Place, voice, interdisciplinarity: understanding technology in the colony and postcolony

Introduction

In this special issue of History and Technology we explore the subject of technology in the colony and post‐colony through an interdisciplinary lens, gathering together works that emerge from three related yet distinct disciplinary traditions: history; science and technology studies (STS); and geography. Martin Collins has called for this journal to explore the multifaceted ways that scholars engage with the subject of technology to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition, and to highlight the broader intellectual questions that make the study of technology foundational to the historical enterprise. Focused interdisciplinary dialogue is central to this mission, providing perspective on diverse theoretical and methodological questions, and facilitating conversations between scholarly communities with shared interests. In this spirit, this introduction will examine the shared theoretical and methodological concerns with place and voice that have been particularly influential in shaping work in this broad field of study. How to bring forward, and analyze the multitude of voices from the colony, including those voices that have rarely, if ever, been documented has been an ongoing challenge for students of postcolonial and colonial studies. Thinking through how to understand the colony as a cultural, social, and physical place has likewise occupied scholars as they debated notions of cores and peripheries, exceptionalism and normality, and the implications of environment for the colony. Libbie Freed, exploring roads in colonial French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon, Pauline Kusiak in her look at x‐ray technology in postcolonial Senegal, and Laurel Smith in her study of video technologies and indigenous technoscience in Oaxaca, Mexico, each work through these problems in different ways. Each, though, attends to overarching methodological and theoretical questions, helping to produce a set of shared themes that transcend disciplinary differences and allow these studies to speak to each other about the larger question of technology in the colony and postcolony. This introduction will bring out these commonalities, and, not forgetting the mission of the journal, consider the way that historical work functions within this broader scholarly environment. How might historians draw on these diverse approaches to help us enrich our analysis of the complex cultural, political, and social logic of technology in the colony and postcolony?

Rather than survey the deep background of historical and related literatures on technology in the colony and postcolony, something already done most ably by David Arnold ¹ and Warwick Anderson, ² I want to open this essay by reflecting briefly on two underlying concerns that have motivated recent work on technology in colonial and postcolonial studies: to gain a better understanding of the constellations of power in colonial and postcolonial life, especially those exercises of power that reach down into the daily lives of ordinary people; and to move beyond traditional Eurocentric biases in humanistic studies of technology. Because of the technological orientation of civilizing missions and of some projects of postcolonial liberation, studying technology has allowed scholars to probe directly into ways that colonial power was created and exercised, as well as to understand the deeper implications of the material legacies of the colonial experience. ³ Exploring the role of a wide variety of technologies introduced by Europeans, from military technologies like gunboats to infrastructural projects like railroad and dam building, and public health interventions like vaccines, and sewers, scholars started by focusing on the actions of Europeans but soon began to give more attention to the actions, discourse, and therefore agency of the colonized peoples. Newer studies of the relationship between the exercise of power and technology has accordingly become more complicated, moving away from the earliest emphases on technologies as straightforward tools of power for colonizers. Scholars began to appreciate not only the ways that technologies might be appropriated or sabotaged to advance the needs or interests of various colonial groups, but more fundamentally, how technology and power were co‐produced, each shaping the other in important ways. ⁴

The near‐exclusive attention that scholars have given to the power relations of technology in the colony have made it more difficult to satisfy the second of the two rationales for this work, the desire to move away from Eurocentric frameworks in technology studies. Most studies have focused on introduced technologies, including both those introduced by Europeans with a stated goal of some sort of uplift or local improvement, as Freed describes in her story of roads or by non‐European elites seeking technologies that can serve in producing locally generated and defined social changes, as Kusiak and Smith explore in their respective articles on X‐ray and video technologies. Is this merely the perpetuation of the Eurocentric bias that only European technologies are worthy of study? While I think there is a kind of bias at work here, it is more complicated than the eurocentrism of years past (thankfully many years past) that assumed that colonized peoples were people ‘without technology’ or at least without any technologies that mattered. Indeed, Smith's call for greater attention to indigenous technoscience, as well as Freed's exploration of the logic of African footpaths suggest the emergence of more thoughtful analytics.

