Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (review)

Anthropologists have long been challenged to undertake ethnographic studies of the state. In their joint study of road construction in Peru, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox draw on conceptions of the state as a relatively abstract entity that is made real through governmental practices. In Roads, the team examines the production of Interstate Highway/Route 26 and the Iquitos-Nauta road as infrastructural technologies. These roads arise out of complex partnerships between state institutions and non-state entities, scholars and scientists, commercial interests, and local populations. Citing De Boeck (2012: 5), the road is taken by Harvey and Knox “as a built form around which publics thicken.” This book is about teasing out the material and imaginative dynamics that encourage both roads and publics to appear, to co-coalesce, with particular attention being paid to the ways in which roads “manifest the political, not just through the transformations they promise, but also by arranging and rearranging the mundane spaces of everyday life” (8). Harvey and Knox argue that a multidimensional study of material transformation in the guise of a road deepens the ways in which we understand how the political is articulated, especially where the political is defined as “the relationships in and through which heterogeneous forms of social difference are enacted” (187). In tracking how these these differences are articulated, they show how materiality acts as both catalyst and as a foil to the production of states, identities, intereses (interests), and imaginaries.

The text is organized into three sections. Looking to provisionally, and quite self-consciously, bracket what are in effect borderless, sprawling affairs, Part I tracks the storied histories of these two roads. It focuses particularly on the interaction of state-sponsored imaginaries of connection, modernity, and expertise versus more local values, desires, and interpretations. The more engaging second and third sections constitute the ethnography of road construction. Part II presents an analysis of bureaucratic processes that produce the idea of the road if not the road itself—road materiality, regulatory practice, and interviews with engineers, planners, environmental officers, safety personnel, and local people. Part III focuses on the discontinuous manifestation of the state by exploring the experiences of conflict and accommodation, from the scale of the informal and individual, as when residents frustrate official access to land by constantly attempting to renegotiate the terms of their agreements, or formal and institutional, as in the frequent “inauguration” rituals led by state representatives that may or may not coincide with the completion of various road sections and bridges.

Throughout the book, the authors revisit the ways in which people situated at different nodes along the road network are responding to themes of risk, opportunity, nationalism, contingency, knowledge, uncertainly, integration (and interruptions to it), and the neoliberal impetus to “release” value. In doing so, the authors work at a number of different scales to examine a “site” that, by its very nature, resists easy ethnographic investigation. The strategy of tacking back and forth between themes and participants allows Harvey and Knox to interrogate the spaces inbetween what people say and what they do, what the state promises and what it delivers, or how the road is constructed rhetorically and how it actually functions. This focus on these third spaces is mobilized even in their use of theory.

The most interesting aspect of the book, and what can be taken and applied elsewhere, is the introduction of several third space concepts. Finding well-known theoretical classifications useful, but unable to adequately capture the ethnographic material they encountered on the ground, Harvey and Knox float several new concepts. For example, in their chapter on engineering practices, the team contrasts idealized engineering knowledge and actual local material conditions. This reveals how engineers are wed neither to absolute rational knowledge of environmental conditions nor to collecting abstractions that could be used to make hypothetical calculations primarily for political effect. Instead, engineers use a pragmatic philosophy of “as long as” (106), which helps them arrive at a...