Road animism

Abstract

In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room-an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self-what would be very much the way traditional anthropology has come to imagine animism. Rather, by turning such an understanding of agency on its head, we take the animacy of the in-between as the starting point from which life unfolds. According to Tim Ingold's work on the subject, this view is consistent with the cosmologies of people traditionally described as "animists." Yet unlike conventional understandings of the term, Ingold describes this ontology as an openness to a world in becoming. Here what brings things into existence is not an animating principle inscribed within them, but rather the potential of the field of relations in which they are embedded. We suggest that this analytical reversal can provide us with a novel framework for the analysis of infrastructures. Accordingly, we argue that roads' doings cannot be understood as active subjectivity or a function of their material resilience. Instead of connecting, roads should be understood as growing out of connections-as an "in-between" in which their doing is also their undergoing. We will make this argument through ethnographic cases from Pakistan, Nepal, China, Myanmar, and Austria.

The Multi-Sided Ethnographer

“…This understanding of roads is not new in the growing anthropological literature on the subject, and so they been shown to allow the ethnographer to work through and across different categories and disciplinary boundaries and represent an ideal point of entry for anthropological analysis (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012: 2;Dalakoglou 2010Dalakoglou , 2012Mostowlansky 2011;Argounova Low 2012;Rest and Rippa 2019). Echoing this literature, and moving from my experiences across many carpet shops, I address the Karakoram Highway not only as an object of analysis per se, but also as an inclusive space created by economic, social, cultural and material interactions.…”

What Fragility? Multiple Professional Visions in the Maintenance of French Public Roads

“…MRS thus use a number of notions evoking non-change, such as preservation (Gregson et al 2009;Edensor 2011;Domínguez Rubio 2014;Yurchak 2015;Denis and Pontille 2017), stability/stabilization (Gregson et al 2009;Jones and Yarrow 2013;Barnes 2017), or authenticity (Jones and Yarrow 2013;Domínguez Rubio 2014). At the same time, a large part of the scholarship on maintenance has consisted in problematizing the durability of things, taking their fragility (Domínguez Rubio 2014Rubio , 2016Denis and Pontille 2015;Houston and Jackson 2016;Tironi and Calvillo 2016;Rest and Rippa 2019;Barry 2020) as a starting point. These discussions on material fragilities have paid particular attention to large technical systems such as transportation infrastructures.…”

Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology

“…Within this field, it is possible to identify two related strands of inquiry that are particularly useful for the purposes of this review. One involves an interest in re-thinking the materiality of infrastructure not as an inert or relatively stable foundation for dynamic social processes but rather as unstable assemblages of human and non-human agencies (Bennett, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010; Rest and Rippa, 2019). The second explores the oftentimes hidden ‘techno-political’ work of infrastructural forms (Barry, 2013; Collier, 2011; Larkin, 2008; Von Schnitzler, 2016).…”