The reason for the continued attention to new (to the particular historical context), or newly configured, technologies seems to me to emerge instead from the ways that these technologies become a focus of attention, contention, and sometimes struggle. They are frequently well‐documented, or at least, well‐remembered. They are therefore outstanding sites for understanding certain kinds of colonial and post‐colonial power relationships: those between state actors and non‐state actors, between foreigners and local people, between elites and non‐elites. Debates and disagreements over new technologies can make visible the ways that contests over (for example) religion, gender, ethnicity, privilege, or other cultural beliefs are noticed, resolved, or exacerbated within this matrix of unequal power. Just as scientific controversies lay bare important exercises of scientific power, so do technological controversies make the action of technological power easier to trace and observe, both because of the fact of controversy itself, and for the sheer quantity of documentation (and individual memory) such controversies may leave behind. Technologies that gain a high profile within a society are those that offer the richest material to study. Accordingly, studies of ubiquitous, yet uncontroversial technologies are rare indeed. The very ubiquity of these technologies make them the invisible background of social life, not noticed or written about in any great depth, and rarely a subject of interest or passion for contemporary informants. ⁵ The history of the ubiquitous, especially those common objects which have not in recent memory held the sheen of modernity (think: brooms, rather than radios or sewing machines) is one that still remains to be explored, and may perhaps hold the best promise for helping scholars acquire a more truly balanced and less Eurocentric understanding of technology in colonial settings. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that stories focused on technologies that bear (or are assigned) a ‘foreign’ mark are analytically tapped out. Indeed, each of the three articles offers fresh insight into the ways that attributes of foreignness and domesticity become meaningful categories for technologies in the colony and postcolony.

The evident bias in these studies is therefore toward the remarkable rather than the ordinary in technology, the places where power relationships are contested and constructed, and where sociotechnical change reaches a level of communal consciousness. My focus on power here is to raise a key problem, to bring into the foreground that colonial power is intimately tied to the question of what sort of place the colony is, and to inquire whether it is sensible to think of it as a meaningful and distinct area of study.

The problem of place

The colony as an analytic category has long presented difficulties for historians interested in technologies. Is the colony a particular sort of place where a particular kind of technological activity happens, creating ‘colonial technology’? When George Basalla first posited the idea of colonies as peripheries to colonial cores, he did indeed suggest that there was something analytically distinct about the nature of scientific and technological activity in the colony. ⁶ While rejecting as most contemporary scholars do, the rigid distinction of core and periphery, Arnold has suggested that we might see the colony as a place of basic, labor‐intensive technologies, rather than complex, labor‐reducing technologies, a distinction that Freed seeks to complicate in her study of French colonial roads in Equatorial Africa. ⁷ Scott's argument that ambitious (and sometimes disastrous) large‐scale, high‐modernist technologies find a home under authoritarian regimes seems to apply in some measure to colonial and postcolonial settings. ⁸ Yet these arguments seem always to fall flat in the face of counter‐evidence; colonies appear too diverse to draw meaningful conclusions. Indeed, the question of whether there is a particular kind or arrangement of technology that one could label distinctly colonial is one that seems to appeal mainly to historians of science and technology. Rather than trying to define the character of ‘colonial technology,’ many scholars (including historians) have turned the question around and asked what it is about technology and technological practices that sheds light on the nature of colonial power and cultures. To investigate this question in the face of the diversity of colonial practices and environments, scholars have begun attending more closely to the specificities of place and the way that technology is or becomes situated in that place. Exploring the nexus of environment (natural and built), spatially‐organized social relations, and cultural beliefs, each of the articles presented here integrates explorations of place with technology, giving us empirical, if not categorical insights into the meaning of colonial or post‐colonial technology.

That technologies and people act within and transform their environments seems like an obvious insight these days, but earlier studies paid most attention to the technologies as a kind of universal, focusing more on the perceived capabilities of guns or railroads, for example, and spending less time considering how guns or railroads shaped and were shaped by the particular environments of the particular places in which they were deployed. ⁹ Paying closer attention to place however has yielded important insights into both the character and consequence of technologies in colonial settings, as Freed's examination of road building in French Equatorial Africa and French Cameroon in the 1920s demonstrates. As colonial officials undertook road‐building projects in the region they faced greater distances than any French road builder had to cope with, and monsoon rains and heavy vegetation that would disrupt both building and maintenance of the roadways. Faced with the demand for colonial roads and a colonial budget that would not stretch to build the paved roads of the French imagination in the African environment, colonial authorities deployed in diverse combinations several key tactics: re‐imagining what would count as a road, minimizing technical challenges (and the need for expensive experts) by tracing ‘cheap’ paths through the environment, shifting the expense from building to maintenance (which could be neglected if need be) and creating a system of forced labor to support the building and maintenance of the roads. Each of these choices, as Freed explores, had consequences that reverberate in the region to this day. By studying how the French authorities muddled through the problem of building roads in the colony, Freed is able to demonstrate how the flexible imagination of a road could work to the advantage of colonial authorities who (from their perspective) confronted a seemingly impossible job.

