1. Chapter 5: The spectacle of modernity.
- Author
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Fisher, Eleanor, Arce, Alberto, and Long, Norman
- Subjects
MICROSCOPES ,SUPERNATURAL beings ,DISEASES ,MODERNITY ,DEVELOPMENT economics - Abstract
This chapter offers a look at the use of microscope to generate a complex set of relationships between people and the forest, supernatural beings and diseases, and blood, vectors and human hosts in colonial Tanganyika. The microscope's use facilitated the British policy of sleeping sickness resettlement concentrations. The resettlement schemes not only transformed the physical landscape but generated possibilities for local people to experience and internalize the diffusion of modernity. Colonialism was a process in which different elements, such as maps, microscopes and blood, were assembled together in new ways which put together both European and African tradition, and in so doing, established particular local situations of modernity. In this process of transformation, blood, the fly and resettlement schemes generated a different local complexity. The colonial administrator was in a difficult and sometimes personally uncomfortable position, but one that was never in tune with the local people and their environments. The final transition of a biomedical episteme to a development economic one coincided with the entrenchment of a colonial administration that sought to politically control space and people.
- Published
- 1999