Description
Book SynopsisHighways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in twenty-first-century Asia, this edited collection demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political and economic relations.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Preface: Thinking with roads (Penny Harvey)
1 Why highways remake hierarchies (Luke Heslop and Galen Murton)
2 Stuck on the side of the road: Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal (Galen Murton and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel)
3 A road to the 'hidden place': Road building and state formation in Medog, Tibet (Yi Huang)
4 Dhabas, highways, and exclusion (Swargajyoti Gohain)
5 The edge of Kaladan: A 'spectacular' road through 'nowhere' on the India-Myanmar Borderlands (Jasnea Sarma)
6 The making of a 'new Dubai': Infrastructural rhetoric and development in Pakistan (Mustafa A. Khan)
7 Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives: Gifts, hospitality, and rumours (Luke Heslop and Laura Jeffery)
8 Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal (Katharine Rankin and Edward Simpson)
List of figures
Photos by author
Authors notes
Index