Freed's attention to environment underlines an important theme for studies of technology in the colony: how does a working (or effective) technology get defined in a particular place, and by whom? Freed considers the arrangements of power, authority, labor, and artifacts that make this technology work for the French. While participants in European road conferences might imagine sleekly paved highways built with the latest high‐technology equipment, designed and overseen by experts, in the colony itself the only characteristic that proved essential to colonial authorities was the ability for four‐wheeled vehicles to pass for some part of the year. Colonial officials could draw on the flexible meaning of roads and fulfill their mandate by planning instead dirt or gravel roadways, passable only seasonally, built using common and inexpensive tools, and a distinctly colonial and abusive system of labor, and avoiding grave technical challenges (like bridge‐building) which might require the use of an expensive expert.

For the French a ‘working’ road produced a special kind of wheeled mobility, but ‘improved’ mobility was not a shared outcome for the indigenous people, whose own mobility had long centered on footpaths with a political, economic, and spatial logic of their own. For the colonized people, the French roads worked in a rather more complex way than simply opening up a space for wheeled traffic. For those forced to relocate to villages placed close to roadways but far from the richest agricultural land, or those drafted into forced labor, the roads did little to enhance their mobility, instead increasing their vulnerability to local and colonial authorities. For those who could stay away from the roads, the roads offered invisibility and therefore enhanced mobility, albeit not of the kind imagined by the French, because the French stayed on or around the roads and did not venture into the space of the footpaths. Footpaths therefore maintained or even increased in value and effectiveness as a consequence, at least for those who could take advantage of them. Building roads transformed the spatial logic of the colony but not necessarily as they were designed to do. As Freed notes, this story, despite a full measure of tragedy, should not be seen as a ‘failure’ of French roads, but rather as one that complicates our understanding of what it means for a technology to work in this colonial setting.

Freed's attention to place in both its environmental and cultural dimensions helps make an important point about the character of colonial power as exercised through the agency of technology in French Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. For all of the ways that road‐building significantly transformed the environment and social world of the colony, particularly with respect to the trauma of forced labor, the power of roads was still somewhat limited. Because what could count as a road could be flexibly imagined, officials working more or less independently of each other and of technical experts created a set of roads that were neither homogeneous, nor entirely hegemonic. Built and maintained in a piecemeal manner, they did not offer a uniform face of French power across the colony, nor, despite becoming more commonplace, did they have the power to eliminate footpaths and the indigenous mobility that went with it.

The problem of place – what manner of place is the colony or post‐colony and what does this mean for technology? – as we see in both Kusiak and Smith, is a question of more than abstract academic interest to people who live in postcolonial circumstances. The ethnographic methods employed by both authors are powerful tools for exposing the ways that individuals living in postcolonial societies construct a logic of technology and place, both rhetorically and in their day‐to‐day activities. Ethnographic methods of participant‐observation and interviews may sometimes produce less temporally rich accounts than historians might wish for. Yet these methods do offer access to information that may otherwise be unrecorded or seem so commonplace as to be unnoted by informants. Smith and Kusiak both use interviews and their own observations to trace the meanings that technologies have acquired in relation to place in the postcolony, where place is defined equally by the physical geographical spaces in which the technology and people exist, and by the networks of social, cultural, and economic relationships that animate human life in those places.

