Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise

Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge

by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

Roads matter to people. This claim is central to the work of Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, who in this book use the example of highway building in South America to explore what large public infrastructural projects can tell us about contemporary state formation, social relations, and emerging political economies.

Roads focuses on two main sites: the interoceanic highway currently under construction between Brazil and Peru, a major public/private collaboration that is being realized within new, internationally ratified regulatory standards; and a recently completed one-hundred-kilometer stretch of highway between Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, and a small town called Nauta, one of the earliest colonial settlements in the Amazon. The Iquitos-Nauta highway is one of the most expensive roads per kilometer on the planet.

Combining ethnographic and historical research, Harvey and Knox shed light on the work of engineers and scientists, bureaucrats and construction company officials. They describe how local populations anticipated each of the road projects, even getting deeply involved in questions of exact routing as worries arose that the road would benefit some more than others. Connectivity was a key recurring theme as people imagined the prosperity that will come by being connected to other parts of the country and with other parts of the world. Sweeping in scope and conceptually ambitious, Roads tells a story of global flows of money, goods, and people—and of attempts to stabilize inherently unstable physical and social environments.

Genres: Anthropology

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 5, 2015

Reviews

[Kelly Moran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read through the end of Part 1, as that was the assignment for a book club. I really wanted to like it and keep reading, but it was very surface level, not routed in much theory or even in the historical perspective of roads and other passageways, and then wasn’t even particularly engaging. It needed one of those at least. It was kind of just, how two roads got built under challenging circumstances.

[Chelsea Valentine · Rating 1 out of 5]

First off: WHAT A MISLEADING TITLE!

Had this assigned for class and never read it. Here I am at 29 reading it because I started working for an asphalt company and searching for some meaning in my job. This book isn’t about roads, isn’t anthropology of roads. It’s an ethnography of a couple roads. Really disappointed by this book.