Americanity as a concept, Asia as method: on historicizing Cold War technopolitics

This piece compares two recent volumes on transnational networks of expertise in two different regions of the world. What unites them is the thematic focus on technology, science, and development, but more saliently, the historical period they cover. Exploring the role of experts in Cold War developmentalist regimes in Latin America and Asia, the chapters included in these volumes analyze the ways in which mostly agrarian societies wagered their national destinies on the promise of modernization. In order to achieve their goals, the leaders of these nations participated in multilayered networks of knowledge and industry that rested on powerful state actors and, among them, two rising powers in the postwar political landscape: the United States and Japan. The present article reviews and draws interesting parallels and differences between their conceptual and methodological approaches and argues in favor of the recovery of topological thinking in the historiography of science, technology and society.

Centered on Latin America, Itineraries of Expertise reconstructs the emerging regional order through the insights of a cultural turn in Cold War historiography. As artists, writers, intellectuals, and students come to be recognized as important actors who shaped the conflict in the region, the editors of this volume put forward a similar treatment for technoscientific experts. Against their frequent portrayal as removed from politics, the book historicizes scientists and engineers’ role in a wide array of development initiatives within more or less explicit political projects by governments and international agencies. As rulers feared the communist menace, they sought the assistance of an equally wary United States to carry out long-dreamed projects of national modernization. Involving dramatic infrastructural interventions, experts were thus enlisted in technologically-mediated programs to quell political agitation while crafting upright citizens and modern consumers.

Modernization became policy for Latin American governments and its convergence with the northern neighbor’s gospel of development laid out the grounds for multiple individual trajectories to intertwine with each other in often messy networks of power and knowledge. Itineraries offers a fruitful disciplinary blend of Science and Technology Studies (STS) with environmental history to rethink the Latin American Cold War through its concern with human and nonhuman relations within the intersections of technology, power and diplomacy. It does so by asking how technologies and experts traveled along circuits of expertise, forging alliances with aid donors, state agencies, private companies and purveyors of local knowledge within processes of state formation and nation-building. Against orthodoxies that reify modernization as a monolithic imposition of postwar empires on docile recipients of foreign knowledge, Itineraries echoes previous scholarship in criticizing the view of science and technology in Latin America as “imported magic” (Medina, da Costa, and Holmes 2014).

The book is, however, emphatic in its aim of decentering the nation-state from environmental and technoscientific histories of Latin America by replacing familiar chronologies that constrain environmental processes within the temporal boundaries of the state. It reframes temporalities in relation to the fluctuating influence of experts in political discourse. Thus, instead of using periods like “republican” or “post-WWII,” the studies in Itineraries deal with stages of electrification or the Green Revolution, which can be traced to the early twentieth century. This is one of the strong points of the book and, as Gilbert M. Joseph, a historian specialized in Latin America–US relations, upholds in the first chapter, the Cold War in Latin America was especially violent because it channeled historical struggles for radical reform and revolution that politicized everyday life. In a related move, but not explicitly developed in the thematic chapters, the introduction draws a direct comparison between modernizing elites and eighteenth-century physiocracy, which professed that governance ought to follow physics, drawing its authority from the rules of nature known and managed by enlightened experts. From physiocracy to the Porfirian científicos of the late 1870s, positivism remained ingrained in Latin American elites. Cold War modernization theory and capitalist development can thus be seen as an outgrowth of earlier views already present in the region.

The authors of Itineraries take distance from historiographies centered on funding institutions such as the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, or the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean which, albeit central to shaping the developmental landscape, are not sufficient to understand Cold War expertise in the region. They recognize that institutional politics shaped the paths experts themselves were able to travel through, as certain programs opened channels of funding that influenced circulation of experts in particular places, while foreclosing others. This is most evident in Funes-Monzote and Palmer’s chapter on the Cuban-Canadian livestock exchange program. Traditionally, Cuba had dedicated extensive lands to beef production while importing other foodstuffs from the United States. But after the 1961 embargo, it was forced to rely on different partnerships to ensure food security. Observing that its dairy production was superbly deficient, the Cuban government consulted with a French expert with previous experience in socialist countries, who recommended a shift from beef to milk, which provided more efficient nutrition. Increasing milk yield became of utmost importance and Cuba “challenged climate and geopolitics” to improve its livestock first by importing bulls and later genetic material from Canada to strengthen the island’s milk and beef production. The program lived on for decades, until oil imports and subsidies from the Soviet Union collapsed, triggering a crisis that revealed newer forms of dependence. While production was native, it was predicated on the intensive use of energy and chemical inputs that the island could not obtain by itself (Itineraries, 310).