As Kusiak explores X‐ray technology (or la radio as it is called locally) in Senegal, she traverses a number of locations, including the offices of radiologists and the inner and outer precincts of a radiology clinic with its spatial arrangements of order and privilege. Although imagined by its earliest advocates as a medical technology that would come to be widely available, in the present day, radiology treatments remain difficult to obtain and the process of getting one is a profoundly different experience depending on a person's social status and connections. Friends of clinic workers, medical professionals, and others with some claim to social significance, get privileged access: short or no wait times; free or minimal cost; and instant diagnoses. Ordinary patients may wait hours on hard benches in the outer precincts of the clinic, for an X‐ray that takes mere minutes without a diagnosis, which they can only get after making a trip back home (often very far away) and visiting their own doctors. This working of X‐ray technology into social relations becomes visible both by watching the way people flow through the microspace of the clinic itself, and by understanding the larger journey's each person goes through in order to obtain both the X‐ray and the diagnosis. As Kusiak points out to us, the social matrix of this technology, from the experience of patients to the operation of the clinic itself is no mystery to the people of Senegal. Employees in the clinic understand a broken X‐ray machine to be as much a sign of the clinic director's lack of social pull, or the requirements of profit‐making, as it is a problem of spare parts. Like Freed, Kusiak asks what it means for this technology to be working (or not working) in Senegal, and understanding both the social and physical space the technology occupies helps to make this clear. Kusiak convincingly contradicts the findings of other ethnographers who see in the Senegalese attachment to X‐rays an updated form of reading entrails. Kusiak instead shows that far from being a consequence of a re‐imagining of mystical traditions, the mystery of the X‐ray is differentially experienced and indivisibly embedded in postcolonial arrangements of social privilege, and the mundanities of profit‐making.

As Kusiak traverses the history of radiology in Senegal, it becomes clear that her informants also have a profound interest in the relationship between technology and place, particularly la radio's articulation with Senegal, sometimes in terms of the nation, and other times in terms of Senegal as simply the social and cultural community that constitutes ‘here.’ The first Senegalese radiologists imagined that one day la radio would become a common technology for Senegal, as routinely useful and domesticated as they perceived it to be in France or elsewhere. This was the promise of development ideology, that what started as a foreign technology, deployed by uncommon specialists would become a useful, yet common technology deployed by routine, if respected, professional experts. In this dream of la radio, the origins of the technology cease to be of special importance, and its hoped‐for ubiquity would reflect an emergent technical and medical sophistication of Senegalese society modeled on an ideal of scientific and technological rationality. The idea that Senegalese people, the people in this place, needed to become a ‘technological’ people (according to a quite restricted definition of technology) was embedded in an interest in what European anthropologists and others termed the ‘mentalities’ of the colonized people, an interest that spanned the colonial and post‐colonial eras. As Kusiak unfolds the history of la radio, culminating with her exploration of a present‐day X‐ray clinic, we see how ideas about mentalities, and the valorization of indigenous healing practices, helped to produce a complex reality of la radio in Senegal that bears little resemblance to the dreams of early doctors.

For her informants, the nature of la radio's working is impossible to disentangle from the place of Senegal. For older medical professionals, la radio does not really work as it should for Senegal, the nation. La radio is commonly desired, but not easily obtained, and X‐ray diagnosis for most remains a mysterious, rather than rational, activity. Health professionals in the clinic, while unconcerned with the sense of lost opportunity for the nation, nevertheless posit that la radio ‘in this place’ works somehow differently, and certainly less well than it should or than it does elsewhere. They shrug their shoulders at this, the way one might talk about the inevitability of bad weather. The result is almost paradoxical. Kusiak's informants perceive la radio as simultaneously deeply embedded in the place of Senegal and somehow foreign to it. While most understand it to work after a fashion, the manner of its working seems for all to be lacking, falling short of some ideal which is imagined to exist elsewhere. The complex currents of postcolonial society have marked la radio as both a badly implemented foreign technology, and one which cannot be disentangled from Senegalese social relations. For Kusiak's informants, the implications are significant not just for la radio, but more broadly for what it says about the technological nature of Senegal.

Of the three articles here, the interplay of place and technology is perhaps most central in Smith's study of the production of indigenous video in Oaxaca. Using ethnographic methods with a strong focus on what she terms sociospatial entanglements, Smith provides a multilayered analysis of technology and place. She focuses on the Sandoval family who self‐identify as indigenous, and explores the ways they have sought to use video (and to a lesser degree other technologies like radio) to produce authoritative knowledge about their culture and community in Oaxaca, creating an indigenous and postcolonial technoscience. The interest of her informants in the relationship between place (in its most expansive cultural and physical sense) and technology, like that of Kusiak's, is profound. Indigeneity is itself of course inextricably linked to place, in that it denotes a special kind of belonging that is dependent on a particular place. They worry about the influx of new technologies and how these technologies might affect the things they cherish about their culture and community. They concern themselves with finding ways to make this technology work to protect their imagining of indigenous identity, both in their early attempts to produce indigenous‐centered radio programming, and later with video that reflects (and perhaps reinforces or even reshapes) their definitions of indigenous culture.

