The Related Research page is designed to consolidate and publicize research project on roads and infrastructure in the Himalaya. Please note that team research projects are listed under the name of the PI(s).
ROBERT BEAZLEY
Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University
website
email: bbeaz@usa.net, reb265@cornell.edu
Related Research Projects:
Contemporary development studies recognize road networks as a key element in economic development, socioeconomic well-being, and poverty alleviation. However, the outcome of road construction projects has not always met the original goals of the project, has contributed substantially to environmental degradation, and in some cases has led to the loss of cultural traditions and marginalization of indigenous peoples. The World Bank, one of the main financiers of road construction projects, admits that there is a paucity of empirical evidence about the amount and quality of the benefits, who receives them, and how they are disperse, despite the numerous socioeconomic evaluations of road projects already conducted. Environmental studies have shown few, if any, positive environmental impacts of road construction projects. To date, there have been very few studies on the sociocultural impacts of roads and no studies on how all three spheres of impacts influence each other. My research seeks to fill this gap by evaluating the impacts of the recently completed (2008) Kali Ghandaki Road, and the ongoing construction of the Marsyangdi Road, along the Annapurna Circuit Trail in the Annapurna Conservation Area of Nepal.
Discordant Landscapes and Purloined Mobility: Friction, Gendered Fluidity, and Transient Livelihoods along the Trans Himalayan Highway
Mediated by recent events in Nepal including the 2015 earthquakes and the promulgation of the new Nepali constitution (September 2015) this ongoing research embarks on a trip along the recently (2012) Chinese financed and constructed Rasuwa Road from Syaphrubesi to the Tibetan border of Rasuwagadhi north west of Kathmandu.
Himalayan Mobilities: An Exploration of the Impact of Expanding Rural Road Networks on Social and Ecological Systems in the Nepalese Himalaya
The major outputs of this research are a book co-authored with Professor James P Lassoie (Cornell University) that is in preparation for SpringerBriefs [under contract].
As a strategically located developing country, the rapid construction of roads across remote mountainous regions of Nepal is having profound and far ranging impacts on the country’s socio-ecological systems. This book examines this complexity.
Impacts of Expanding Road Networks on Communities along the Kawakarpo Kora, Meili Snow Mountain, Northwest Yunnan, China
This ongoing research looks at the exponential road growth of the Western Development or “Go West” Campaign (Chinese: 西部大开发; Pinyin Xībù Dàkāifā) in China and how it has impacted Tibetan communities in Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), and Qinghai provinces.
“A Handshake Across the Himalayas”: Chinese Investment and Trans-Border Infrastructure Development in Nepal
This ongoing collaborative research with colleagues Galen Murton (U.C. Boulder-Geography) and Austin Lord (Cornell University-Anthropology) looks at the increasing aid in the form of a “gift of development” from China to Nepal for infrastructure (primarily for roads and hydro power) and its implications for state formation and changing demographics, livelihood options, and identity formation in Tibetan borderland regions of Nepal.
Please click here for more information about all of Robert’s ongoing research projects
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DAVID BUTZ
Department of Geography, Brock University
website
email: dbutz@brocku.ca
NANCY COOK
Department of Sociology, Brock University
website
email: ncook@brocku.ca
Related Research Projects:
A Critical Ethnography of the Shimshal Road
project website
This project is a SSHRC-funded ethnographic study of social change in Shimshal in the context of shifting mobilities facilitated by the recent completion of a 60 kilometre road linking the community to the Karakoram Highway (KKH). Shimshal is a rural village of about 2000 members, located in the high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Until recently the journey from the village to the nearest road was a difficult four-day trek through the Karakoram Mountains. Importing and exporting goods involved carrying them along a narrow footpath that connected the village to the KKH. Shimshalis began to build a link road to the KKH in 1985. The road officially opened to vehicular traffic in November 2003, reducing the journey between the highway and the village to three hours.
