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Technologies of Modernity: Road Infrastructure in Indigenous Remote Area

Technologies of Modernity: Road Infrastructure in Indigenous Remote Area
—Wen-Ling Lin, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao Tung University


Project schedule:2018/1-2019/4 

The rational principle intrinsic to the technologies of modernity governs and arranges the world of human beings and objects through a wide array of techniques, and thus molds the contemporary life and cultural world from different perspectives. The road infrastructure in indigenous remote area, as an important segment of infrastructure, establishes networks, facilitates exchanges and communication, and upholds the modern living, mobility, and sense of space of the indigenous people which then provoke thoughts and arrangement pertaining to identity association, border, order and ethics. The movement and communication facilitated by infrastructure is by no means homogeneous. Different locales, people and national border all have different links, unlinks, or hindrance in the quotidian, or possibly so. The larger scale of this research is to investigate the change in the human-land relation of the indigenous people as a result of road infrastructure and the governing model developed by the state through building the road. From the microstructural perspective, the research explores how the change initiated by economic and political power results in the impact on the individual and ethnic cultural sensibility, the construction of borders and its meaning.