But place and technology are also linked in another way in Smith's study. Examining the larger postcolonial environment shaped by Mexican political and economic currents, and the global politics of non‐governmental organizations, she traces a spatial circulation of her informants through Mexico, as they seek and gain access to video cameras, editing equipment, and computers. Although Smith does not raise the theme in explicit terms, she, like Freed and Kusiak, grapples with the question of what a video technology at work looks like, and how it is embedded in, and therefore vulnerable to, political and physical spaces which are themselves profoundly shaped by postcolonial cultures. The way the technology serves to achieve the informants' goals fluctuates as the technologies and the videomakers move through space. While the video technology is meant to create knowledge about indigeneity, video makers frequently move away from their homes to gain access to the technology and training, as organizations and the sites they use to house complex video editing technology, fall in and out of favor and funding with the changing political winds. This movement has non‐trivial consequences, as we see with one informant who, on moving to the capital to work with the video technologies, finds that he has little time (and perhaps with the distractions of the city, somewhat less inclination) to do his videography back home in Oaxaca. Technology is being used in one respect to define indigeneity just as the continual travel involved to get to the sites where the technology can be used most fully to mobilize indigenous representations, itself threatens the links of the individual to the community, and in the extreme case, their ability to speak authoritatively according to their own sense of that term. This may help explain the importance her informants ascribe to portable editing technologies. The question of whether technologies are ‘foreign’ is not of special interest to the Sandovals, who care less about where the technology comes from or how it might be used elsewhere, than about how it can be shaped to the purpose at hand. The question of making this technology a tool for speaking about place and indigeneity, and creating a fully domesticated indigenous technoscience (as elaborated by Smith), is at once one of technological pragmatism and of successfully managing the spatial circulations inherent in postcolonial society.

The question ‘how is a working technology constituted?’ is a familiar one in the history of technology and science and technology studies. What is clear from these three stories is that asking ‘how is a working technology constituted in this place?’ provides a way of seeing how technology is situated in place, in both its physical and its sociocultural sense. The value of the question for colonial and postcolonial settings is that it helps us continue to think through the question of what manner of place the ‘colony’ or the ‘postcolony’ is from an analytic perspective, and perhaps even more importantly from the perspective of our sources. Place – its meaning and connection to technology – emerges from a diversity of sources, a diversity which has profound political significance in colonial and postcolonial stories. Interpreting place and any other topic of interest in the colony therefore requires us to look more deeply at the problem of voice, a subject to which we now turn.

The problem of voice

One of the most serious methodological challenges raised by scholars of the colony and postcolony in the 1980s and 1990s was the problem of voice. In an environment in which power relations are highly stratified, and when one powerful group produces the preponderance of documentation, the question of how to represent the multiplicity of voices from the historical setting without reproducing the inequities, biases and power relations of the source is a challenging one, as famously explored by Edward Said in Orientalism, and in the subaltern studies school of analysis. ¹⁰ The framework of colonial authority was built on a rigid and not‐easily‐permeable hierarchy and for scholars this creates both theoretical and pragmatic problems (and temptations) in the course of study. Put simply, colonial (and to some extent post‐colonial) written sources largely come from the elites of those societies, and frequently from those involved more or less closely with the operation of the state bureaucracy. Other peoples: peasants, craftworkers, or marginalized ethnic groups for example, may be far less visible in written or otherwise recorded sources. The interpretations of events these peoples might hold, their political or social entanglements, and their daily concerns can be extraordinarily difficult to recover. Yet the fact that it may be difficult and frustrating work makes it no less necessary for a clear understanding of colonial and postcolonial life.

