Penelope Harvey

Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by pre-existing differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

The Topological Quality of Infrastructural Relation: An Ethnographic Approach:

This article seeks to address how topological approaches to cultural change might be combined with ethnographic analysis in order to suggest new ways of thinking empirically about the dynamic political and moral spaces that infrastructural systems create and sustain. The analytical focus is on how diverse notions of relationality and connectivity are mobilized in the production of infrastructural systems that sustain the capacity of ‘state-space’ to simultaneously emerge as closed territorial entity and as open, networked form. The article seeks to establish that the differences and discontinuities inherent in all spatio-temporal relations might productively be considered as ‘intervals’ that both separate and connect across time and space. The notion of an infrastructural system as an interface that conjures both topological and topographical space is the idea that I set out to explore.

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise

This claim is central to the work of Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, who in this book use the example of highway building in South America to explore what large public infrastructural projects can tell us about contemporary state formation, ...

Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment in Researching Language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by preexisting differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Waste Futures: Infrastructures and Political Experimentation in Southern Peru

ABSTRACT Drawing on an ethnographic study of attempts to bring new waste infrastructures into being in the Cusco region of Peru, this article considers the specific material and social articulations that such infrastructures imply. The ethnography explores the attempts by engineers, municipal functionaries, and local communities to engage ‘waste’ both as decomposing matter and as material resource. The article traces the tensions that emerge in experiments to produce new material and economic forms that reorient the agency of decomposing matter to new productive ends. In practice, this proposed reconfiguration of materials and of social relations draws attention to the divergent and disjunctive practical ontologies that inhere in waste infrastructures. The proposal to transform existing waste infrastructures disturbs existing modes of social accommodation and requires people to explore how the tensions between economic growth and environmental care might be re-negotiated in spaces of distributed sovereignty and decentralized environmental governance.

Roads and anthropology: ethnography, infrastructures, (im)mobility

Roads and the powerful sense of mobility that they promise carry us back and forth between the sweeping narratives of globalisation, and the specific, tangible materialities of particular times and places. Indeed, despite the fact that roads might, by comparison with the sparkling agility of virtual technologies, appear to be grounded in twentieth century industrial political economy they could arguably be taken as the paradigmatic material infrastructure of the twenty-first century, supporting both the information society (in the ever increasing circulation of commoditized goods and labour), and the extractive economies of developing countries on which the production and reproduction of such goods and labour depends. Roads and Anthropology is the first collection of road ethnographies, edited by two pioneers in the anthropological explorations of infrastructures, the essays published in the book aim to pave the way for this rising field of anthropological research. This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Interrupted futures: co-operative labour and the changing forms of collective precarity in rural Andean Peru

Sociological interest in precarious labour has focused on the existential insecurity associated with the discontinuous work relations of contemporary modes of production and the difficulties produced for the formation of effective modes of social and political solidarity. This essay, by contrast, explores the continuities of precarious living in the Southern Peruvian Andes over the past century, with a focus on how the affective force of social obligations and responsibilities to wider collectives (such as the family, the peasant community, or the co-operative) both support and interrupt the search for more stable personal and collective futures. Approaching precarity as a relational condition, the essay traces how precarity takes form in the movements between formal and informal labour practices.