Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony

Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony

Mrázek, Rudolf

Paperback

Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History, Book 3

AnthropologySoutheast Asian History

ISBN10: 0691091625
ISBN13: 9780691091624
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Mar 24 2002
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.26
Language: English

Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about things, Rudolf Mrázek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature.

The central chapters comprise vignettes and take up, in turn, transportation (from shoes to road-building to motorcycle clubs), architecture (from prison construction to home air-conditioning), optical technologies (from photography to fingerprinting), clothing and fashion, and the introduction of radio and radio stations. The text clusters around a group of fascinating recurring characters representing colonialism, nationalism, and the awkward, inevitable presence of the European cultural, intellectual, and political avant-garde: Tillema, the pharmacist-author of Kromoblanda; the explorer/engineer IJzerman; the Javanese princess Kartina; the Indonesia nationalist journalist Mas Marco; the Dutch novelist Couperus; the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer; and Dutch left-wing liberal Wim Wertheim and his wife.

In colonial Indies, as elsewhere, people employed what Proust called remembering and what Heidegger called thinging to sense and make sense of the world. In using this observation to approach Indonesian society, Mrázek captures that society off balance, allowing us to see it in unfamiliar positions. The result is a singular work with surprises for readers throughout the social sciences, not least those interested in Southeast Asia or colonialism more broadly.

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