So what does this mean in pragmatic terms? For the colonial era especially, the most easily accessible sources are the copious bureaucratic leavings of colonial officials, often archived in their former metropoles, as well as the journals, newspapers, and ephemera circulated among the reading population. While these sources will certainly refer to the non‐elites of colonial society, it is more rare to find these ordinary people speaking for themselves in these documents. Depending on which part of the world you are in, the spread of literacy in any given language may be much less than universal, penetrating only certain groups in society. For the analyst therefore, learning multiple languages (or collaborating with those who can provide insight into works in those other languages) may be essential to gaining access to a greater diversity of voices. Even where literacy in a shared language may be widespread, the nature of interpreting stories and statements that are purposely ‘encoded’ (for example, to mask critiques of colonial power) may present serious ambiguities and difficulties of interpretation. Yet going the easy path: reading only one language when two would give a wider view, focusing on the easily obtainable colonial archives to the exclusion of all others, makes it that much more difficult to recapture the lives of the ordinary people as active lives, engaged with defining the sociotechnical life of the colony, and not simply passive recipients of state largesse or oppression.

Despite these difficulties, scholars in technology studies have worked assiduously to provide, to adopt Smith's term, a polyvocal view of the colonial and postcolonial world. ¹¹ Although much of the early critique focused on the disciplines of history and literary criticism (suggesting the special difficulties for fields where written sources play an important role), it is clear that the question of voice is one of importance for scholars across the range of colonial and postcolonial studies. Smith frames her study with an especially insightful discussion of the theoretical and political implications of the problem of voice. She reminds us that as agents producing a narrative, and frequently operating from a position of privilege, our stories, historical or otherwise, inevitably exist in a political landscape in which these stories matter, sometimes profoundly. Even though many of us may focus on the past, in many respects the power relations of the colonial and postcolonial world are not crumbling legacies, but stubbornly persistent realities of contemporary life. Smith embraces a goal that is simultaneously analytic and political in her article; as she recounts the efforts of her informants to represent their own indigeneity to the rest of the world, she at the same time demonstrates her own commitment to and recognition of polyvocal knowledge making in the social sciences.

Smith navigates the problems of voice and power by combining an ethnographic focus, centering on the experiences of the Sandoval family, with analytic attention to the role of academic advocates, herself included. She is clear about the reasons for her narrative choices throughout and, as is common in ethnography but less frequently seen in historical studies, she is careful to use the first‐person in her narrative where appropriate, a move that allows readers to understand more clearly her own agency in the story she tells. While some historians may find this unfamiliar, and sometimes even uncomfortable, it is important to understand why, given the author's role as participant‐observer, that this move to first‐person is necessary. It is consistent with her methodological and theoretical commitments to keep her position as one (and only one) narrator of a complex story, clear. Her look at the experiences and influence of academic advocates in Oaxaca and their cultural collaborations with indigenous activists in Oaxaca not only offers insight into the emergence of indigenous video in the form it is taking, it helps underscore the ways that analysts working in cultural geography in Oaxaca (and elsewhere) should not be understood as mere observers or commentators, but as social actors in their own right.

Kusiak, like Smith, tackles the problem of voice by employing ethnography in her analysis of radiology in Senegal. She combines this ethnography with oral history (which, although also involving interview techniques, emphasizes having informants offer an interpretation of the past) and conventional historical analyses of sources into the kind of ‘thick description’ that is a trademark of the interdisciplinary methods embraced by many science and technology studies scholars. This combination of approaches allows Kusiak to incorporate multiple voices (from doctors, patients, health workers, and aid providers, for example) that provide not just a multifaceted view of typical contemporary practices, but also a temporal richness, as we can see the rise and fall of particular ways of imagining radiology and the technological character of Senegal and the Senegalese over time through the voices of these diverse sources. Ethnography allows Kusiak to both engage with how people talk about technology, and to get insight into daily technological practices, something that can be difficult to pull out of written sources. By juxtaposing the routine practice of technological work with her informant's discourse about technology, Kusiak is able to get a more penetrating perspective on what these technologies really mean to the people who work with them.

Like Smith, Kusiak also engages in first‐person narration in the more ethnographic section of the article, making the complexities of her role in this process of participation and observation clear. The role her informants understood her to play shaped the ways they interacted with her, and the way they explained the day‐to‐day operations of radiology and its deeper meanings for Senegal. Indeed the point discussed earlier in this introduction, about the notion of radiology as being somehow ‘foreign’ to Senegal seems to have been shaped in part by their perception that Kusiak herself (and previous anthropologists and aid workers) perceived radiology as a ‘western’ technology in a ‘non‐western’ setting. In her absence, might their sense of la radio as a foreign technology diminish? How does her/our inability to answer that question affect the way we understand radiology in Senegal? Without trying to offer a definitive answer to that question, let me simply suggest that Kusiak, like Smith and others who practice ethnography in this way, use first‐person narratives and attention to the participant‐observer's own role, to allow us to see the difficulties and ambiguities that come part and parcel with the effort to tell stories that incorporate multiple voices. As theorists have emphasized, the inability of any analyst to be merely an observer does not invalidate the analysis. Instead we should see these as useful and honestly circumscribed narratives that give us deeper insight into the complex nature of the legacies of colonialism, and the nature of the postcolonial world.