Engineering Asia represents a similar attempt, although focusing on Japan’s internal development and its relations with Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Burma. Both books critique the limited understandings of the politics of technical aid in postcolonial regions. In developing this critique, however, Engineering takes a different approach than its Latin American counterpart. In the latter, people and places become the grounding sites for understanding how Cold War technopolitics shaped itineraries of expertise through which “the Cold War not only entered Latin America” but “Latin America’s internal historical struggles also entered global circulation” (Itineraries, 16). It maps the region’s open veins as they transport modernizing agents in and out, articulating preterite domestic concerns with an ideologically polarized world. In contrast, the volume on Asia starts its analysis on the much more concentrated moment of Japan’s defeat. This is not to say that Engineering is strictly limited in its temporal scope, as it connects Asian developmental concerns with previous periods like the European and Japanese colonial regimes.

There is a slight disparity in the technological fields they analyze. While Itineraries traces the circulation of expertise in varied areas like irrigation and electricity infrastructure, the Green Revolution, rural education, livestock genetics and disease research, visual culture, space exploration, housing, urban transportation, natural conservation, biology, and institutional frameworks for research; Engineering selects only a handful of topics to develop a web of analyses that pair up very nicely with others in different sections. Thus, the history of Asian Studies in Japan, industrial and construction firms’ methods for procuring contracts, rice breeding programs, petroleum infrastructure, and dams feature recurrently throughout the book, tightly packed within the narrative of Japanese industrialization, colonial expansion into Asia and postwar reconstruction. The repetition of topics (but not of perspectives) benefits from the editors’ gracious suggestions for connecting chapters.

Engineering Asia identifies a continuity from the Japanese colonial project to the postwar order under US guidance. Resuming global trade after war devastation required aid schemes to revitalize national economies while expanding the American market. After the breakdown of European colonial regimes in many Asian countries, economic nationalism proved to be “a major driving force behind the reconstruction of the network of colonial development into a network of international development under the Cold War.” Under the banner of development, postcolonial Asian leaders sought to appease ethnic and political tensions, “engineering” them into a shared dream of prosperity (Engineering, 3). As in Latin America, developmentalism became a source of legitimacy for authoritarian governments.

Both volumes cover large continents and a variety of topics that lend themselves to multiple comparisons and creative lendings. A comparative approach, however, will need to be equipped with concepts and methodologies to make this a fruitful endeavor. It is here where Engineering Asia, in my view, can serve as an inspiration for Latin American histories of technology and environment. Hiromi Mizuno opens the volume with a remarkable argumentative and methodological purview. The argument is that Japan attained postwar development on account of its engineers, entrepreneurs and specialists who “created, expanded and followed” opportunities opened by war reparation treaties that strapped the country in a series of relations with its former enemies and colonies, channeling capital flows from US reconstruction aid programs during the occupation. But Japan’s position as an “aid hub” that “connected the USA, Japan and postcolonial Asia” (Engineering, 3) has been frequently misunderstood as a consequence of economic success, and not, as Mizuno contends, the other way round. To support her argument, she proposes a distribution model to replace the “hub-and-spoke” image prevalent in conventional understandings of aid as a trickle-down process from the United States to the Third World via Japan.

The alternative is taken directly from the economic anthropology of Melanesia. Mizuno draws analogies between industrial development through technological aid and the kula ring, a gift exchange system that connects various islands in the Pacific through the circulation of ceremonial objects with powerful symbolic effects. She insists in using the model “not as mere rhetoric, but as an actual configuration in the historical conditions in postwar Asia” (Engineering, 4), taking aid-giving as a condition for economic recovery. Thus, the kula ring appears as an analytical topology that helps elucidate the intricate systems of knowledge exchange and technological transfer that propelled many parts of Asia to economic development.

