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. 1. There has not been a regional comparative and long-term ethnographic study of roads on this scale, in South Asia or elsewhere. 2. Through its analysis of roads, the book offers an insight into social, economic, and political change across the most important and global future-shaping region of the world. 3. Reflecting the composite parts of bigger, entangled infrastructure development projects that inspired this research, the chapters within generate a comparative conversation that makes the volume greater than the sum of its individual parts.
