The Life and Death of Machines and Imaginaries: Conversations on Trains on EASTS Covers

Abstract

These short essays are an experiment in quite how far EASTS ’ cover images can take us. Af fi liating STS with different disciplines, and working on opposite sides of the globe, we are delighted to have two EASTS editors — Hyungsub Choi, an excellent historian of technology working in Korea, and Leandro Rodriguez Medina, the former editor-in- chief of Mexico-based Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society — re fl ecting on their encounters with three EASTS covers that feature trains — an iconic presence of progress and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without knowing that Shigehisa Kuriyama ’ s beautifully written “ Covers and the Poetics of Communication ” featured two of the three mentioned in his essay, Leandro chooses covers that resonate with his experiences in a railway-employee family in Argentina and tries to make sense of the cultural messages they carry for non-Europeans. Sharing Leandro ’ s critical examination of these modern/Western machines, Hyungsub ’ s re fl ection is a culturally-oriented one: “ What do we mean by ‘ East Asian technology ’ ? ” As his essay goes, Hyungsub ’ s observation nicely echoes the promises of “ Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th – 21st Centuries ” project, a Hong Kong based, transnational collaboration that aims to trace technological processes and modernity in this region, advancing “ new methodological strategies into the study of technology and its knowledge, practice, and artifacts that de fi ne and rede fi ne East Asia as a region with fl uid boundaries ” (Hirsh, Leung and Nakayama 2019: 507). As readers will see, the two essays here do not stand alone; instead, via the poetics of EASTS covers on how technology has made STS both modern and traditional, global and vernacular, ideological and practi- cal, together they achieve a recondita armonia.