On BavaI. On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt.

On Tine TecInoIog and TenpovaIil in Modevn Egpl I On BavaI

Beviev I Bavid AvnoId
Isis, VoI. 105, No. 2 |June 2014), pp. 447-448
FuIIisIed I TIe Univevsil oJ CIicago Fvess on IeIaIJ oJ TIe Hislov oJ Science Sociel
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vice to the same elds and journals to which
Tansley contributed. Though Ayres clearly ad-
mires Tansley, the book is not a hagiography
but, instead, a charming account of a scholar
actively engaged in the society in which he
lived. Historians looking for a contribution in-
spired by philosophy or sociology of science
will probably be disappointed, as Ayress biog-
raphy is not informed by a particular method-
ological approach.
The heirs of Tansley have provided Ayres
with new material and oral history, including
information about Tansleys extramarital af-
fair (though we still dont know her name). As
readers of Isis will recognize, there is often a
woman behind a man, and in Tansleys case
his mistressor, more accurately, his guilt
over having a mistresspropelled him to visit
Sigmund Freud in Vienna for psychotherapy.
Upon his return he wrote his best-selling book
everThe New Psychology and Its Relation
to Life (1920)which made him a public g-
ure in Britain. He practiced as a psychologist
for about two years before returning to biol-
ogy. In the 1920s his name was easily recog-
nized by academics beyond the closed circle
of botanists and ecologists. For the rest of his
life he would write extensively about psychol-
ogy and Freud, including Freuds biographical
memoir for the Royal Society. Tansley drew
analogies between developments of the neu-
rological systems of the brain and the evolu-
tion of ecosystems of nature, thus, in effect,
restating the old biogenetic law that ontog-
eny recapitulates phylogeny.
Throughout his life Tansley engaged with an
extensive list of scholars and social activists. His
friends and contacts read like a Whos Who of
the British academic scene in the interwar era. In
addition to all the ecologists, for example, he
discussed philosophy with Bertrand Russell and
Robert Collingwood, inspired Virginia Woolf,
and hung out with the famed neurologist Charles
Sherrington, to mention just a few. Ayress bi-
ography should thus be of interest beyond the
circle of historians of biology.
This is not the rst biography of Tansley:
ecologists and historians of sciencemyself in-
cludedhave written extensively about him.
His life and work have provided a window into
the politics and eld of ecology. Ayres has
drawn on this previously published material and
has done his own archival work as well. The
result is the most complete account of Tansleys
life and scientic achievements to date. Some of
the chapters are truly original, such as the ac-
count of Tansleys childhood, while others retell
material that is largely known.
Ayres has done a ne job in bringing together
new and exciting material about an important
scientist. Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur
Tansley is a valuable contribution to the history
of ecology in Britain, worth both time and at-
tention.
PEDER ANKER
On Barak. On Time: Technology and Tempo-
rality in Modern Egypt. xiii 341 pp., illus.,
bibl., index. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2013. $29.95 (paper).
Time is central to On Baraks fascinating ac-
count of the cultural history of technology in
colonial Egypt, and yet consideration of modern
times most obvious manifestationsclocks
and watchesis delayed until the conclusion
and even then amounts to little more than an
afterword to a case already made. Instead, he
demonstrates through a wide array of textual
and visual materials, and from Arabic as well as
Western-language sources, how various con-
cepts of temporality were articulated through
and embedded within the most conspicuous and
emblematic technological innovations of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesthe
train, tram, telegraph, and telephone. Super-
cially, these technologies, their form and func-
tion familiar from established histories of Eu-
ropes reputed tools of empire, appeared to do
what historians have expected them to do: to
compress time and space and to effect a homog-
enization of the modern world through the uni-
versalizing inuence of steam and electricity
and the corresponding curtailment of local pe-
culiarities and prescientic superstitions. The
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and its link-
ages with the technologies of submarine cables
and overland telegraphs seemed precisely to
achieve this desideratum and to reinforce the
idea of Egypt as a midway station between an
increasingly interconnected East and West. Sim-
ilarly, inside Egypt, trains, trams, telegraphy,
and telephony could be expected to speed com-
munication and transport and so facilitate exter-
nal means of exploitation and control. To a de-
gree, Barak argues, they did serve this function,
though seldom unproblematically: trains rarely
ran to schedule, telegraphs suffered breakdowns
and delays. But technological modernity is not,
in his view, a simple matter of imposition or an
opposing resistance. Modernity acquires its
meaning and temporality its substance precisely
from the manner in which novel technologies
creatively and imaginatively recongured cul-
ture and reconstituted experience in ways that
BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 105 : 2 (2014) 447
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the colonial power and international capitalism
could not have predicted or that, conversely,
they too ascribed to Egyptian indolence and
technological ineptitude. Since even Europeans
imagining of Egyptpyramids, camels, and the
restwas facilitated by modern technologies
like the diorama (and to the exclusion of the
transformative presence of the very railroad by
which they traveled), it is unsurprising (but
nonetheless revealing) that Egyptians, espe-
cially the effendiyya, the modernizing profes-
sional middle class, should see their society as if
from a railway carriage or tramcar. Railroads,
tram schedules, telegrams, and ofce hours
might impose a new regime of timekeeping and
punctuality on Egyptians, just as modern tech-
nologies of transport and communications might
become apposite sites for industrial strikes and
anticolonial movements; but, instead of time
being uniformly compressed and made linear, it
was simultaneously inltrated by preexisting but
revamped notions of spirits and jinn, cyclical
time and millenarian beliefs, a time fashioned
less by the Greenwich meridian and expatriate
train companies than by religious festivals and a
lunar calendar. Barak offers multiple examples
of this interpenetration and co-constitution, of
how even the slowness with which Egyptians
were castigated could itself become a mark of
self-identication, aesthetic appreciation, and
anticolonial deance. But one of the most sin-
gular examples he develops concerns the way in
which the telephone became identied less with
the marvels of modern technology and its ca-
pacity to shrink time and space (a task at which
it often failed) than with its feminization
through the disembodied voice of the female
switchboard operator and the reworking of ear-
lier cultural idioms, looping back to the medi-
eval Islam and Su tradition, of erotized delay,
seduction, and madness.
On Time is a work of inspiring originality, mov-
ing with sophistication, ease, and not a little humor
between a richly contexualized Egyptian experi-
ence and a critical understanding of Western writ-
ing about technology and time. It effectively an-
swers the question, which such studies so often
confront, of what is Egyptian about this story of
imported technology and social change while at
the same time addressing the more general ques-
tion of what we (especially the we situated out-
side Europe) might mean by modern without
either collapsing all technological modernity into a
history of and for the West or, conversely, having
recourse to the escape route of multiple moderni-
ties. It encourages a critical rethinking of what
exactly Europe experienced in its own passage to
technological modernity and hence of how West-
ern scholarship might learn from Eastern exam-
ples. It speaks, as well, to other colonized and
semicolonial societies across Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia for whom, too, the study of tech-
nologys cultural adaptation and gurative recon-
stitution presents such rich possibilities for reinter-
preting modernity itself. Baraks book is nothing if
not timely.
DAVID ARNOLD
Alexander R. Bay. Beriberi in Modern Japan:
The Making of a National Disease. x 230 pp.,
bibl., index. Rochester, N.Y.: University of
Rochester Press, 2012. $95 (cloth).
Alexander R. Bays book examines Japans
beriberi debate (kakke ronso) between the 1880s
and the 1920s and the rice germ debate (haig-
amai ronsronso) in the 1930s. These decades
coincided with Japans modernization and the
rise of bacteriology.
The subject is fascinating because beriberi
(identied as Vitamin B1 deciency during the
interwar years) became so prevalent in the mil-
itary, especially during the Sino-Japanese War
(18941895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904
1905), that Japanese leaders deemed nding the
cause and cure of beriberi a national priority.
The illness, specic to people who eat a diet of
white rice deprived of vitamin-rich rice bran or
germ, posed no national threat to Western na-
tions. Moreover, in spite of the ultimate scien-
tic ndings, faculty at the prestigious Univer-
sity of Tokyo, often trained in bacteriology in
Germany, scorned, ignored, and resisted the ef-
fective and empirical nutrition-based treatments
developed by traditional kanpo doctors and na-
val physicians. Most prominent among the latter
was Takaki Kanehiro, trained in England, who
succeeded in containing beriberi in the Navy by
replacing the white rice diet with Western food
and barley-rice. Beriberi was a national dis-
ease, not conned to the lower class. Its victims
included emperorsprecisely because the elite
were able to afford a white rice diet. The Uni-
versity of Tokyo doctors, partnered with Army
physicians, championed the contagionist theory
and dismissed the need for diet reform as long as
they could, in spite of experimental evidence.
Bay explains that this rst book-length study
of Japans beriberi debate in English contributes
to the extensive existing literature by such
scholars as Yamashita Seizo, Itakura Kiyonobu,
Christian Oberlnder, and Kenneth J. Carpenter.
First, he emphasizes the uniquely Japanese med-
ical hybridity, exemplied by Takakis ap-
proach that bridged traditional kanpo and mod-
448 BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 105 : 2 (2014)
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