On humble technologies: containers, care, and water infrastructure in northwest Madagascar, 1750s-1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anchored in urban Madagascar, this study probes historical entanglements between water systems, containers as ordinary technological things, and labor regimes from the late eighteenth century through French colonial times (1896–1960). As technologies-in-use, water containers were sometimes materials of governance, but increasingly they were anticipatory technologies through which families could navigate the precarities of monarchal and then colonial rule by storing excess, manipulating time, and sustaining everyday life. While technologies-in-use are always embedded in local moral economies, I argue that they also act on users in sometimes contradictory ways – ossifying labor regimes and entrenching existing practices that navigate everyday predicaments of urban space. Ultimately, this essay calls for historians of technology to attend to the relationships between humble artifacts (containers) and labor practices to understand how practices of care are forged in tandem with the material world.