The ring, she claims, not only facilitated flows but translated technology and economic capital into symbolic power, (more or less) effectively erasing Japan’s troublesome past as an imperialist aggressor. Japanese planners understood that Japan’s economic rise depended on elevating its neighbours’ capacity to absorb the products it produced during its period of rapid economic growth. Hence, “economic cooperation” functioned as a symbolic operation that transformed wartime compensation into postwar benevolence. Mizuno recovers the figure of Akamatsu Kaname, the economist behind the Flying Geese paradigm of the 1930s, which posited that it was not Japan who would lead Asia, as the imperial imagination of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere proposed, but it would be Asia which would help Japan “take off again” (Engineering, 25). Thus, instead of patiently waiting for peers to industrialize by themselves, it was crucial to provide them with necessary infrastructure so that the vivid imagery of geese flying in formation toward development could take shape. The kula ring of Asian development enabled the circulation of reparation/aid objects as simultaneously obligated payments and gifts, with the effect of revealing mutual dependencies between donor and receiver (Engineering, 29). Mizuno and her associates, through Kaname, utilize Asia as a method to accomplish their own historiographic goals.

Engineering Asia’s well-crafted proposal is further supported by the thematic chapters, giving them a shared purpose that, in sum, does a better job in advancing a theoretical model to counter simplistic narratives of trickled-down modernity from the West to the rest. The topology of aid-giving it proposes helps us visualize and grasp the multilayered, multi-sited institutional arrangements and negotiations that allowed individual experts to build their expertise. The kula ring, then, serves as a conceptual device, “structuring phenomena in practice, which is enabled (and disabled) by particular technologies” (Marres 2012, 289). In contrast, the multiple itineraries of experts in Latin America leave the reader with a sense of openness, insisting on a kind of methodological individualism that focuses on experts as they navigate mobile networks, as if their traces were non-recurrent. Traveling experts, in Asia and Latin America alike, were part of larger state and continental governance projects, but portability adopted different shapes following political imaginaries and calculations (Mehos and Moon 2011). Fernando Purcell counters this charge when his analysis of dam building in South America gives us a glimpse at the circuits of expertise that established pathways that could be transited once and again by new experts, suggesting a sort of stabilization of individual itineraries, but this is left untheorized, so as not to echo center–periphery thinking, the bête noire of the volume. Needless to say, this is not an injunction to uncritically retrieve dependency theory or to hastily transplant models, but a call for historians and science and technology scholars of Latin America to reflect into the postcolonial mirror to theorize the region’s experiences to come up not only with detailed historical accounts but topological models of cooperation and innovation.

Engineering dedicates two chapters to the role of agricultural science in producing a miracle crop to secure national nutrition. Tatsushi Fujihara’s chapter on Hōrai rice focuses on a short-stem japonica hybrid rice designed in tropical Taiwan. It is presented as a “pre-history” that traces agronomists’ impetus for improvement and faith in laboratory-bred seeds at least half a century before the Green Revolution, during the Japanese regime. Likewise, Tae-Ho Kim tells the story of Tongil rice, developed by Korean scientists in the midst of a polarizing war at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute. Tongil was, like Hōrai, a hybrid of japonica and indica rice varieties. Tongil means reunification and it represented the stakes in scientific mastery. As South Korea succeeded in developing its own blueprint for the Green Revolution, it could showcase itself as the most developed, and thus, legitimate, Korea.

These chapters present a very similar structure of research cooperation and indeed share a lot with Timothy Lorek’s work on what could be called, following Fujihara, a pre-history of the Green Revolution in Colombia. Lorek recovers the forgotten efforts of two research-oriented public servants with reformist ideals by analyzing their connections with inter-American networks of expertise, through a renowned Puerto Rican mycologist who they enlisted to work at an experimental station funded by landowners and the Colombian government. The explosive situation in rural Colombia during the 1940s prompted visiting agents from the Rockefeller Foundation to suggest extending their experimental program in Mexico to the Cauca Valley. Thus, the Green Revolution arrived, but found therein a ready-made alliance of scientists interested in improved crops, who connected the valley with the greater Caribbean, the Antilles and the southern United States, outlining a model for technical collaboration to be exported to the rest of the region. Not only was the Green Revolution not “imposed” on local society, but its actual groundwork had been made by Latin American experts who found in US cooperation the necessary means to accomplish their own agricultural visions, translating their “local cultural imaginary of bountiful potential to fit with an emerging global neo-Malthusianism and the politics of communist containment” (Itineraries, 109).

If these feats of science were accomplished at all, it is largely because the experts’ personal and local projects tapped into crucial infrastructures of research that furnished them with equipment, personnel and funding. Itineraries includes several stories of experts who navigated transnational networks, gathering allies and enemies on their way to securing support. Engineering does so too, however, its conceptual strength lies in the most “structural” chapters which explicate the formation of such infrastructures in Asia.

