Description:
Sweeping in scope and conceptually ambitious, this book tells a story of infrastructure and of global flows of money, goods, and people.
Brief description: Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. She is the author of Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition and coeditor of Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies, Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion, and Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice.
Review Quotes:
"What is the relation between the unity and stability of the nation-state and the state of a nation's infrastructure? In addressing this question, Roads forces us to consider, among much else, the expertise of infrastructure's architects, the construction engineers, whose work is attuned to the instability, unruliness and unevenness of the environments within which infrastructure is assembled. The infrastructure of the road turns out not to be the stable base on which the state can ground its existence, but a situated achievement. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox's remarkable ethnography of infrastructure is a vital intervention, in anthropology and beyond."
--Andrew Barry, University College London, author of Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline