ahead Hans Lipp Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen

  Doing research about the past of Lao infrastructure there are not so many written sources available. Most of the documented Lao infrastructural history began in 19th century with French colonial administration integrating kingdoms and principalities into French Indochina. Existing structures and planning have been mostly based on the country's integration into what was formerly seen to be the regional French sphere of interests. Today, the game has changed and so have the players. Technological options are different and so are the needs of economy, both national and supra-regional. This paper asks: What does the infrastructural future of one of the world's poorest economies currently look like? What role do emerging economic neighbors and international super powers play to shape the future of a country romanticized by writers as a kind of Shangri La, Laos is experiencing a fast growing population, as well as environmental and economic change. To what extent is it possible for the population to participate in infrastructural change in the face of weak structures of civil society?

• Hijacking Area Studies: Ethnographic Approaches to Southeast Asian Airlines Jane Ferguson Australian National University

  Area Studies, by definition, conjure ideas of emplaced knowledge; in-depth interdisciplinary understanding of language, history, culture and politics of a nation or region. Where detractors might see this approach as overly empirical, therefore precluding theoretical sophistication, others argue that “places” are either artificially constructed, or that processes of globalisation have obliterated the cultural zone. But what if we turn an ethnographic eye to those very processes and technologies themselves? Can Area Studies take to the air, and if so, what are the attendant challenges and benefits? Based on ethnography amongst airline customer service workers, ground and cabin crews in Thailand and Myanmar, this research examines the airline cabin as a field for ethnographic study, and as an emplaced site for political and cultural processes. With participant observation-based knowledge of Southeast Asian cabin crews, interview material with cabin crew and hijackers, this paper examines the 1990 hijack of Thai Airways TG 305 from an emplaced cultural perspective.

• Mobile Technologies and Their Inequalities: The Export of Platte to Vietnam Christina Schwenkel University of California, Riverside

  This paper examines the production of new infrastructural spaces in postwar Vietnam through North-South technology transfers between socialist countries. There is arguably no other construction material more ubiquitous in Southeast Asia than cement. As a marker of modernity, cement is the primary ingredient in concrete, the technology most often used in public infrastructure projects to construct major highways, dams, bridges, and housing. Cement is not only a technical or alchemical substance, but also a political matter: it has been used to build empires and utopias, as well as to subvert them. Historically, cement has operated as a technology of subjectification in some instances, and that of liberation in others. In this paper, I examine the export of concrete technologies to Vietnam by the GDR as part of its modernist fantasy to build a new society in the global South though prefabricated panel technologies, or Platte. Vast power asymmetries underpinned these transfers, which were framed as projects of horizonal solidarity. Focusing on Vinh City, I show how concrete served as a binding agent to draw materials, people, and visions together into new social and infrastructural arrangements that were fraught with gender and racial inequalities.

Abstract

Keywords

• Infrastructure
• Migration
• Mobility
• Urbanization