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.
Edited by:
Luke Heslop,
Galen Murton
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 420g
ISBN: 9781041180883
ISBN 10: 1041180888
Series: New Mobilities in Asia
Pages: 226
Publication Date: 01 December 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements, Preface: Thinking with roads (Penny Harvey), 1 Why highways remake hierarchies (Luke Heslop and Galen Murton), 2 Stuck on the side of the road: Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal (Galen Murton and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel), 3 A road to the 'hidden place': Road building and state formation in Medog, Tibet (Yi Huang), 4 Dhabas, highways, and exclusion (Swargajyoti Gohain), 5 The edge of Kaladan: A 'spectacular' road through 'nowhere' on the India-Myanmar Borderlands (Jasnea Sarma), 6 The making of a 'new Dubai': Infrastructural rhetoric and development in Pakistan (Mustafa A. Khan), 7 Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives: Gifts, hospitality, and rumours (Luke Heslop and Laura Jeffery), 8 Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal (Katharine Rankin and Edward Simpson), List of figures, Photos by author, Authors notes, Index.
Luke Heslop is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He specialises in trade, labour, and mercantile kinship in South Asia, and infrastructure and connectivity in the Indian Ocean. Galen Murton is Assistant Professor of Geographic Science at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia USA. His work is primarily concerned with the politics of large-scale infrastructure development throughout the Himalayas and especially in the borderlands of Nepal, India, and Tibetan regions of China.
