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

Description

Highways and Hierarchies: 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. Cover Table of Contents Acknowledgements Preface Thinking with roads Penny Harvey 1. Why highways remake hierarchies Luke Heslop and Galen Murton 2. Stuck on the side of the road Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal Galen Murton and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel 3. A road to the ‘hidden place’ Road building and state formation in Medog, Tibet Yi Huang 4. Dhabas, highways, and exclusion Swargajyoti Gohain 5. The edge of Kaladan A ‘spectacular’ road through ‘nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar borderlands Jasnea Sarma 6. The making of a ‘new Dubai’ Infrastructural rhetoric and development in Pakistan Mustafa A. Khan 7. Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives Gifts, hospitality, and rumours Luke Heslop and Laura Jeffery 8. Roads and the politics of thought Climate in India, democracy in Nepal Katharine Rankin and Edward Simpson Authors notes Index List of figures Figure 3.1 A crashed vehicle lying in the river valley Figure 3.2 Yellow prayer flags standing on the Medog Highway Figure 3.3 Medog County seat and the Yalu Zangbu River Figure 4.1 Amrik Sukhdev Dhaba, Murthal, NH 1 Figure 4.2 Anurag Dhaba, Nagaon Bypass, NH 37 Figure 4.3 Trucks parked outside a line dhaba, NH 37 Figure 4.4 Inside a line dhaba, NH 1 Figure 6.1 Pictures of Container Hotel