Freed, in studying an era now past, must rely on the historian's traditional arsenal of sources to cope with the question of voice in her study, including numerous sources from colonial bureaucrats. Even given the limits of bureaucratic sources as already discussed, there are important insights to be gained from studying them carefully. Freed's observations concerning the flexible interpretations of roads deployed between the metropole and the colony allows her to understand this history as not just another colonial ‘technological failure’ story, but rather as a more penetrating account of the way that colonial politics help to define a working, if non‐standardized technological system, and the complex legacy of the fragmented technological choices that colonial authorities made. Giving attention to both officials and, through interviews, the experiences of those who labored on roads, she brings into focus the realities of practice that went into creating an infrastructure to ‘see like a state’ (Scott). Her careful attention to the pragmatic realities of construction (with the partial vision of the colonizers, and the financial priorities that made officials avoid experts and embrace tragic systems of labor) gives Scott's much quoted term a new depth.

In order to gain perspective on the voices of the colonized people Freed turns to both conventional historical written sources and oral histories. She uses both to recreate the logic of African footpaths, an insight essential for seeing the ways that these new roads would articulate both physically and symbolically with existing means of mobility. Supplementing her written sources with oral histories from people who worked on roads or remember road building as a part of life, she is able to add a gritty reality to her story of road construction, including especially the hardships, the multiple strategies for avoiding road labor, and the long‐term consequences of the labor relations the French put into place. Not only does this put French claims about eliminating the ‘evils of porterage’ into perspective, it also shows how these practices helped to shape one of the hallmarks of the colonial relationship and the post‐colonial legacy: a perception of the colony or postcolony as a dualistic world. That these roads are seen by some of her actors as ‘French roads’ is perhaps not so surprising. From a historian's perspective these roads seem almost the definition of hybridity, combining European notions of spatial order and economic and political relationships with African labor, local tools, and colonial bureaucrats in place of engineers. Yet it is not at all difficult to understand how the people with memories of colonial life see these roads as French creations, reflecting first and foremost the desires of the French colonial government. What is striking is the persistence of this characterization. As one of Freed's informants notes long after decolonization, roads belong to governments while footpaths belong to people. The divide between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized,’ made abundantly clear to all in the process of building roads, has seamlessly transformed into an enduring distinction between the government and the people, a distinction that the people of Cameroon now read directly into the roads themselves.

In each of these articles, the authors had the opportunity to interview people directly involved with the technology at hand, or with clear and relevant memories of those technologies from earlier times. For those working on earlier periods, this tool is of course unavailable. In these cases there is little choice but to glean what we can from written documents in light of the power relations we do understand, and to pay attention to the remnants of oral culture, like songs and stories, to try to create a clearer, polyvocal understanding of the deeper colonial past.

Conclusions

For all the disciplinary differences evident in these three articles, certain shared themes (something we did not plan, incidentally, while putting together this special issue) suggest commonalities of interest that make the study of technology in the colony and postcolony broadly compelling. I will limit myself to highlighting two themes I have already brought up in this introductory essay: the question of how a working technology is constituted, and how technologies are assigned attributes of foreignness or domesticity in colonial and postcolonial settings. Although it is certainly true that one could look at these questions in any setting, in the colony and postcolony, they give helpful insights into the power relations in which technologies are embedded, the ways that coloniality or post‐coloniality influence the cultural meaning that technology as a category or individual technologies acquire, and the meanings that are or are not attributed to the movement of technology across borders. Particularly in recent years, where the constant circulations of technology and technological work are a global phenomenon, it is especially enlightening to see how ideas of technological ownership, characterizations of ‘western’ vs. ‘non‐western’ technology, or other ways of delineating relationships to technology have changed.

