Till Mostowlansky - Böcker

Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people's lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan and China. The highway initially brought sentiments of disconnection and hardship, followed by Soviet modernization and development, and ultimately a sense of distinction from bordering countries and urban centers that continues to this day. Based on extensive fieldwork and through an analysis of construction, mobility, technology, media, development, Islam, and the state, Till Mostowlansky shows how ideas of modernity are both challenged and reinforced in contemporary Tajikistan. In the wake of China's rise in Central Asia, people along the Pamir Highway strive to reconcile a modern future with a modern past. Weaving together the road, a population, and a region, Azan on the Moon presents a rich ethnography of global connections.

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.