Alessandros Unexpected Traverse

A mountain climber finds mystics and space aliens in the Himalayas.
Table of contents

An Interview with Gary Clifton. An Interview with Gary Inbinder. An Interview with Governor Bird. An Interview with Greg Gifune. An Interview with Harry Lang. An Interview with Heather J. An Interview with Jack Alcott. An Interview with James R. An Interview with John Stocks. An Interview with Lewayne L. An Interview with Maria Kontak. An Interview with Marina J. An Interview with Mark Murdock. An Interview with Michael E. An Interview with Mike Florian. An Interview with Oonah V. An Interview with Rachel V. An Interview with Rebecca Lu Kiernan.


  • Historical Dictionary of Tokyo (Historical Dictionaries of Cities, States, and Regions).
  • You Did What?: Mad Plans and Incredible Mistakes!
  • On Roads: A Response to Alessandro Rippa and Colleagues — Cultural Anthropology?
  • On Roads: A Response to Alessandro Rippa and Colleagues?
  • Through Another Lens: Reflections on the Gospels Year A.

An Interview with Richard Ong. An Interview with Robert L. An Interview with Roberta Branca. An Interview with Sheila Murdock. An Interview with Stephanie D. Weidner of Silver Lake Publishing.


  1. Liverpool After Midnight.
  2. Forms of the Political!
  3. Perry Rhodan 227: Der Duplo und sein Schatten (Heftroman): Perry Rhodan-Zyklus Die Meister der Insel.
  4. DISCOVERING THE SELF: OTHER EXPERIENCES AND THOUGHTS;
  5. Microsoft FrontPage Interview Questions, Answers and Explanations: Web Development with Microsoft Fr!

    6. An Interview with Steven Utley in 2 parts. An Interview with Tala Bar. An Interview with the editors of Nocturne Press. An Interview with the Master: An Interview with Tim Simmons. An Interview Without Coffee. An Ode to Dying. An Ongoing Modern Miracle. Analogical Meaning in Lord of the Rings. Anatomy of a Secret Life. And Come the Swift, a New World. And Eternity in an Hour.

    And Just Like That and Spanish original: And She Shall Have Music. And the Beat Goes Phut. And the Darkness Drank Them In. And the Sign Read "Taters". And the Sparrows Coughed. And Then He Rested. And They Were All Saved. And Where Were You? Androids in the Garden. Anent the Scots Leid Angel in My Coffee Cup. Angel of the Winds. Animals Under the Skin. Another Commander-in-Brief or Grief.

    Another Day in Paradise. Another Day in the Park. Another Golden Opportunity Frittered Away. Another Night in Transylvania. Another Story of the Myth of Eve. Another Way of Doing It. Anthem of My American Youth. Apocalypse and Butterfly Flap. Apocalypse for a Dissociated Creator. Apparition in a Photograph. Apple Pies and Elephants. Arabella of Radius Lane.

    Roads or Infrastructures?

    Armchair Observatory, December 5, Armchair Observatory, December Armchair Observatory, December 10, Armchair Observatory, December 11, Armchair Observatory, December 12, Around the World and Beyond. Art for Our Sake. Art of the Storm. As Beautiful as Fish in a Dream. As Dead as David. But alongside the figure of the road as infrastructure, we were interested in exploring how roads simultaneously figure as place. Roads are not only enabling, connective technologies but also locations that are imbued with meaning.

    Dangerous roads are lined with shrines that mark the sites of fatal accidents. People visit spectacular bridges and admire these feats of engineering. They also make trips to enjoy the reflective lights that mark sharp bends or steep drops. Ethnographically, then, we tacked between an anthropology of infrastructure and an anthropology of place, seeking to show how a material entity such as a road may simultaneously enact a sense of place and an extensive relational field of connective potential.

    As you note, we looked in particular at road construction, the means by which a road is brought into being as both place and infrastructure. This multiplicity of the road as both place and infrastructure has forced us to think carefully about method. Ethnographers are very good at producing descriptions of place-making practices, but we wanted to think about how ethnography can help us to understand relationships that exceed the production of place.

    by Michael Alan Potter

    The methods we deployed in this project were an attempt to tackle this problem. Rather than expecting that through depth and length of residence we could uncover a kind of total social meaning for a particular group of people living in a place, we attempted to understand the experience of infrastructure as something that produces confrontation with the unknown, forms of interpretation and negotiation that exceed history and locatedness, and modes of experience that traverse locations.

    We did plenty of place-based ethnography on this project, both in particular locations and in the construction camps. But we also moved around in different ways, on public transport and in company vehicles, sometimes covering very short distances and sometimes making longer journeys.

    On two occasions we traveled along the seven hundred kilometers of the Interoceanic Highway in a private car, with two men who had worked this space as drivers for many years. Along we way we talked with many of the oldest residents of the settlements that we passed through.

    'Hop-to-select' traverse with gestural input in an eye-off interaction

    Here we found ourselves conducting what we might call a syncopated ethnography , which both distanced us from the materiality of place and engendered a different spatial understanding of social interconnection. Importantly, it also made us aware of the way in which social separations appeared, both between people in particular locations and between people who moved up and down this road to live and work.

    We found that kinship relations held the space of the road together in unexpected ways, and yet we also found that these kin relations were compromised by and challenged by the presence of outsiders, people from other places, and anonymous others. This leads us into our response to your question about the lack of contextual detail surrounding some of the people we discuss, particularly some of the engineer-bricoleurs we came across.

    You refer in particular to the engineer in Chapter 3 who asserts his belief in math over a belief in ghosts. In this case Penny knew the woman in question very well, but not the engineer.

    'Hop-to-select' traverse with gestural input in an eye-off interaction

    He was passing through. The conversation was not uncomfortable and his faith in numbers emerged many times as a key component of engineering expertise. However, we also thought in terms of an ethnographic commitment to describe the mutual unknowingness that marked this kind of interactions between people who engaged each other on the road, with no further knowledge of each other or sense of how or when they might meet again. We wanted to retain the importance that our informants placed on diagnosis, on watching, on the interpretation of signs and messages of who outsiders were and what their interests might be.

    We needed to know something about the people we were talking to, but a detailed account of their histories, motivations, and desires would not, we believe, have helped us to describe and explain the dynamics of infrastructural mixing. Communication between people on the road was often unclear. People did not necessarily speak the same language. The engineers often spoke only Brazilian Portuguese.

    In response to your question, we wondered about using the term project sociality to refer to these modes of engagement: Anthropologists have always had to struggle with this type of project sociality, which often jars with the local sociality they are trying to understand. In our case, however, the project sociality we experienced as fieldworkers was not so dissimilar to that of the engineers and local residents with whom we found ourselves interacting. We have tried to use STS and anthropology together to think about how to conceptualize the mess in ethnography as something instructive and empirically relevant.

    As anthropologists, we invest in the study of infrastructural formations in a way that is somewhat different from the technological interests of STS scholars. It is the structuring social forces that engage us. A road construction project allows us to ask questions about power and structure without assuming that the constitutive elements of infrastructural forms are either stable or coherent.

    Thus, rather than seeing structures as things in the world, we prefer to speak of structuring effects. The emergent infrastructure might be both fragile and powerful, and in this respect we should perhaps revisit the issue you raise about roads as priori failures.

    Alessandro’s Unexpected Traverse

    A clarification is needed here. A road is unlikely to meet the multiple expectations that surround it as a structuring formation, but this is not to say that its effects are insignificant. Those effects simply might not be those that were originally planned for or expected.