Edward Simpson - Böcker

Based on substantial ethnographic, textual and archival research, this interesting book offers a new perspective on the anthropology of the western Indian Ocean. Writing in a clear, engaging style, and covering an impressive range of theoretical terrain, Simpson critically explores the relationships between people and things that give life to the region and drive shifting patterns of social change among Muslims in the highly-politicized state of Gujarat. Scholars of the Indian Ocean, Muslim society in South Asia, and Hindu nationalism, as well as anthropologists in general, will find this a fascinating read and a major contribution to research in this area.

Based on substantial ethnographic, textual and archival research, this interesting book offers a new perspective on the anthropology of the western Indian Ocean. Writing in a clear, engaging style, and covering an impressive range of theoretical terrain, Simpson critically explores the relationships between people and things that give life to the region and drive shifting patterns of social change among Muslims in the highly-politicized state of Gujarat. Scholars of the Indian Ocean, Muslim society in South Asia, and Hindu nationalism, as well as anthropologists in general, will find this a fascinating read and a major contribution to research in this area.

Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia offers a new understanding of how technological innovation, geopolitical ambitions, and social change converge and cross-fertilize one another through infrastructure projects in Asia. This volume powerfully illustrates the multifaceted connections between infrastructure and three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower. Drawing on fine-grained analyses of airports, highways, pipelines, and digital communication systems, the book investigates infrastructure both "from above," as perceived by experts and decision makers, and "from below," as experienced by middlemen, laborers, and everyday users. In so doing, it provides groundbreaking insights into infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation.Focusing on cities and regions across Asia, the volume combines ten tightly interwoven case studies, from the Bosphorus to Beijing and from the Indonesian archipelago to the Arctic. Written by leading global infrastructure experts in the fields of anthropology, architecture, geography, history, science and technology studies, and urban planning, the book establishes a dialogue between scholarly approaches to infrastructure and the more operational perspective of the professionals who design and build it. This multidisciplinary method sheds light on the practitioners’ mindset, while also attending to the materiality and agency of the infrastructures that they create. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia is conceived as an act of translation: linking up related—yet thus far disconnected—research across a variety of academic disciplines, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, infrastructure professionals, and the general public.

This book argues that road-building was naturalised in the twentieth century to the point of common sense, integrating roadbuilding into a system of climate change denial hidden within a broad international development imperative. But if we can 'read' South Asian roads as forms of governance and knowledge, we can challenge the region's established geopolitical narratives, and the idea of a never-ending future. Highways to the End of the World explores the political economy of these ideas by focusing on the history of this phenomenon, and on the road-builders of South Asia themselves. How do these flamboyant and controversial 'roadmen' think about their work and the future of the planet? What do roads do, and why? And how did they become central to the region's nationalist and developmental projects in the first place? Edward Simpson's fascinating ethnographic account takes us from fume-filled toll booths in the heart of India, via overworked government offices in Pakistan, to pharaonic bridges in the Indian Ocean. Simpson follows the money, explores the politics of evidence, and argues against the utopian hyperbole of present-day 'road talk', finding both humanitarian crises and freewheeling international capital in the hedgerows. Roads have never been so interesting, or so controversial.

For those so-minded, the aftermath of an earthquake presents opportunities to intervene. Thus, in Gujarat, following the disaster of 2001, leaders were deposed, proletariats created, religious fundamentalism incubated, the state restructured, and industrial capital- ism expanded exponentially. Rather than gazing in at those struggling in the ruins, as is commonplace in the literature, this book looks out from the affected region at those who came to intervene. Based on extensive research amid the dust and noise of re- construction, the author focuses on the survivors and their interactions with death, history, and with those who came to use the shock of disaster to change the order of things. Edward Simpson takes us deep into the experience of surviving a 'natural' disaster. We see a society in mourning, further alienated by manufactured conditions of uncertainty and absurdity. We witness arguments about the past. What was important? What should be preserved? Was modernisation the cause of the disaster or the antidote? As people were putting things back together, they also knew that future earthquakes were inevitable. How did they learn to live with this terrible truth? How have people in other times and places come to terms with the promise of another earthquake, knowing that things will fall apart again?