Abstract
Historically, roads have played a pivotal role in development. The opportunities and conflicts roads have spurred by connecting people, places and economies have been reflected in debates over the logic, convictions and scepticism surrounding road building for eons. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (2015) continue this tradition in their book Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise to illustrate whether, how and why roads matter in the contemporary world. Their specific focus is a solid ‘ethnography of how infrastructures configure contemporary politics’ (p. 13). By using examples of road building in South America, they explore what large public infrastructural projects can tell us about contemporary state formation, social relations and emerging political economies. Through the dominant and subaltern narratives of the everyday the authors reveal how ‘material transformations open up a world of tensions, negotiations, and contestations that extend our understanding of political life’ (p. 203).
By combining ethnography and historical methods, Harvey and Knox trace the development of two large transport infrastructure projects: the interoceanic highway currently under construction between Brazil and Peru; and, a recently completed one-hundredkilometre 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 study maps the technical and social expertise and experience of a range of informants from local populations, migrant workers, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians and construction company officials to offer a scholarship on the politics of the everyday social, economic, political and technical processes of infrastructure projects and how they influence contemporary state formation.
To begin with, the authors position their research by providing the context of Peru’s large frontier economy comprised of ‘scrappy bits of land with contested histories’ (p. 15). They present the readers with the past desires and future aspirations of the local populations inhabiting the space. In doing so, they map the historical context of the two infrastructural projects, which illuminates an alternative account of state absence and local entrepreneurial initiative. 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 would come by being connected to other parts of the country and with other parts of the world.
The middle section deals with the construction practices and regulatory devices used by engineers, scientist, bureaucrats and construction company officials. This section exposes the technical tensions in the politics of connectivity, which was introduced in the first section. In particular, this section looks at the procedures and norms that guide engineers practice and the articulation of these norms with a broader knowledge politics of road construction. Ethnographic description of these aspects teases out the everyday onsite relations between people and things. The quantification of materials in construction laboratories, the ‘performativity of numbers in road construction projects’, and the health and safety procedures that govern the construction process are demonstrated as constituting political power (p. 82). A final theme that this section explores is corruption in road building. However, without following the dominant narrative of discussing bureaucratic corruption, the authors instead seek ‘to understand the ubiquity and the energy of corruption stories, their capacity to circulate and to fascinate’ at the local level (p. 137).
In closing, the authors expose the gap between the first two sections, between the hopes of the local populations and the actual practices of road building. It considers the political ramifications of the modern project of social transformation via infrastructural engineering by identifying two new areas of attention for anthropological analysis of contemporary political relations. The first revolves around the ‘impossible public’ and the second is about the ‘engineer-bricoleur’. By exploring the ways in which the public role of infrastructural projects gets negotiated, the authors are able to demonstrate how infrastructural projects manifest as sites of political transformation.
Through this powerful ethnography, Harvey and Knox point to how infrastructure has been presented as a seductive package in the prevailing neoliberal context; though the evidence presents a narrative of failed attempts to stabilise unstable physical and social environments. The strength of their analysis lies in the voices and technical experiences of the local populations, engineers and officials, which are situated within the powerful discourses of connectivity, corruption, modernisation, politics and engineering. In doing so, they use roads to provide ‘a new perspective on the politics of contemporary social relations’ (p. 4). Thus, enabling the reader to see how complex multi-level material and technical processes and discourses converge to produce unstable infrastructures. The strength lies not only in these complex multi-level processes and notions that they uncover, but also in the methods they use to uncover the multiple voices and interpretations of these complex processes. They do this without bifurcating the sources into oppositional camps; instead they seamlessly marry local knowledge with the technical expertise.
The book presents an eloquent discussion on the technical knowledge and expertise around road construction; however, the authors are unable to weave in the narrative of road users as effortlessly as they did with road builders. The book may also have benefited from discussions around roads and environment. As the authors acknowledge, there are great environmental cost associated with development of roads, yet the book misses out on the opportunity to explore this angle in-depth. This may be because their primary preoccupation is to draw on the instability and politics of road construction. The story they tell is important to all who are interested in the anthropology of infrastructure and expertise. It is a cautionary tale, revealing what can happen when we seek in infrastructure and politics a ground for stability. To this end, this book is not only a contribution to anthropology, sociology and infrastructural studies, but to any researcher preparing for fieldwork on roads.