Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean

by Luke Heslop (Editor), Tulasi Sigdel (Contributor), Huang Yi (Contributor)

Highways and 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.

226 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2021