Roads

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. She is the author of Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition and coeditor of Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies, Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion, and Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice. Hannah Knox is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London.

"What is the relation between the unity and stability of the nation-state and the state of a nation's infrastructure? In addressing this question, Roads forces us to consider, among much else, the expertise of infrastructure's architects, the construction engineers, whose work is attuned to the instability, unruliness and unevenness of the environments within which infrastructure is assembled. The infrastructure of the road turns out not to be the stable base on which the state can ground its existence, but a situated achievement. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s remarkable ethnography of infrastructure is a vital intervention, in anthropology and beyond."

• Introduction: Anthropology, Infrastructure, and ExpertisePART I. ROADS AS STATE SPACE: PAST DESIRES AND FUTURE IMAGINARIES1. Historical Futures2. Integration and DifferencePART II. CONSTRUCTION PRACTICES, REGULATORY DEVICES3. Figures in the Soil4. Health and Safety and the Politics of Safe Living5. Corruption and Public WorksPART III. THE MODERN STATE: PROMISE AND DEFERRAL6. Impossible Publics7. Conclusions: Inauguration, Engineering, and the Politics of Infrastructural FormNotesReferencesIndex