http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7913 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47827 Propheteering : a cultural history of prediction in the Gilded Age Pietruska, Jamie L This study of the changing practices and perceptions of prediction in the late nineteenth century reveals the process by which Americans came to rationalize economic and cultural uncertainty into modern life. Forecasts of all kinds were ubiquitous in the late nineteenth century; as the United States fashioned itself into an urban-industrial power with a national economy and an increasingly corporate and bureaucratic society, prediction became an increasingly significant scientific, economic, and cultural practice. As a postbellum crisis of certainty destabilized ways of thinking about the future-in science, social science, and religion-predictions, whether accurate or not, offered illusions of control over one's future to citizens of a rapidly modernizing America. I argue that the late-century search for predictability found as much uncertainty as it did certainty, that consumers of predictions were at once desirous and dismissive of forecasts that often took on greater cultural than economic value, and that producers and consumers of prediction together rationalized uncertainty and shaped a new cultural acceptance of the predictable unpredictability of modern life. In the first half of the dissertation I analyze the work of U.S. Department of Agriculture statisticians, private cotton estimators, Weather Bureau forecasters, and local "weather prophets," all of whom sought to systematically convert their observations into economically valuable predictions. In the second half of the dissertation I focus on the work of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, fortune-tellers, and spirit mediums, whose prophecies circulated by the thousands through rural and urban America. (cont.) "Propheteering" offers a new narrative of modernization by examining the tools and cultural practices used by both institutions and individuals to make sense of the late-century scientific and social reimagination of the future, however uncertain and fragmentary that future promised to be. Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 316-340). Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47825 The Yellow Revolution in Malwa : alternative arenas of struggle and the cultural politics of development Kumar, Richa, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology This dissertation engages with two analytical frameworks to explore questions of social transformation and structures of power in rural society in India. The first is a specific critique of various types of development discourse and development projects that have been elaborated by national and international elites during the last forty years, focusing on the dry land Malwa region in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. This includes a project to introduce soyabean cultivation to the region in the 1970s, which has been post-facto labeled as a yellow revolution, and a discourse which argues that providing market information through new information and communication technologies is empowering farmers. I argue that these projects and discourse have mostly steered away from engaging with the structures of power framing rural society, and thus, have failed to bring about much change in the condition of rural people in central India. The second analytical framework is a recovery and foregrounding of alternate arenas of struggle that rural people in the Malwa region have been participating in. The platform of democratic politics is one such avenue that marginalized groups have used to make demands upon the state to provide them with support and allows them to hold the state accountable for the same. Participating in cultural projects that question and subvert the forms of caste and gender based exclusion that frame the lives of people is another such arena which provides women and adivasis (tribals) with a language of empowerment. This research argues that for the language and practice of development to have more relevance to the lives of the poor and for it to engage with the deeper aspirations in their lives, the role of these political and cultural projects as vital platforms for rural people to exercise agency and bring about change, must be recognized. Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-331). Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45804 The promiscuity of freedom : development and governance in the age of neoliberal networks Chan, Anita Say This study brings together science and technology studies, political anthropology, and Latin American studies, by studying the practices and political reasoning of neoliberal networks in Peru. It analyses the extension of such networks by studying the relationships and subjectivities cultivated under two contemporary state-led projects: an initiative promoting intellectual property rights among traditional artisans as tools for rural development, and a national effort to encourage the uptake of free/libre and open source software based resources. Promising to modernize government and prepare citizens for the global, information-based economy, these projects frame their reforms as new, contemporary models for economic development. This work demonstrate how key to the success of such projects is the remaking of rural and urban citizens into "free" and modern individuals who are able to independently self- realize using the tools and logics of information networks. It argues that such plans rely on the ability to bring diverse actors - including state planners, transnational corporations, traditional artisans, rural communities, urban technology experts, and transnational activists -- into strategic alliance, or what can become coded as relations of promiscuity. What brings these partnerships together and seduces such disparate actors into alliance isn't so much the promise of increased technology access. It is instead the promise of "freedom" and the opportunity for diversely situated subjects to realize themselves as "modern individuals." Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45803 Planting improvement : the rhetoric and practice of scientific agriculture in northern British America, 1670-1820 Zilberstein, Anya "Planting Improvement: The Rhetoric and Practice of Scientific Agriculture in Northern British America, 1670-1820," explores the history and cultural politics of environmental change in the British empire through a focus on rural land-use practices and the construction of scientific expertise in the cold temperate colonies of New England and Nova Scotia, from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. Improvement was an abiding mode of and justification for British imperialism through territorial expansion and early modern economic development. British American and anglophone colonists of a range of status positions embraced agricultural improvement, though to different degrees and in different ways. For all settler-farmers, improving extra-European land meant transforming native environments into neo-European agricultural landscapes that were aesthetically familiar. For elites in northern North America, agricultural improvement was additionally a science of the practical Enlightenment, which encompassed husbandry and horticulture, stadial theories of progress, and the objectives and methods of natural history, geography, and economic survey. By exchanging farming advice, botanical literature, and seeds, plants, and livestock with other naturalists and improvers in the republic of letters and scientific institutions in the region as well in England, Scotland, Sweden, Russia, and France, elites in New England and Nova Scotia took a uniquely scientific approach to colonial property development. By employing the rhetoric of science and flaunting their privileged access to transatlantic, European, and imperial networks, northern elites who formed agricultural societies, supported natural history professorships, and private, academic, or colonial botanical gardens, distinguished their land improvements from those of their neighbors. Moreover, they believed that scientific improvement could ameliorate the troublesome disadvantages of the region's nature-especially its climate, seasonal weather extremes, short growing seasons, uneven topography, and thin soils. (cont.) Scientific improvement would erase the geography of difference which made their lands marginal to the real estate market, staple-crop economy, and migration flows of the British empire and the early United States. Because improving the landscape and environment promised to improve the people inhabiting them, agricultural improvement was also a program for social reform: northern elites crafted projects to employ 'surplus laborers'--especially Indians, Acadians, Jamaican Maroons, women, children, criminals, and the poor-in silk production or in the region's small farms. Yet the limits of the northern environment challenged the regional practicability of scientific agriculture as well as enlightened improvers' pretensions to universalism. I conclude by analyzing these broad ambitions in relation to northern improvers' allegations of widespread indifference (or their own failure to popularize) a scientific approach to agriculture. The study bridges the 'First' and 'Second' Empires in British imperial historiography and the colonial and early national periods in the field of United States history, emphasizing instead the solidarities that persisted among elite Americans, Loyalists, and Britons, through kin, friendship, and scientific networks, despite conflicting allegiances to the Crown or to the republican causes of the American and French Revolutions. Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-272). Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:58:59 GMT