Jin Sato examines the role of the private sector’s presence in Japanese postwar economic cooperation policy in Asia. Previous historiographical bias toward 1970s aid policy had the effect of overestimating the importance of ministerial and interministerial politics, giving the impression of Japanese postwar aid as a primordially state-led project, Sato argues instead that tokushu hōjin, a group of publicly-funded special corporate bodies led by powerful businessmen, were in fact responsible for laying out the infrastructure of Japanese aid during the transformative 1950s and 1960s. Following Mizuno’s suggestion of a developmentalist translation of war reparations into aid, Sato contends that these quasi-governmental organizations helped depoliticize Japanese wartime involvement in these countries transforming reparations into “economic cooperation,” a term originally used to describe the link between the United States and Japan but deployed to describe later Japanese activities with Asian neighbors. Cooperation was a state policy that was not, however, centrally implemented. Bilateral agreements were handled by different ministries and the tokushu hōjin, with their flexibility for hiring and generating profits, were responsible for exploring and exploiting potential niches in aid-receiving countries.

Private interest groups articulated a domestic infrastructure for Japan’s cooperation and development assistance by connecting state ministries and industry experts in the process of implementing war reparation programs, but they also had the effect of cloaking Japanese national interest in private capitalist clothes. And it was indeed perceived as such by critics in Southeast Asia, where rising economic nationalism started to judge these ventures as a form of neocolonial invasion. Therefore, managing postcolonial nationalisms became crucial for Japanese cooperation. Masato Karashima’s chapter deals with the formation of knowledge infrastructures that enabled academic, bureaucratic, industrial and political actors to form a “development complex.” Karashima unravels the colonial legacies of Japanese area studies and their reconstitution after the war, showing that Japan’s increasing economic and technical cooperation was mirrored by growing funding of research institutions. This was deliberately so, as the regional wave of decolonization intersected with Cold War geopolitical imperatives. As Sato identified, critical nationalisms throughout postcolonial Asia became a threat to the Japanese strategy, buttressing a need to understand its neighbors by “reconfiguring earlier research agendas of colonial management to Japan’s new position as a key US ally” (Engineering, 62). Asian studies in Japan had thus far carried a heavy bias toward Chinese affairs. The Cold War order shifted priorities and refocused area studies toward Southeast Asia, realigning networks by strengthening relations with the newly independent nations.

These chapters on the colonial roots of Japanese domestic infrastructure of postwar technology aid provide a fascinating view of how developmentalism encompassed more than technoscience, but also experts in politics, history and cultural issues. The institutional architecture that hosted these experts was the product of a combination of private and public efforts under the banner of Pan-Asianist development. This development, however, was strongly grounded on state-led capitalism and public support for expertise and research. This model was then exported to Asian nations in an effort to replicate the former’s economic miracle. In a stark contrast, Javiera Barandiarán reconstructs the present history of Chilean research infrastructure, elucidating its current undoing as the product of free-market ideology, which revoked the previous affinity between expertise and state. Scientists began to be defined exclusively as those who published in indexed academic journals, contrary to previous imaginations of public science as useful for development. We become aware of ironic connections through the story of CENMA, a laboratory set up to provide the state with environmental knowledge for decision making. In 1992, it received technical aid from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in an effort to replicate its model of scientific advice by furnishing the Chilean commission for environmental regulation with in-house capacity to produce knowledge to support lawmaking. The Japanese model thus confronted unabashed neoliberalism in its cradle when state officials rejected JICA’s offer arguing that “under Chilean law; the state cannot […] have a privileged relationship with any one group” (Itineraries, 292). Under late Cold War politics, scientific expertise withered away from Chilean technocracy as a group of economic experts formed in Chicago experimented with a new form of capitalism.

Another common thread is the attention both books pay to the quintessential developmentalist policy of the twentieth century: dam building. Tore Olsson’s illuminating account of Mexican hydraulic engineering in the 1940s develops a “history of comparisons,” analyzing the ways in which experts and politicians “imagined long-distant places as sources of inspiration and legitimacy” (Itineraries, 72). As the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) proved its success in water management and state planning, Mexican leaders sought to replicate it while negotiating domestic issues like land reform and mass politics. Mexican experts began scrutinizing the regional economy of Tennessee, revealing an untold United States from which taking similar policies actually seemed plausible. The TVA’s efficacy in remaking regional landscapes and its aesthetics of state power inspired not only Mexicans but also governments around the world. Thus, irrigation and hydroelectricity through large infrastructural projects came to be seen as a “universal tongue” of development that spoke of “soil fertility, forests, electricity, phosphate, factories, minerals, rivers,” which, according to a US official, required “no English interpreter […] when a Chinese or a Peruvian sees this series of working dams” (Itineraries, 220).