Since 2010 we have been studying the implications of this new mobility infrastructure for various aspects of social organisation in the community (e.g. gender relations, agricultural and herding practices, movement patterns, divisions of labour, religious practice, intergenerational relations, education, etc.). Although the road was not a discrete research preoccupation until 2007, it featured prominently in our previous investigations of social change in Shimshal, which began in 1988, three years after road construction commenced. This long-term research engagement with the community – from 15 years before to a decade after the road was completed – allows us trace mobility-related social change from the era of pedestrian mobility in the late 1980s to the period of vehicular mobility that has followed the opening of the road. Our ethnographic repertoire has included extended participant observation, photography and videography, individual and group interviews, participatory methods, focus groups, mapping and archival research. Our insights about road construction and social change in Shimshal contribute to the critical mobilities literature, but also to ethnographic scholarship on Pakistan’s Karakoram region, and critical scholarship on development and modernisation in rural parts of the global South.
Related Publications:
Butz, D and N. Cook. (2016). Political Ecology of Human-Environmental Change in Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. In Hermann Kreutzmann and Teiji Watanabe (eds), Mapping Transition in the Pamirs: With Case Studies on the Changing Human-Environmental Landscapes. Ed. Hermann Kreutzmann. New York: Springer, pp.175-190.
Butz, D. and N. Cook. (2011). Accessibility Interrupted: The Shimshal road, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Canadian Geographer, 55(3): 354-364.
Cook, N. and D. Butz. (2011). Narratives of Accessibility and Social Change in Shimshal, Northern Pakistan. Mountain Research and Development, 31(1): 27-34
Living with Unexpected Demobilisation in Gojal, Northern Pakistan: A Case Study of the Effects of the Atta Abad Landslide
project website
On January 4th, 2010 a massive landslide blocked the Hunza River in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan and destroyed three kilometres of the Karakoram Highway (KKH), the main transportation route connecting this region to the rest of Pakistan. About 20,000 people in 25 villages were cut off from vehicular access to the rest of Gilgit-Baltistan province and Pakistan. A lake formed behind the landslide dam; when the lake finally overtopped the dam, it had submerged 27 kilometres of the KKH, and flooded the homes and fields of about 240 households in five villages. Since the KKH opened in 1986, Gojalis have come to rely on vehicular transportation, access to services, and the cheap and easy movement of people and goods between their villages and down-country cities. The mobilities afforded by the KKH have become woven into the everyday economies and time-space fabric of almost all Gojali households. In the context of this disaster, they struggle with the sudden, unexpected reassertion of the friction of distance.
During 2010 and 2011, we conducted semi-structured interviews with members of 18 households in four Gojali villages. We complemented these interviews, in summer 2013, with an autophotography project. Forty men and women, most between the ages of 17 and 25, provided us with photos and accompanying narratives that conveyed the landslide’s mobility-related effects on Gojalis’ everyday lives. These materials were supplemented by four ethnographic visits to Gojal during the summers of 2010, 2011 and 2013 and fall 2012. Our empirical focus throughout was on locals’ struggles to adapt to and mitigate the drastic changes to their everyday mobilities induced by the landslide. The KKH reopened to vehicular traffic in September 2015. The Chinese government provided funding and the engineering expertise to lower the level of the Attabad Barrier Lake and to realign the remaining 24 kilometres of submerged highway through mountain tunnels around the lake. We are interested to witness the mobility effects of a realigned highway and restored vehicular mobility. A new mobility regime is emerging that produces new mobile configurations and practices: new movements, networks and connections and modes and infrastructures of circulation, as well as delay threats.
Related Publications:
Cook, N. and D. Butz. 2016. Mobility Justice in the Context of Disaster. Mobilities 11(3): 400-419.
Cook, N and D. Butz. 2015. The Dialectical Constitution of Mobility and Immobility: Recovering from the Attabad Landslide Disaster, Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Contemporary South Asia 23(4): 388-408.
