Highways and hierarchies : ethnographies of mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean / edited by Luke Heslop and Galen Murton.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Heslop, Luke, editor.

Murton, Galen, editor.

Series:

New mobilities in Asia.

New mobilities in Asia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roads--South Asia.

Roads.

Roads--Himalaya Mountains.

Roads--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Summary:

This edited collection 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 21st-century Asia, it 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.

Contents:

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

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

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

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 12 Nov 2021).

ISBN:

1-003-69734-8

90-485-5251-6

9781003697343

OCLC:

1272991321