The ubiquity of dam building in development imaginaries of practice is further explored by Fernando Purcell who follows its spread in Chile, Colombia and Peru. In a move reminiscent of Japanese war reparations through “goods and services” instead of cash, dams were seen as an important strategy, in part, because they fostered diplomatic relations owing to technology transfer programs and the sustained flow of spare replacement parts that linked corporate suppliers and buyer states. It also carved paths through which engineers traveled, consolidating centers of expertise by gathering sprawling networks and allowing “local facts to be compared, tested, confirmed and connected together” (Itineraries, 222), revealing the importance of local knowledge in the creation of global expertise.

In a closely related chapter, Aaron Moore traces Japanese imperial discourse and practice in Southeast Asia by analyzing Japan’s largest development consultancy firm, led by an engineer who had played a significant role in colonial Korea. Although a native Japanese speaker, Yutaka Kubota was proficient in the universal tongue of development, if only with a martial accent. Challenging notions of Japan as a mere executioner of US policy, his plans sometimes contradicted American plans for regional light industry and gradual economic growth. Kubota convinced, for example, Burmese leaders to opt for rapid development based on heavy industry, following Korea's example. Kubota suggested a “comprehensive development” plan modeled after the Sup'ung Dam which fed the state-led chemical and metallurgy industry. Moore’s chapter also draws parallels between Japanese–Burmese cooperation and colonial programs by questioning their shared histories of violence and embracement of militaristic regimes. Dams on either side of the Pacific were thus able not only to contain water bodies, but also communism by encroaching rural territories and subjugating suspect indigenous communities through dispossession and sexual violence (Itineraries, 219).

Even though postcoloniality is not explicitly invoked in Itineraries, it is a concept that underpins its aims as it critically analyzes “conventional accounts of so-called ‘global technoscience,’” by revealing “how scientific and technological endeavors become sites for fabricating and linking local and global identities, as well as sites for disrupting … the distinctions between global and local” (Anderson 2002, 644). In this vein, a pressing issue for some of the authors in this book is to challenge and “dismantle” center–periphery models. Nearly all chapters evidence a flow of technology and knowledge that is more complex and multidirectional than simple diffusion accounts such as those of Bassalla and Rostow. Instead, by closely studying individual experts’ trajectories and the “localized application and generation of knowledge,” it foregrounds intraregional exchanges and other South-South collaborations, proving modernization orthodoxies wrong (Itineraries, 8).

Yet, in this effort to multiply connections and decenter the global north from networks of expertise, a rather odd effect reminiscent of earlier postcolonial discussions arises. Although understanding modernization beyond diffusionist models is indeed necessary, the shift to more “cultural and/or place-based histories of technology and the environment” (Itineraries, 8) has to avoid sinking into “a sea of local histories” (Chambers 1987 cited in Anderson 2002, 648). The transnational and multi-sited histories contained here dispense the reader from such a fragmentary view. However, Itineraries reiterates the challenge by declaring that not only North-centric models of diffusion, but “dependency theory has also divided the world into a series of connected dichotomies: developed–underdeveloped, urban–rural, North–South, center–periphery,” and while they are useful to recognize a “greater diversity of experiences,” they have “continued to position parts of the world as having less status than others” (Itineraries, 306). I will not rehash the diffusion-dependency debates of the late 1970s, as the shift toward contact zones, following the formulation by Mary Louise Pratt, represents a step forward in the understanding of subaltern technoscientific agency, but the overstated claims of decentering and multiplicity, particularly when no alternative to structural explanation is attempted can be indeed disconcerting. Militant simplifications that reduce contact zones to relations of power populated by active centers and passive peripheries (or their reversal) are, as Gilbert Joseph rightly declares, insufficient to describe the “multilayered collaborations” and the “multivocality of negotiation, borrowing, and exchange; and of redeployment and reversal” that actively attempt hegemonization (Itineraries, 48).

