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Harvey, Penny and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015, 264 pgs.
Anthropologists are increasingly turning to the study of infrastructures as material forms that enable the circulation of goods, people, and ideas, reorient spatial and social relationships, and provide insight into the workings of power and politics across multiple scales. In this book, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox draw on over a decade of research on roads and road construction in rural Peru to investigate how roads, approached as ''infrastructural technologies," can provide new perspectives on the politics of contemporary social relations (4). Their work adds to the growing literature on infrastructure by focusing squarely on the form of the political: the political purchase of infrastructural forms; the material politics through which infrastructures are brought into being, sustained, or undermined; and the ways in which infrastructures are constitutive of political power (5). Roads promise social transformation, and they rearrange the spaces of everyday life. They create spaces for institutional forms of governance exercised by state representatives and experts such as engineers. They reflect the gap between the intended effects of infrastructural practice and the way those intentions play out in actual practices. They work as scaling devices, so that state power is present in the lab and in measurements, and global capital is there in confrontations over ownership of land (14). In other words, roads manifest the political (7).
To explore the politics of roads and road building in Peru, Harvey and Knox focus their analysis on two specific roads. The first is Route 26, 700 kilometres of the Interoceanic Highway, which runs from the highland town of Urcos to the Brazilian border at Iñapari. The construction of the highway was a multi-million dollar initiative that was the subject of considerable political debate before road construction began in 2006 (23). The second road was no less controversial: a onehundred-kilometre stretch of highway between Iquitos and Nauta in the northern Peruvian Amazon, which had a 70-year history of construction at the time of the publication of the book in 2015. Harvey and Knox write that this road is ''the most expensive road on the planet" (24), based on per-kilometre construction...