"Stretching the friendship" On the politics of replicating a dairy in East Timor

Abstract

In this article, we address the problem of how technoscience knowledge and practices are translated when they are relocated during the highly organized, international encounters between cultures, often called "development." We examine efforts to build a "model" Australian dairy and instantiate Australian dairy practices in East Timor following East Timor's recent emergence as a nation-state. Through this ethnography of development's construction of a heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage, we show how knowledge and power inform the practices that enable Western models of production and exchange to be reassembled in postcolonial spaces. In aiming to conduct a symmetrical anthropology of deve..