My criticism seeks not to recover any given master narrative to gather up fragments and recompose a pre-designed mosaic but to take up the suggestion by Fernando Coronil to bridge polarities between parts and wholes (Coronil 1998, xi). If the postcolonial focus on locality affords “richly textured, multi-sited studies of modern technoscience” (Anderson 2002, 652), is the abandonment of center–periphery simply a late accomplishment of recent Latin American studies of technoscience? Local histories that highlight transnational agencies should enable the composition of alternative middle-ground structures, or more richly textured topologies of power/knowledge. If structural forms are left untheorized or seen as secondary in order to give precedence to localized connections, one would have to ask why are these contact zones of technoscience relegated to (otherwise) peripheral regions. Admittedly, the volume is about Latin America, but these chapters deal with nodes in networks that coproduce the web of interconnection of which they are part. If, as the postcolonial lens allows, “the ‘centre’ in the multi-sited imaginary of postcolonial accounts is just as local, and should be considered as another node in a network” (Anderson 2002, 652), perhaps some chapters could have been included to deal with those same networks as seen from the perspective of local technocrats in the northern centers of calculation.

What I mean with using Asia as method is to let these stories of circulating experts give shape to conceptual devices to better understand the region’s historical dilemmas. What Itineraries accomplishes is to break away from previous diffusionist and dependency models that provide simple topologies of exchange. Yet, it proposes no explicit alternative, we are left with a postcolonial mess of variegated canals and dams that regulate flows of expertise, but no coherent sense as to why they were constituted as such. As Engineering shows, it is possible to theorize these flows and reconstruct the infrastructures through which experts, technologies and knowledge traveled, organizing a material and symbolic efficacy for development. Itineraries deals a blow to dependency or center–periphery models, a home-grown topological device that emerged precisely from within Latin American Cold War expertise. CEPAL economists comprise, too, the population of circulating experts, and I would argue that they were crucial to understanding the shape of developmental cooperation during this era (Bracarense 2016, 37). Furthermore, Latin American thinking on science, technology and society is deeply rooted in questions of critical development and unequal exchanges in international relations. From the late 1950s to early 1980s, a strong political concern with industrialization, modernization and development dominated academic discussion, particularly, the apparent “absence of virtuous relations between the development of S&T and innovations” (Kreimer and Vessuri 2017, 21). During this period, center–periphery thinking came to form the basis for explaining the problematic relations between the underdeveloped Third World and the industrialized core countries (Dumoulin, Kleiche-Dray, and Quet 2018, 284; Medina, da Costa, and Holmes 2014, 8). Admittedly, this approach hindered research on the cultural aspects of science and technology, privileging a rigid structuralist overview, which seems to be the reason Itineraries shies away from giving too much credit to stabilized trajectories.

If Kaname’s developmental economics can be revitalized and reshaped with its theoretical encounter with the Melanesian gift-exchange system to think of the linkages of science, technology and industry in Asia, why are the editors of Itineraries so quick to discard Latin American critical thinking in economics? A serious engagement with dependency theory might be needed in order to theorize the fragmentary stories so vividly and interestingly told in this valuable addition to the history of science, technology, and the environment in Latin America. This is not to say that these accounts need to be readjusted to comply with the tenets of that theory, but incorporating its framing of underdevelopment as a condition of development elsewhere might prove useful in understanding the specific kinds of expertise and technological solutions that were implemented in the region by new and existing networks of cooperation. Conversely, the political fixes that dependency theorists envisioned for Latin America, namely, that its constitutive nations “could be improved […] with increased national autonomy and less reliance on foreign capital, foreign goods, and foreign priorities” (Medina, da Costa, and Holmes 2014, 9) explain some of the terms on which nationalism and cooperation were practiced through technoscience and industry, but also their shortcomings. If dependency theory fostered a Third Worldist ideology rooted in regional solidarity with postcolonial nations that was nonetheless limited by an inflexible national imaginary, a somewhat similar phenomenon can be identified in Asia. What explains the different outcomes of economic nationalism in these places?

Japan was aware of emerging alliances within the decolonizing world, responding to it by engaging with its structures of sentiment by cultivating sympathies with non-aligned regimes. This meant emphasizing a Pan-Asianism that in some cases played up its disagreements with the American “global imaginary of integration” to buttress Japanese leadership (Engineering, 94). Hence, this Japanese-inflected Pan-Asianism was fundamental in the formation of the kula ring of technical aid/war reparations. On what terms was American cooperation given and received in Latin America? The grand scheme, of course, is Cold War containment of communism, as Truman’s Four Points program explicitly strove to, but is that all that there is to tell? Itineraries connects these stories with larger national processes, but no overall or regional rationale is given from the point of view of Latin America.