It is worth taking note of an absence as well, one that I think speaks well of the development of scholarly work on the colony and post‐colony in recent years. This is the lack of failure narratives as an organizing principle in these stories, narratives that for many years were the mainstay of studies of technology (and technological development) in colonies and post‐colonies. The typical failure narrative is a story of foreign technologies introduced to a new setting, resulting in the technology's failure to work as planned and an explanation of the social, political, and technological reasons for this failure. While these stories have served an important purpose in the literature, particularly speaking against much earlier historiography which tended to valorize the introduction of new technologies in terms of progress, it has become an often‐repeated, and now very stale punch line that does not seem capable of pushing our understanding in new directions. Without suggesting that all technologies operate seamlessly or that there are no failures, there is much value to asking not how a technology fails, but instead how it works, or what it accomplishes in a given setting, something which may or may not be directly related to the narrowly defined technical task the technology is intended to perform. ¹² The attention to the functioning of technologies, and the efforts involved in putting technologies into use allows a deeper exploration of the place of technology in the life of a society. If comparisons to idealized, or at least unstated ‘elsewheres’ enter the story, they come in via the voices of informants, rather than through the assumptions of the analyst.

Considering that many readers of History and Technology have a primary scholarly interest in history, it is worth taking a moment to consider what value there is to spending some time with this interdisciplinary collection of articles. The scholarly motivations behind these studies differ and accordingly historical narrative plays a varying role, from the central focus of the study (Freed), to a key element in a broader study that unites past and present orientations (Kusiak) to an important, if less‐central exploration of the context that makes the more present‐oriented study meaningful (Smith). However, the shared concerns with investigating place and spatial relationships, and critically engaging with multiple voices at the sites of research, suggest that it is worth thinking through multiple methodological approaches for enriching traditional historical practices, particularly when, as is the case here, we must grapple with non‐written sources in order to gain a more informed perspective. Adding a fully ethnographic dimension to oral histories may be quite valuable in studies of recent history where such a method is workable, despite the added interpretive complexity that this can involve. Even aside from the prospect of methodological innovation however, engaging with studies from other disciplines offers the opportunity for historians to consider how they might bring their own expertise to bear on the findings of anthropologists, geographers, and STS scholars.

There is a tremendous opportunity to historicize important issues that emerge in present‐day oriented ethnographic studies. Kusiak suggests that we need to give more serious consideration to the theme of corruption and technology, and how we might usefully unpack the concept of corruption to give greater insight into technology as a process of sociocultural exchange and negotiation. We should pay attention to key spatial relationships of technologies and people as both Smith and Freed do, considering especially the temporal dimensions of the circulations of people and technology and how these two not necessarily identical circulations influence each other and historical actors' understandings of how to constitute a working technology. Finally we might consider the ways that various historical actors' ideas about their own cultural relationships to technology (e.g. whether or not they are ‘technological’ people, or whether such a concept even has meaning) change over time. Readers will probably uncover others as they read these articles. The question of how technology is implicated in the political, economic, cultural and social practices of colony is intimately tied to the continually evolving meaning of technology in the postcolony. Mutual engagement between historians and other scholars interested in technology in the colony and postcolony has the potential to produce valuable insights and new areas of exploration for this rich area of study.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Martin Collins for his insights into, enthusiasm for, and patience with this issue, which helped make it possible. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader for the thoughtful and constructive readings of these articles and of my initial version of the introduction. Last but not least, my thanks for Libbie, Pauline, and Laurel for their terrific articles and their intellectual generosity.

Notes

1. Arnold, ‘Europe, Technology, and Colonialism.’

2. Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience.’

3. For technology and science in civilizing missions see the classic work by Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. For the linkage between colonial and postcolonial scientific and technological commitments, see Prakash, Another Reason.

4. An outstanding recent example is Storey, Guns, Race, and Power.

5. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.

6. Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science.’

7. Arnold, ‘Europe, Technology, and Colonialism,’ 96.

8. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

9. See for example Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires and Headrick's influential Tools of Empire. Headrick has recently expanded his attention to environment in Power over Peoples.

10. Said, Orientalism; Guha, ‘On Some Aspects.’

11. See for example Anderson, Collectors of Lost Souls; Prakash, Another Reason; Storey, Guns, Race, and Power.

12. A now classic study in the anthropology of development, James Ferguson's The Anti‐politics Machine, helped re‐orient development studies by doing something analogous: asking what work development projects did, rather than focusing on the ways they failed to achieve the goals set forth by their advocates.