Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

Indigenous Time,Colonial History: Sami Conceptions of Time and Ancestry and the Role of Relics in Cultural Reproduction

The role of the past in prehistoric societies is a frequently occurring topic in recent archaeological literature. It is proposed that prehistoric societies were concerned with the construction of an ancient past, and that relics were actively used as mnemonic devices in recalling the past. This paper comments on the significance of historicity in cultural reproduction on the basis of indigenous Sami conceptions of time and ancestry. It is a personal reflection from an archaeologist's point of view. The indigenous Sami concept of time, life and death implies that distances in the past were not ascribed any significant value and that there was no chronological or genealogical scale against which events in the past were measured. It is argued that relics were not ascribed a discursive value, and that they were not used as mnemonic devices in recalling an ancient past. By the example of Sami conceptions of time and ancestry, the author advocates great caution in promoting relics as carriers of collective memories in ancient societies.