One of the most interesting conceptual blueprints that Itineraries furnishes the reader with is the notion of “middle modernism” presented by Emily Wakild on her chapter about Amazon forest conservation. She characterizes the tropical forest as a type of middle landscape, a swath of “public land unavailable for exploitation” that “did not fit easily into developmentalist tropes for private enterprise or land reform” (Itineraries, 262). As the modernizing aspect of conservation came not from its potential for economic development but from its power to convey a civilized and scientifically-informed concern for nature, the establishment of a reserve and research station became a form of middle modernism that allowed professionals from the middle classes and otherwise sidelined groups like women to engage in nation-building projects. Wakild is especially sensitive to local knowledge and gender issues, perspectives that are not well explored elsewhere in the volume, as they inform her case for a “scientific resistance” that is specific to the interests and preoccupations of this middle group of professionals. They exercised a specific kind of resistance to the gospel of development that was, nonetheless, modern in its underpinnings. Their resistance was carried out not by presenting conservation and development as completely antithetical, but by leveraging their capacity to become better spokesmen for nature through science. Thus, Amazon wilderness came to be preserved on account of emerging research in “biodiversity.”

Mark Healy’s chapter about a housing program in Colombia can be also read through the notion of middle modernism. Healy proposes a vision of Colombian statecraft through the experience of CINVA (Spanish for Inter-American Housing and Planning Center), an architecture/social science research center that transformed top-down planning into a more processual and participatory model for rural community development. Healy argues that the commitment shown by CINVA’s activist professionals to field research and integrating peasants’ perspectives was key in the making of the Colombian developmentalist state, enunciating its language of modernizing design and social science, but turning it to its head. Given its role as a transnational contact zone of discourses and practices of housing and development, as well as between urban renewal and rural development (Itineraries, 200), CINVA paradoxically strengthened the authority of urban housing experts while undermining many of their theoretical assumptions. Born in 1948 as the first Organization of American States sponsored institute that was not based in the United States, it was planned to work alongside the Cauca Valley Authority as a strongly centralized institution that would technically mandate housing projects in Colombia and the continent. CINVA instead became engaged in reworking high modernist planning into a middle modernist practice, owing to their campesinista and latinamericanist sensibility. Mid-twentieth-century Inter-Americanism, led by the United States, also had to negotiate postcolonial nationalism and anti-imperialist currents among its southern neighbors (Sheinin 2000).

Following similar concerns, Thomas Rath comments on the role of the category of Latin America in shaping the perceptions and actions of politicians and scientists involved in livestock epidemic control. Intense debates on the national and geopolitical stakes of veterinary policy informed the institutions created to deal with this problem, creating a strong support for alternative channels of cooperation and development among Latin American peers. Rath underscores the strategies for resisting United States’ power and scientific authority (Itineraries, 172–173) and showcases the Brazilian and Mexican laboratories’ regional postcolonial commitments, though embedded and folded into funding schemes coming partly from the north. Their commitment to Latin America as a geosocial body speaks of the potency of America as a concept in decolonial critique, as Aníbal Quijano has frequently argued. Itineraries closes with a celebration of novel narratives of technology and science in Latin America, insisting on the ways its chapters contribute to tearing down the undue emphasis of foreign actors in the region, minimizing the contributions of Latin American peoples and institutions, while rejecting the view of Latin America as peripheral (Itineraries, 308, 321). This suggests an understanding of peripheral status as a form of passivity, but world-system analysis tells not the story of passive secondary actors but of active patterns of peripheralization (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 555) that hold up and sustain metropolitan development. Center–periphery thinking, and its dependentist variant, is a legacy of Latin American Cold War critical economic expertise, and in a way, a theoretical infrastructure that is good to think with. Itineraries successfully opens new narratives and areas of study. But again, without a topological imagination that allows us to visualize network stabilizations with some degree of distinctiveness, we risk drowning in a sea of mobile fragments.

