Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox

Abstract

Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 264 pp.Anthropologists have long been challenged to undertake ethnographic studies of state. In their joint study of road construction in Peru, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox draw on conceptions of state a relatively abstract entity that is made real through governmental practices. In Roads, team examines production of Interstate Highway/Route 26 and Iquitos-Nauta road infrastructural technologies. These roads arise out of complex partnerships between state institutions and non-state entities, scholars and scientists, commercial interests, and local populations. Citing De Boeck (2012: 5), road is taken by Harvey and Knox as a built form around which publics thicken. This book is about teasing out material and imaginative dynamics that encourage both roads and publics to appear, to co-coalesce, with particular attention being paid to ways in which roads manifest political, not just through transformations they promise, but also by arranging and rearranging mundane spaces of everyday life (8). Harvey and Knox argue that a multidimensional study of material transformation in guise of a road deepens ways in which we understand how political is articulated, especially where political is defined the relationships in and through which heterogeneous forms of social difference are enacted (187). In tracking how these these differences are articulated, they show how materiality acts both catalyst and a foil to production of states, identities, intereses (interests), and imaginaries.The text is organized into three sections. Looking to provisionally, and quite self-consciously, bracket what are in effect borderless, sprawling affairs, Part I tracks storied histories of these two roads. It focuses particularly on interaction of state-sponsored imaginaries of connection, modernity, and expertise versus more local values, desires, and interpretations. The more engaging second and third sections constitute ethnography of road construction. Part II presents an analysis of bureaucratic processes that produce idea of road if not road itself-road materiality, regulatory practice, and interviews with engineers, planners, environmental officers, safety personnel, and local people. Part III focuses on discontinuous manifestation of state by exploring experiences of conflict and accommodation, from scale of informal and individual, when residents frustrate official access to land by constantly attempting to renegotiate terms of their agreements, or formal and institutional, in frequent inauguration rituals led by state representatives that may or may not coincide with completion of various road sections and bridges.Throughout book, authors revisit ways in which people situated at different nodes along road network are responding to themes of risk, opportunity, nationalism, contingency, knowledge, uncertainly, integration (and interruptions to it), and neoliberal impetus to release value. In doing so, authors work at a number of different scales to examine a site that, by its very nature, resists easy ethnographic investigation. The strategy of tacking back and forth between themes and participants allows Harvey and Knox to interrogate spaces inbetween what people say and what they do, what state promises and what it delivers, or how road is constructed rhetorically and how it actually functions. This focus on these third spaces is mobilized even in their use of theory.The most interesting aspect of book, and what can be taken and applied elsewhere, is introduction of several third space concepts. Finding well-known theoretical classifications useful, but unable to adequately capture ethnographic material they encountered on ground, Harvey and Knox float several new concepts. …