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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox Jay Bowman Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2015. 203 pp.; maps, diagrs., photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $27.00 paperback (ISBN 978-0801479649) Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox have written a fruitful book, based on fieldwork in Peru from 2005 to the present, which should be useful to a wide range of readers. Their book follows the conception, implementation, construction and aftermath of two major road projects. The first is the Interoceanic Highway, which runs from the southwest Andean highlands to the border with Brazil, and which has a political history stretching back to the 1920s; the second is a notably shorter stretch of road connecting two smaller Amazonian towns in the Northeast. Despite the wide range of academic traditions employed throughout the book, Harvey and Knox provide lucid descriptions of the literature on critical infrastructures and theory used in the study of infrastructure projects, and more importantly, its relevance to the case study and the study of infrastructure more widely. The nuance and clarity of their writing should make this book valuable to a wide ranging audience—civil engineers, Peru specialists and development scholars, geographers and scholars in cognate disciplines alike. There has been a wealth of new studies of infrastructure projects throughout the developing world. These studies have been taken up by geographers and similar fields (anthropology in the case of Harvey and Knox) because the impacts of new or failing infrastructures are theoretically productive in studying the interconnections between technological systems, social change and development. The theoretical significance of this scholarship is given more urgency by governmental decisions: the BRICs economic group (Brazil, Russia, India and China), alongside the World Bank, are currently pushing for large-scale infrastructure projects as public-goods investments in a time of global economic downturn. Of course, the agendas of global financial institutions do not automatically translate into newly initiated projects, and by focusing not on the “what” of these roads projects but on the “when,” Harvey and Knox deliver an impressive political anthropology of road building. Through rigorous mixed methodologies, Harvey and Knox puncture the modernist assumptions of command and control employed [End Page 368] by state leaders and international bankers. The inevitable complications of diverse terrain, public corruption and pre-existing webs of social connections along the route produce “gaps that exist between the intended effects of infrastructural projects and the way those intentions play out in actual practice” (p. 5). Political life, therefore, is the struggle through which these gaps are formed and manipulated. Part I of the book is a rich ethnography of the social life of the road projects. Taking locals’ aspirations seriously, Harvey and Knox demonstrate the immense importance these projects have for the lives of those living along the roadways. From dreams of new jobs, social and educational connections with the city, or an entire village that picks up and moves from a nearby riverbank to the road for easier shipping, the roads are transformative. The integrative potential of the roads, of course, confronts a hierarchy of existing interconnections, demonstrating through richly told stories how uneven development plays out in the lives the roads encounter. Part II of the book begins with the ways in which numbers are mobilized as “foundations for an epistemological engagement with the world” (p. 82). Harvey and Knox draw on scholars such as Verran (2001) and Lave (1988), who argue that the enumeration and categorization of the world by civil engineers does not represent a universal ideal of proper infrastructure construction. Instead, numbers are created within political, legal and technocratic spheres that allow for the transformation of the world, mobilizing “the material articulations of imagination, ideology, and social life” (quoting Anand, p. 5). The authors, therefore, are “interested in what numbers do, in the relationships they entail and the worlds they create” (p. 82). An arresting example of this is the $4 million, seven-volume ‘pre-feasibility study’ commissioned by the Ministry of Transport prior to authorization and the rewarding of contracts. Drawing from national regulations, World Bank data and international civil engineering...