Cook, N. and D. Butz. 2013. The Atta Abad Landslide and Everyday Mobility in Gojal, Northern Pakistan. Mountain Research and Development 33(4): 372-380.
BEN CAMPBELL
Department of Anthropology, Durham University
website
Related Research Projects:
A Himalayan Road and the People of the Border
Film: (with camera by Cosmo Campbell): 2009 ‘The Way of the Road’
The Way of the Road is a film about a road which is being built to the Tibetan border to help relieve poverty in Nepal’s northern districts. The film journeys through the Tamang communities who will be most affected, to hear their reflections on whether the road will benefit them. It is a turning point for these communities, who have occupied a land of crossovers – in trade, in religion and languages on the border zone between south and central Asia. The Tamang speak of mythological travellers, perform dances of warring armies, and discuss uncertain livelihoods, as these people of the border now face the momentum of globalisation with some scepticism.
The film combines the knowledge of the Tamang language and communities gained over twenty years by anthropologist Ben Campbell (Durham University), and the camera work, and remote filming experience of his brother Cosmo. The film was made possible by the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund at the University of Cambridge and Canon Europe and was screened at the Film South Asia festival on 17 September, 2009. Please email Cosmo Campbell for further information on viewing and purchasing the film.
Related Publications:
Campbell, B. (2013). From Remote Area to Thoroughfare of Globalisation: Shifting Territorialisations of Development and Border Peasantry in Nepal. In Territorial changes and territorial restructurings in the Himalayas. Smadja, J. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers. 269-285.
Campbell, B. (2010). Rhetorical Routes for Development: a road project in Nepal. Contemporary South Asia 18(3): 267-279.
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AGNIESZKA JONIAK-LÜTHI
Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich
website
project team website
Related research project:
ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders
project website
‘ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders’ is a four-year research project (2018-2022) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and based at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. The project team will conduct ethnographic fieldwork along roads that have been designated as key links at the Sino-Inner Asian interface of the China-initiated Silk Road Economic Belt. Archival research and GIS analysis, two further research methods employed by the team, will help to identify social relations and temporalities that are difficult to capture through ethnography, but which nonetheless powerfully affect roads and travel in this region of Asia. The conceptual aim of the project is to propose a novel framework to theorize the social life of roads through a dialogue with the concepts of place and time, and to bring decay and maintenance to the centre of anthropological enquiry.
Photo caption: Animals and cars. Encounters on the Almaty-Taldyqorghan Expressway, Kazakhstan
GALEN MURTON
Department of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder
website
Related Research Projects:
(Re)Building the State: Border Infrastructure, Chinese Development, and the Politics of Aid in Post-Earthquake Nepal
Galen’s research examines how international politics and cultural identities intersect and are mutually constituted through development. Using roads as a lens of observation, he will conduct an “ethnography of geopolitics” in Mustang and Rasuwa, Nepal that studies how international road developments in Nepal are influenced by Trans-Himalayan geopolitics and responsible for regional socio-cultural transitions. Galen uses three main bodies of literature (critical geopolitics, cultural materialism, and development studies) and mixed methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, and archival methods) to address the complex dynamics presented by road development at multiple scales. Building upon extensive previous experience in the Himalaya region, this research will advance scholarship on Trans-Himalayan trade and infrastructure development in South Asia and facilitate cross-cultural dialogue between multiple development constituents in Nepal.
