Penny Harvey

Social networks and the study of relations: networks as method, metaphor and form

Abstract Networks have recently become fashionable in social analysis but most of the new network approaches have paid scant attention to the long history of reflections upon the potential of networks as an analytical device in the social sciences. In this paper we chart the developments in networking thinking in two disciplinary areas – social network analysis and social anthropology – in order to highlight the enduring difficulties and problems with network thinking as well as its potential. The first half of the paper explores the uses of network approaches over the past fifty years, situating theoretical and methodological questions in their broader disciplinary contexts. The authors then show how emerging issues from both bodies of work offer the promise of new kinds of networking thinking.

The Enchantments of Infrastructure

Abstract This paper addresses the unstable material and social environments that large-scale road construction projects attempt to tame and fix in place as a way of exploring the affective force of roads as technologies for delivering progress and development. Drawing from our ethnography of the construction of two roads in Peru, we trace the disruptive and destabilising processes through which roads come to hold the promise of transformation. We approach roads with curiosity as to their capacity to enchant with respect to three specific promises: speed, political integration and economic connectivity. We suggest that whilst the abstractions of engineering and politics are provisional attempts to demarcate the capacity of roads to bring about the enhancement of international trade, promote the growth of national economies and provide economic opportunity for those prepared to engage with the road’s potential, that these practices alone are not sufficient to explain the passionate promise that roads hold in Peruvian society. We suggest, rather, that the promise of stability is invigorated by mundane engagements with unruly forces that threaten to subvert the best laid plans of politicians and engineers. We argue that such forces are integral to the ways in which roads come to endure as enchanted sites of contemporary state-craft despite their capacity to disappoint and/or the likelihood of generating negative consequences. The political and material process of creating roads, calls forth competing, unauthorised and openly unstable dimensions of being – shifting soils and water courses, side-roads and short-cuts which both challenge and reinvigorate the promises of speed, integration and connectivity.

Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility

Abstract The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspective on roads, space, time and (im)mobility.

Scales of place and networks: an ethnography of the imperative to connect through information and communications technologies

Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for...Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for social change derive from a tension between imagined communities and imagined networks as two different forms of place making. The paper illustrates this tension by tracing the political, institutional, and social development of what we term an imperative to connect, which constitutes a moral and social imperative as much as an economic one.

‘OTHERWISE ENGAGED’: Culture, deviance and the quest for connectivity through road construction

This article explores the cultural framings that all too frequently pass un-noticed in standard cost-benefit accounts of development economics. Our purpose is not simply to add our voice to those who argue for the importance of ‘bringing culture back in’, for we assume that in contexts of modern development economics ‘the cultural’ cannot simply be added to the technical or the economic, as these perspectives are explicitly elaborated as an abstraction from the cultural. Rather, we are interested in how an exploration of the cultural dynamics of technical process leads us to a disjunctive (rather than an additive) mode of ‘inclusion’. Building on approaches from science studies and social anthropology, we draw on our ethnographic and historical investigations of road-building in Peru to explore divergent modes of connectivity through which a politics of cultural engagement is played out. Taking the example of a highway under construction in a frontier zone not generally considered of economic importance to the wider national economy, we discuss the historical desire for ‘connectivity’, highlighting the instability of the physical and social environments on the margins of a marginal state. In this context we find that the vital energies of the frontier – entrepreneurial, innovative, experimental and unruly – consistently disrupt the vision of smooth, orderly, technical integration. We argue that this tension between the cultural and the technical, so clearly manifest at the frontiers of capitalist expansion (but characteristic of technological expansion more generally) is a driver rather than an obstacle in the development process. Attempts to produce a political resolution to a perceived lack of integration on the margins of society too often proceed through further attempts at securing smooth continuity (via further technical modes of intervention) rather than building on the diverse (disjunctive) modes of engagement that already exist.

Anticipating harm: Regulation and irregularity on a road construction project in the peruvian andes

This article draws on an ethnography of road construction in the Peruvian Andes to explore how engineering projects operate as sites of contemporary governance. Focusing on the way in which engineering projects entail a confrontation with dangers of various kinds, we explore how people caught up in road construction processes become preoccupied with the problem of anticipated harm. Drawing on the notion of ‘codes of conduct’, we suggest that the governmental effects of practices which attempt to deal with the uncertainty of the future might be analysed as a tension between the enactment of two different kinds of codification. Building on the notion of coding as a situated material practice, we investigate the appearance of two different ways of encoding a relationship with an uncertain future which we term ‘machinic’ and ‘emergent’. The article builds on a description of these two ways of encoding uncertainty to explore how formal mechanisms of dealing with anticipated harm, such as the regulations of health and safety, are both unsettled and reinvigorated by more affective and relational dimensions of practice.

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester.

Scales of Place and Networks

Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for...Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for social change derive from a tension between imagined communities and imagined networks as two different forms of place making. The paper illustrates this tension by tracing the political, institutional, and social development of what we term an imperative to connect, which constitutes a moral and social imperative as much as an economic one.