Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise

262 Pages·2015·4.52 MB·English

by  Penny Harvey

Roads
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Roads
An Anthropology of Infrastructure
and Expertise
Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2015 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harvey, Penelope, 1956– author.
Roads : an anthropology of infrastructure and expertise / Penny Harvey
and Hannah Knox.
pages cm— (Expertise (Ithaca, N.Y.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5323-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8014-7964-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Infrastructure (Economics)—Political aspects—Peru.
2. Infrastructure (Economics)—Social aspects—Peru. 3. Roads—
Political aspects—Peru. 4. Roads—Social aspects—Peru.
5. Ethnology—Peru. I. Knox, Hannah, 1977– author. II. Title.
III. Series: Expertise (Ithaca, N.Y.).
HC79.C3H368 2015
388.10985—dc23
2014040304
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Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The figure and all photos are by the authors.
Cover photographs: Top photograph by the authors. Bottom photograph
by Thomas Grisaffi.
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Anthropology, Infrastructure, and Expertise 1
PART I. ROADS AS STATE SPACE: PAST DESIRES
AND FUTURE IMAGINARIES
1. Historical Futures 21
2. Integration and Difference 52
PART II. CONSTRUCTION PRACTICES,
REGULATORY DEVICES
3. Figures in the Soil 79
vi Contents
4. Health and Safety and the Politics of Safe Living 111
5. Corruption and Public Works 134
PART III. THE MODERN STATE:
PROMISE AND DEFERRAL
6. Impossible Publics 163
7. Conclusions: Inauguration, Engineering, and the Politics
of Infrastructural Form 186
Notes 205
References 215
Index 231
Preface
We began to talk to each other about doing a joint ethnography of Peru’s
roads in 2004. Over the ensuing ten years we have accrued many debts to
those who have variously inspired, assisted, cajoled, critiqued, signposted,
reassured, and supported us in bringing the book to completion. Although
it is now impossible to reconstruct the specifi cs of many of these conversa-
tions, they have all undoubtedly affected our thinking about what roads are,
what they do, and what they can reveal about our contemporary world. In-
deed, roads have proved to be a remarkably generative topic of conversation,
inspiring comment, insight, and opinion from disparate family members,
friends, and colleagues in the United Kingdom, Peru, and beyond. It has
been an unexpected delight to fi nd ourselves working on something that
seems to make sense to people, particularly in Peru. Furthermore, in the
world of social research more generally, “roads” seems to lend themselves to
a huge range of intellectual concerns.
Without belittling the importance of all of these interactions, there are
inevitably par tic u lar people, moments, and settings that stand out as having
viii Preface
been central to the realization of the book that we want to acknowledge
more directly. The ac know ledg ments also serve another purpose. Although
necessarily somewhat curtailed, the tracing of a few key relationships allows
us to produce an account of how we did the research. The book does not
contain a chapter that explicitly outlines our methods. The ethnography
emerged through the extensive and largely serendipitous discussions and
encounters that gradually provoked and guided us into shaping this book in
the way we have. To put it another way, to acknowledge the invaluable sup-
port that we have received from so many people since we began our re-
search into the roads of Peru is to describe our method—t he ethnographic
method, which looks to learn through engagement, dialogue, and living
alongside other people as they go about their daily lives, whether in Peru or
in Manchester, at home or at conferences and workshops. Our point is that
ethnographic research is a relational affair. We learn through the relation-
ships in which we become entangled. These relationships have been the
bedrock of our research, from the moment that we formed the idea of what
to focus on, to when we began to track that idea through the encounters
that became the empirical foundations of the work, through to the conver-
sations and critical challenges that encouraged us to report back and to keep
thinking about what we were learning.
It is hard to remember exactly how the topic of roads took on the mo-
mentum it did for us, and there are doubtless diverse origins. A workshop
on anthropology and the state org an ized by Christian Krohn-H ansen and
Knut Nustad in Oslo in 2002 provided the impetus to think about roads as
an ethnographic way into the exploration of state effects. Many subsequent
visits to Norway, both to Bergen and to Oslo, have continued to provide a
consistent source of inspiration and support. Special thanks are due here to
Bruce Kapferer for his intellectual companionship. Our interest in roads
also emerged out of prior work that we had done on the anthropology of
technology more broadly conceived. We had both worked ethnographically
on the promise and challenges of new information and communications
technologies, Penny through the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s
“Virtual Society?” program, and Hannah as a researcher in the Economic
and Social Research Council’s “Evolution of Business Knowledge” pro-
gram. From early on we approached roads in terms of the role they play as
an older form of communications technology, drawing on our thinking that
Preface ix
had been developed through our prior collaborative research with Sarah
Green, Damian O’Doherty, Theo Vurdubakis, and Chris Westrup.
However, it was under the auspices of the ESRC Centre for Research on
Socio- Cultural Change (CRESC) that the conditions arose to turn an in-
triguing research possibility into a funded research project. For that we
must thank the original directors of CRESC, Tony Bennett, Mike Savage,
and Karel Williams, and their vision for a research center that would pro-
vide a rich intellectual space within which an open and exploratory empiri-
cal research project like this could be developed. The ESRC’s Small Grants
scheme provided a grant in 2005 to allow Penny to undertake a year’s fi eld-
work in Peru in 2005–06. This small grant was lodged inside CRESC,
where Hannah worked from 2004 to 2014. Penny was subsequently sec-
onded to work at CRESC, as a director since 2006. CRESC thus provided
the intellectual home for this project, allowing us to extend our very strong
and important ties to the Department of Social Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Manchester into new conversations.
Our home within CRESC was a research group that came to be known
colloquially as “Theme 4.” The group was initially concerned with approach-
ing social change from the perspective of politics and cultural values, a topic
that over time took shape as a conversation between anthropological and
ethnographic approaches to social change, actor-n etwork theory, Deleuzian-
inspired poststructural philosophy, theories of affect, and new cultural
materialisms. We have been fortunate to be surrounded in Theme 4 by our
inspirational anthropology colleagues: Jeanette Edwards, Adolfo Estalella,
Gillian Evans, Gemma John, Fabiana Li, Cecilia Odegaard, Madeleine
Reeves, and Peter Wade. We also have been challenged in Theme 4 to ac-
count for our anthropological perspective by our intellectual friends from
other disciplines: Elizabeth Silva, Nick Thoburn, and Kath Woodward
from sociology; Eleanor Casella from archaeology; Christine McClean and
Damian O’Doherty from management and or ga ni za tion studies; Tone
Huse from geography; Michelle Bastian from philosophy; and Andy Gale
from engineering. It was serendipity rather than strategy that brought
together this par tic u lar mix of scholars, but the creation of this environment
of curiosity, supportive critique, and theoretical creativity would never have
been possible without the model of open intellectual enquiry that CRESC
put in place.