The Social Life of Roads: Connectivity and Material Connections in the Karakoram, Pakistan
(2022) Ontologies in the Making. Anthropological & Archaeological Perspectives. — Location: UCLouvain University (18.May.2022)
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- Authors
Fontanari, Thibault 
- Abstract
- The article explores the entanglements of connectivity and connection, materials and materiality. It aims to explore how the construction of the Shimshal Road shapes people’s connectivity, forms a bond of material connections and is continuously coming-into-being with the travellers who use it. When China and Pakistan built the Karakoram Highway (1966-1979) to connect Kashgar, in China, to Mansehra, in Pakistan, the people of Shimshal Valley built a road from 1985 to 2003 to connect their village to this promising international infrastructure. Some parts were made by the state and paid labourers, others were built by the inhabitants themselves with the help of NGOs, while some lineages financed the constructions of hazardous places as a gift. Even today, the road is continuously repaired by the locals, as landslides periodically destroy or block it. The article focuses on the comings and goings of the inhabitants and describes the road as a set of spaces where three types of connections occur: as an object, the road connects the village to the city and carries the promise of the future; as a gift, the road is relational and symbolises relationships; as a thing, the road is constitutive of the ephemeral configurations between human and non-humans. As the ground of social life, the road gathers all these connections together.
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Citations
Fontanari, T. (2022). The Social Life of Roads: Connectivity and Material Connections in the Karakoram, Pakistan. Ontologies in the Making. Anthropological & Archaeological Perspectives., UCLouvain University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271637