Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In February 1891, after a long and arduous journey to the east, a young scientist descended from his train at Union Station in Peoria, Illinois. The very same month, half the world away another young scientist disembarked from a steamship after his own long journey eastward journey to Saigon in French Indochina. Their arrivals marked the beginning of a race to translate a technology used in food preparation across Asia – mold ferment – to new audiences around the world. Ultimately, each in their own way succeeded not just in translating the technology to new audiences in America and Europe, but also in retranslating that technology to Asia. Jōkichi Takamine, the Japanese chemist who arrived in Peoria in February 1891, would make his fortune with “Taka-Diastase” a patent digestive aid once popular around the world. Albert Calmette, who arrived in Saigon that same month, would see his research used as the basis of the “Amylo Process” of industrial distilling that would first be applied as part of colonial Indochina’s state alcohol monopoly. Reconnecting the stories of Takamine and Calmette and exploring how they came to translate the same technology in such radically different ways sheds light on global processes of knowledge reception, transformation, and circulation, and highlights the crucial role of place in the construction of scientific knowledge.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gerard Sasges received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley’s History Department in 2006. From 2002 to 2011, he was the director of the University of California’s study abroad center in Hanoi, and in 2012 he joined the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies. His research explores the intersection of technology, economy, politics, and culture, with a focus on connecting lived experience to larger processes of historical change. His work has appeared in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of Asian Studies, and he is the editor of a volume of interviews from contemporary Vietnam, published in English as It’s a Living and in Vietnamese as Viet Nam ngay nay: Chuyen muu sinh. His book, Imperial Intoxication: Alcohol and the Making of Colonial Indochina will be published with the University of Hawaii Press in 2017. His new work follows processes of development and nation-building into the postcolonial period.

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