Roads and Communication

This week, I was very captivated with the connections being made between roads and communication. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox both come from research backgrounds in communication technologies. Their interest in roads began from an interest in technologies broadly conceived, and they approached roads “in terms of the role they play as an older form of communications technology” (Harvey & Knox 2015: viii).

In Alaina Lemon’s article, communication occurs within infrastructure and also around, or about, infrastructure. The public transit system, for her, can be read as an ongoing conversation around social transition and belonging: “Talk about transit, its practices and infrastructures, really concerns who should be included in the city, in the nation” (35).

In a google scholar search on “roads communication infrastructure anthropology”, I came across an archeological article by Monica L. Smith (who is local to us, at UCLA Anthropology) about “infrastructures as materialized dialogue” (Smith 2016: 4). Like conversation, infrastrures are supposed to “do” something, but they are never “finished”—there is a continual  exchange occurring (10). Smith argues that a certain degree of consensus is needed in infrastructure, but perfect agreement is not usually attained. For her, consensus is occurring between authorities who initiate infrastructural projects and workers and local users who are more involved with the maintenance of the infrastructure. “Turn-taking” and “expert language” are two forms of communication Smith finds evident in the built environment. For example, in the archeological site of Sisupalargh in eastern India, there is a formal encircling rampart that includes gateways, monolithic pillar, reservoirs, and long avenues (9). Expert language is evident in the four repairs the pillar underwent. These were a communication or performance of expert architects and engineers, and also a communication of the intentions for the infrastructure. Turn-taking is evident in augmentations made surrounding the rampart. There is no standardization between neighborhoods, so Smith concludes that these structures were locally managed. Turn-taking here is a conversation between the initiated infrastructure of the rampart, and then the response back with locally made augmentations (like walls, houses, etc). However, some local responses are more subversive, such as a house that was built blocking a street alignment, thereby rejecting the grid master plan.

Harvey and Knox likewise recognize the “turn-taking” occurring between many actors in road-building: “Any kind of involvement in such projects seems to imply some degree of complicity in the endless flow of compromised decisions, bribes, and compensation payments that keep a large public works project going” (Harvey & Knox 2015: 135). Complicity here is emphasized, though, rather than consensus as in Smith’s article.

Turn-taking can also be seen more vividly on page 156, which includes a bullet point list of all actors in conversation over the Interoceanic Highway, and how their requests align or differ with one another, or a master plan if there is one. There is a problem in planning the road because there is no commonly held goal between all in what the road should offer. It is interesting to compare the conversation happening here, before building, to the material conversation occurring in Sisupalargh as part of building, and over an extended amount of time.

If I had more time, I would revisit Kittler's "City as a Medium", and see how that might fit in here.

Reference

Smith, M. L. (2016). Urban Infrastructure as Materialized Consensus. World Archaeology. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2015.1124804#.VrquWlgrLIU