Highways and Hierarchies

Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean

Luke Heslop, Galen Murton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040786864
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Business

Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean 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 twenty-first-century Asia, this edited collection 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• 1 Why highways remake hierarchies
• 2 Stuck on the side of the road: Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal
• 3 A road to the ‘hidden place’: Road building and state formation in Medog, Tibet
• 4 Dhabas, highways, and exclusion
• 5 The edge of Kaladan: A ‘spectacular’ road through ‘nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar borderlands
• 6 The making of a ‘new Dubai’: Infrastructural rhetoric and development in Pakistan
• 7 Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives: Gifts, hospitality, and rumours
• 8 Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal
• Author notes
• Index