ABSTRACT
During a conversation in 2001, Murat, a government economist in Kazakhstan, stood to explain why the Soviet system had failed and market-based economics appeared to be so successful. He picked up a large stapler and held it out at arm’s length. This chapter aims at uncovering something other than the problems facing the process of translation from idea to practice, from laboratory protocols or bureaucratic schema to the world outside, with which the literature on science and technology studies concerns itself. The pragmaticism of local knowledge, however, is worth dissecting a little further because it appears in several forms, circumstances and relations to standardizing bureaucratic knowledge. Photographs from the 1980s show surrounding buildings draped with gigantic banners of Lenin and Marx; whirling, beaming dancers tap-dancing out a red star: and exhortatory placards urging workers to unite, beneath which there are small tableaux of workers in nineteenth-century costumes.
