Beyond Nature and Culture of Modern Thai Water Engineering

CSDS-IRASEC Academic Seminar 2016-2017

Seminar

Friday, December 16, 2016 – 14h30 / 16h30
Alumni Meeting Room, 12th Floor,
Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University

Jakkrit Sangkhamanee (CSDS, Faculty of Political Science, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Chulalongkorn University) will go on with the lecture series of the academic seminar with a session about Modern Thai Water Engineering.

The talk will explore Thailand’s Royal Irrigation Department Museum for Heavy Engineering where the works and lives of engineers are displayed and narrated and their machines exhibited. Through the museum walk-through, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee will analyze the mutual constitution and historical transformation of the amphibious assemblage that makes up Thai water engineering. In some ways, the human and non-human hybridity depicted in the museum exceeds the binary of nature and culture proposed by Philippe Descola is his critical work Beyond Nature and Culture. Tracing the complex interrelation of engineers, landscapes, bureaucracy, statecraft and myth depicted in the exhibits, the analysis elicits the museum as a particular, and peculiar, parliament of things that articulates the amodern characteristics of the Thai water engineering assemblage.

Blog of the seminar / Download the Poster / Download the Schedule

 Watch the video capture of the lecture