The road : an ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans / Dimitris Dalakoglou.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dalakoglou, Dimitris, author.

Contributor:

Manchester University Press, publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roads--Social aspects--Balkan Peninsula.

Roads.

Infrastructure (Economics)--Social aspects--Balkan Peninsula.

Infrastructure (Economics).

Ethnology--Balkan Peninsula.

Ethnology.

Transportation geography--Balkan Peninsula.

Transportation geography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 203 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, United Kingdom : Manchester University Press, 2017.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albanian-Greek cross-border highway. It is not merely an ethnography on the road but an anthropology of the road. Complex sociopolitical phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, transnational kinship, social-class divisions, or post-cold war capitalism, political transition, and financial crises in Europe-and more precisely in the Balkans-can be seen as phenomena that are paved in and on the cross-border highway. The highway studied is part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes elements such as houses, urban architecture, building materials, or vehicles. Yet even the most physically rooted and fixed of these entities are not static, but have fluid and flowing physical materialities. The highway featured in this book helps us to explore anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to the infrastructure. Categories such as the house, domestic life, the city, kinship, money, boundaries, nationalism, statecraft, geographic mobility, and distance, to name but a few, seem very different when seen from or on the road.

Contents:

From dromocracy toward a new critical dromology

The road to Albania

The state(s) of the road

The city and the road

Fear of the road and the accident of postsocialism

The road of/on transition

Domesticating the road

Infrastructures, borders, (im)mobility, or the material and social construction of new Europe.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 26 Mar 2026).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 176-198) and index.

ISBN:

9781526109361

1526109360

9781526124234

1526124238

9781526109354

1526109352

OCLC:

1085666757