Itineraries proposes a change of perspective, from periphery to the center of analysis, by postulating a different Cold War geography. But, is inversion the only possible move? Peripherality is rejected in terms of its inadequacy to voice Latin American agency, however as a whole, the book seems to think that this entails rejecting peripherality as a concept. Eliding peripherality in favor of unscheduled itineraries risks neglecting the colonial inflection of situated knowledges in Latin America (Grosfoguel 2002, 208). Almost thirty years ago, Quijano and Wallerstein (1992) argued in favor of “Americanity” as a foundational concept in the making of the modern world through the lens of the coloniality of power. Americanity, as a set of institutions and worldviews that sustained racial hierarchies with consequences in the division of labor and world-system ranks, was a historical product that regarded the New World through the lens of absolute newness and otherness. It set the rules for the hierarchically layered system of interstate relations based on ethnicity. The ubiquitous division of the West and the non-West remains the most salient legacy of Americanity as a concept. Quijano and Wallerstein propose that the hierarchy embedded in Americanity remains to this day, even if some countries changed their rank within the order, most notably the divergence between North and South America during the nineteenth century and amplified in the postwar period explored in these volumes.

In a related criticism, Asia as method is a challenge to Western hegemony by multiplying “frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview, so that anxiety over the West can be diluted, and productive critical work can move forward” (Chen 2010, 223). It is a call to theorizing with decolonization (and deimperialization) as a horizon. In Kuan-Hsing Chen’s work, it is specifically a call to thinkers in Asia to extract from their historical experience a “new vision of agency and subjectivity in critical relation to colonial modernity” (Anderson 2012, 446). It can be argued that the accounts of Asian development contained in Engineering fall, too, within the system of “Americanity” as othering and subordination in the world order. With its own particular history of premodern imbrication with the West, its colonial peripheralization converges in a striking manner with that of Latin America, yet affording them a different position. The notion of development espoused by national elites shares a faith in expertise and a political subordination to powerful neighbors, connected through the Japan-United States nexus. If the outcomes of their modernization processes differ, it is in part because of the contrasting relations that these countries developed with their closest core nations, as Engineering shows in a convincing manner. The kula ring device provides not only a topological model of development as it was practiced in Asia, but an analytical methodology that proves very elucidating.¹

Using Asia as method, then, is not to reify Asia through an appeal to essential values (Sakai 2010 cited in Anderson 2012, 446), radical alterity or even alternative modernities (Anderson 2017, 231), but to use “Asia as an imaginary anchoring point to […] become one another’s reference points” (Chen 2010, xv). As reviewed earlier, some of the chapters in Itineraries provide the grounds to similar theorizing in Latin America, but the overarching framework falls short of such a goal. The appeal to regional frames of reference is not exactly a novel way of thinking about coloniality and postcoloniality. As Anderson recognizes in his reflection on the uses of Asia as method in STS, it echoes earlier concerns by Latin American critics such as Quijano and Walter Mignolo who advanced border thinking as a site for hybrid and fractured enunciation in contact zones (Anderson 2012, 449). Thus, having traveled from political sociology in Latin America, decolonial thinking mutated into subaltern and postcolonial cultural critique in South and East Asia, then to Asian STS and finally, making a round trip to Latin American STS. Using (Latin) America as a method for theory making in studies of science, technology, and society thus requires us not to engage with “Latin American values” (whichever those might be) nor traditional knowledge in essentialized form, but with their exclusions and hybridizations with the precarious (under)development of frail modernities (Velho and Ureta 2019) that these itineraries of expertise reveal.

I have highlighted some similarities and differences in Latin American and Asian Cold War experiences as told by Engineering Asia and Itineraries of Expertise, but I would like to add that the connecting nexus that results from Japanese/US hegemony in each region provides an interesting site for exploring Kim’s (2017) suggestion of using “Asia–Latin America” as a method, articulating south-south comparisons by dislocating the West from its centralizing function in comparative discourse. Instead of taking up the West as a universal point of reference, the emergence of China and other Southeast Asian powerhouses as the economic centers of a quasi-Cold War standoff with the United States allows to rethink development in relation to science and technology in a different manner. If “east-south relations cannot be understood as free of unequal power dynamics” (Kim 2017, 107), the terms on which those relations are built draw from previous hierarchies and histories of national modernization within the capitalist world-system. Exploring recent Sino-Peruvian relations, Gonzalez-Vicente (2012) dusts off the disavowed topology of CEPAL experts to confront it with Chinese investments in Latin America to ponder if they can be characterized as new dependency, coming to terms with its limitations but redeeming it as partially explanatory under the light of flexible sovereignties, transnational production and extraction. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with its focus on infrastructural development and modern extractive techniques can potentially serve as a site for theorizing STS in the Asia-Latin America nexus.

Notes

1 For other deployments of the kula ring, see Anderson (2008) and Ferry (2013).