Doctoral Dissertation Research: Developing Mysore: Modernizing Elite and the Politics of Translating Institutions

我的研究探讨了印度迈索尔邦在1881-1947年间为将其农业社会“发展”为“现代”工业社会所做的努力。马克思主义、韦伯、理性选择和世界政治的国家形成观分别强调了经济发展的逻辑、合理化的过程、国家行为者的自利最大化动机和制度仿真的动力的重要性。借鉴布鲁诺·拉图尔在技术社会学中的工作，我认为国家的形成本质上是一个偶然的过程，因为国家技术的稳定性与各种社会力量是相互联系的。我将以早期现代迈索尔为例，说明迈索尔在发展和现代化的实验中所涉及的多个层面的翻译。不同的发展模式在国家精英的政治想象中得到了转化。当我们考察开发项目对社会实践的影响时，另一种顺序的翻译变得显而易见。我选择的研究数据必然是兼收并蓄的。它包括主要政治家的著作和演讲以及迈索尔代表大会的议事程序。这一时期著名公众人物、报纸和期刊的自传和传记也是重要的资料。这项研究更广泛的影响在于它对国家形成、交替现代性和发展研究的学术贡献，它对解释国家形成的技术研究方法论的理论价值，它对日益增长的交替现代性学术的贡献，该学术专注于非西方国家与现代性的接触，以消除社会科学学术对现代性的欧洲中心偏见。

My research explores the endeavors of the Indian state of Mysore to "develop" its agrarian society into a "modern" industrial one during 1881-1947. Marxist, Weberian, rational-choice and world polity perspectives on state formation have emphasized, respectively, the importance of the logic of economic development, the processes of rationalization, the self-interest maximizing motives of state actors and the dynamic of institutional emulation. Drawing on Bruno Latour's work in the sociology of technology, I argue that state formation is an inherently contingent process since the stability of the state's technologies is interlinked with a diverse array of social forces. Using early modern Mysore as my case, I will illustrate the multiple levels of translation involved in Mysore's experiments with development and modernization. Different models of development are translated in the political imagination of the state elite. Translation of another order becomes evident when we examine the development projects' influence on social practices. My choice of research data is necessarily eclectic. It includes the writings and speeches of major statesmen and the proceedings of the Mysore Representative Assembly. Autobiographies and biographies of prominent public figures, newspapers and journals of that period also constitute important data. The broader impacts of this study lie in its contribution to the academic scholarship on state formation, alternate modernities and development studies, its theoretical value of the methodology of technology studies in interpreting state formation, its contribution to the growing scholarship on alternate modernities that focuses on the engagement of nonwestern countries with modernity in order to undo the Eurocentric bias of social scientific scholarship on modernity.