Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise

Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 264 pp.

Anthropologists have long been challenged to undertake ethnographic studies of the state. In their joint study of road construction in Peru, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox draw on conceptions of the state as a relatively abstract entity that is made real through governmental practices. In Roads, the team examines the production of Interstate Highway/Route 26 and the Iquitos-Nauta road as infrastructural technologies. These roads arise out of complex partnerships between state institutions and non-state entities, scholars and scientists, commercial interests, and local populations. Citing De Boeck (2012: 5), the road is taken by Harvey and Knox "as a built form around which publics thicken." This book is about teasing out the material and imaginative dynamics that encourage both roads and publics to appear, to co-coalesce, with particular attention being paid to the ways in which roads "manifest the political, not just through the transformations they promise, but also by arranging and rearranging the mundane spaces of everyday life" (8). Harvey and Knox argue that a multidimensional study of material transformation in the guise of a road deepens the ways in which we understand how the political is articulated, especially where the political is defined as "the relationships in and through which heterogeneous forms of social difference are enacted" (187). In tracking how these these differences are articulated, they show how materiality acts as both catalyst and as a foil to the production of states, identities, intereses (interests), and imaginaries.

The text is organized into three sections. Looking to provisionally, and quite self-consciously, bracket what are in effect borderless, sprawling affairs, Part I tracks the storied histories of these two roads. It focuses particularly on the interaction of state-sponsored...