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Institutt for sosialantropologi
bsas seminar

Instituttseminar: Jacob Hjortsberg

Institutt for sosialantropologi ønsker alle interesserte velkommen til instituttseminar. Foredraget vil bli holdt av doktorgradsstipendiat Jacob Hjortsberg ved Universitetet i Bergen og har tittelen: "Life Inside and Outside the "Economic Miracle": A Case Study of the Singaporean Kopitiam".

Hovedinnhold

Om foredraget (eng)

Singapore's economic development was made possible on the basis of a massive mobilization of the population into wage-labour. This entailed a forced resettlement of the population out of the urban villages, or kampongs, in which they had previously lived, into high-rise public housing flats, or HDBs. This paper follows the lives of a group of HDB residents, who spend their evenings drinking beer in a kopitiam (coffee shop) located at the heart of one such HDB estate. They have lived through the historical transition of Singapore from a colonial trading port into the bustling global city that it is today.

The paper argues that the HDBs is a site where their highly ambiguous relation to economic development, and the state which organized it, is lived and made concrete. On the one hand, The HDBs represent a space of loss and of alienation, where time is experienced as having come to a standstill. Here, "nothing ever happens", you "work, drink, sleep, repeat" -- an experience, I argue, of the empty and circular time that underpins the ever-accelerating speed of time of "the economy". On the other hand, through Singapore's policy of public home owner ship, the HDBs is also the central example of the way in which the state "cares about the people". Through home-ownership, the people are given "a stake in the nation", meaning, a direct financial stake in the economy through ownership in housing. The HDB, I therefore argue, sits at the centre of two distinct and contradictory experiences of time and history, and ways of living both inside and outside the "economic miracle": one which is about loss and standstill, and having been left out; the other about being included in the national project of economic growth.

Lett bevertning på Hjørnerommet etter seminaret. Velkommen alle interesserte!