“A Handshake Across the Himalayas”: Chinese Investment and Trans-Border Infrastructure Development in Nepal
ongoing collaborative research with Robert Beazely (Cornell University) and Austin Lord (Cornell University)
A Himalayan Border Trilogy: The Political Economies of Transport Infrastructure and Disaster Relief between China and Nepal photo essay
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MARTIN SAXER
website
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Related Research Project:
Remoteness & Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World
project website
Remoteness & Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World is a five-year research project (2015-2020) funded by the European Research Council. It is carried out by a team of researchers based at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. Our terrain of inquiry are the highland areas between the Pamirian Knot and the eastern slopes of the Himalayas; our overarching aim is to gain a better comparative understanding of these areas and their significance in the world. These areas are of global concern. What happens in the highlands of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Kashmir, Tibet, Myanmar, or Northeast India has a worldwide impact. Rich in natural resources and crisscrossed by the borders of rising Asian powers, a multitude of stakes and analytic positions are attached to these frontiers; they are alternatively seen as realms of authentic culture, as rural peripheries in need of development, and as trafficking routes and sanctuaries for insurgents. Public imaginaries oscillate between such simplistic assessments and local communities continue to feel misunderstood.
International development organisations, NGOs, state officials and tourist agencies often tend to take remoteness as an analytic starting point: communities in the rugged highlands of Asia are seen as backward, authentic, or unruly because – for better or worse – they are isolated and far away from developed, urban centres and state control. However, state-of-the-art research on circulation and mobility shows that connectivity with the outside world is an essential feature of livelihood strategies in remote areas. They frequently find themselves at old crossroads of intensive exchange of natural resources, labour, capital and manufactured goods. Highland Asian livelihoods are shaped as much by connectivity as by remoteness.
Setting out from this observation, our hypothesis is that remoteness and connectivity constitute each other in particular ways. Our aim with this research project is to analyse the nexus of remoteness and connectivity and thereby lay the groundwork for a new apprehension of the role and position of remote frontiers in general. Interdisciplinary in outlook but grounded in anthropology, fieldwork will be carried out in four locations in cooperation with local experts and organisations. Comparative workshops are planned in all four locations. Results will be published in two edited collections, twenty papers, and individual monographs.
Project Team:
ALESSANDRO RIPPA
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
ADITI SARAF
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
CAROLIN MÄRTENS
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
EDWARD SIMPSON
Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London
website
email: es7@soas.ac.uk
Related Research Project:
Roads and the politics of thought: Ethnographic approaches to infrastructure development in South Asia
project website
‘Roads’ is a five year ethnographic research project on infrastructure development in South Asia. The project, funded by the European Research Council, will provide the first ethnographic account of the culture of ‘road builders’, their knowledge practices, interrelations and motivations. The project is headed by Professor Edward Simpson, in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, in collaboration with research partners at the University of Edinburgh, and an award-winning collective of contemporary artists, CAMP, who are based in Mumbai, India. Please visit the project webpage for a full list of research partners and project case studies.
Globally, a staggering 25 million kilometres of new roads are anticipated by 2050, which is enough to circle the earth some 600 times. This figure predicts a 60% increase in the total length of roads from 2010. Nine-tenths of all road construction is expected to occur in the less prosperous nations, especially in Africa and Asia. Even assuming greater fuel and technology efficiencies, and that the percentage increase in traffic is less than the volume of new roads, this forecast also suggests an enormous increase in the amount of energy required to sustain mobility on such a scale. This research asks: Why? To what end? Who benefits? What ideas lie in the foundations of this new infrastructure? Roads are presented as solutions to poverty, ‘development’ and economic growth. Are they? What else might roads do? As cheap oil dwindles and questions of climate change remain, why are so many international institutions cultivating new roads?
The research will be rooted in case studies of road projects in Pakistan, India, Maldives and Sri Lanka. We selected these sites to highlight how nation-building, neo-liberalism, ambition, environmental vulnerability and modernity feature in contemporary road-building. We will look at the organisation of road building on the ground, in offices, and within a broader array of institutions and state bodies in national and international contexts in order to understand the global cultures of road-building practice. The project will contribute to various pressing and critical debates relating to power, global justice and environmental futures. The project also involves CAMP, an art collective based in Mumbai, to encourage wider discussion among a broader range of constituencies.
Photo caption: World class roads in post-conflict infrastructure development, Sri Lanka