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- Convenors:
-
Olga Povoroznyuk
(University of Vienna)
Stephanie McCallum (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Peter Schweitzer (University of Vienna)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E397
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The panel invites presentations focusing on railroads as (post)modern infrastructure projects engendering new forms of (im)mobility, remoteness, (dis)connection, social engineering and interactions, involving human and non-human agents.
Long Abstract:
Mobility and the transport of goods have rested on transportation infrastructures since times immemorial. While railway technology characterized the industrial transformations and nation-building processes in Europe during the 19th century, renewed interest in railways stems from technological advances of the 21st century, the production of new geopolitical and resource frontiers, and the increased density and sprawl of urban centers. Railways, however, produce particular configurations of remoteness and (dis)connection, linking certain places and disavowing others. Their promise of progress and modernity entangled in complex local histories is often haunted by the specter of failure.
In the growing body of anthropological literature on transportation infrastructures, railroads have largely fallen out of the main research focus, particularly in the recent studies with their methodological shift from a developmentalist paradigm to one focused on material culture. This panel aims to extend the scope of topics connected to railroads as well as to revisit the approaches to the studies of (transportation) infrastructures existing in anthropology and social sciences. We invite presentations focusing on railroads as (post)modern projects engendering new forms of (im)mobility, remoteness and (dis)connection, social engineering and interactions, involving human and non-human agents. How have railroads been used to engineer particular configurations of remoteness and dis/connection? How do particular affordances of railroad infrastructure, in specific ethnographic locales, shape (im)mobility? What are some of the entanglements and encounters with human and nonhuman others engendered or enabled by railroads? What is the affective and material life of railroads in contexts of modernization and ruination?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the affective and material life of a railway under construction in Niger. It focuses on the anticipations the project created in a town situated alongside the planned railway tracks and on the tensions that emerged when the project suddenly drew to a halt.
Paper long abstract:
The 2014 announcement that construction was [finally] to begin on Niger's first railway marked the revival of the old project to connect Cotonou and its seaport in Benin with Niamey, the capital of landlocked Niger, by rail. In Niger, the railway was presented as a longstanding dream that had finally come true and as a key investment for the country's future economic development. In the town of Dosso expectations were high, the arrival of the railway promised to transform the stagnant local economy. However, following a flurry of activity which included the inauguration of the first 140 kilometers from Niamey to Dosso, the project was suspended. Delays have been identified as a key temporality of large scale infrastructure projects. In this paper, I explore this moment of uncertainty by focusing on the material and affective dimensions of the railway project in the town of Dosso. Despite its prospective state the railway had already had an important impact. Imaginations of future prosperity and anticipations of economic development had been accompanied by important investments in land and different commercial ventures. However, with the halt of the railway project the gradual transformation of the town also came to a stop resulting in a landscape of half-finished constructions. As the unused tracks started to deteriorate, disenchantment set in. For many local inhabitants the railway came to symbolize disconnection and broken promises more than anything else. In the end even the materiality of the railway tracks was called into question.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution presents field research documentations on recent railway projects in Selenge province in Mongolia and sheds light on railway plans, history and narrations. These infrastructures relate to the extraction and transfer of resources and effect the sociality of workers and herders.
Paper long abstract:
Mongolia's traditionally nomadic and livestock-based economy has undergone significant change towards the mining of minerals since the implementation of the free-market economy in the 1990s. Bulag (2014) speaks in this context of "Mine-golia". In order to transport the minerals to markets in and above all outside Mongolia, especially China and Russia, states and private companies invest in rail and road transport (plans). When the first long distance railway was built as 'a gift from Stalin' between 1947 and 1949, herders who never had seen engine techniques, imagined the railway as a 'metal snake' (tumor mogoi) that drilled mountains and crossed rivers. Today many people have high hope of this infrastructural modernisation and expect better economic development and quality of life as result of the railway expansion. Until now most of the planned new infrastructures such as "The Steppe Road" exist on paper and in the minds. In this research, we are investigating recently realised railway projects in Selenge province in northern Mongolia. The presentation of this infrastructure focuses on the social encounters of and the cultural impact on involved workers, herder families and the natural landscape (including spirit beings). Which economic, ecological and sociocultural changes go hand in hand with the development of the railway? The investigation, based on fieldwork in the years 2017/2018, includes studies on material and visual culture using primary and secondary sources.
Paper short abstract:
The development of a railroad in the Megino-Kangalasskiy region in Sakha (Yakutiya) has significantly influenced material and social conditions. In my paper, I will discuss how people anticipate their future lives in a region that will be connected to the Russian railroad network.
Paper long abstract:
Railroad connections may be taken for granted in large parts of Europe. In the Megino-Kangalasskiy region in Sakha (Yakutiya) however, people have been waiting for a passenger connection to be opened for more than a decade. Applying ethnographic methods, in 2015 and 2016 I researched people´s expectations of their future lives in a rapidly changing material and social environment. The railroad development not only brings about a changing landscape as well as progressive urban development and recently implemented educational opportunities in the railroad industry, it also triggers enthusiasm, hopes and dreams as well as fears and disapproval. In this way, it causes intrinsic and societal debates on lifestyles and tradition as well as on immigration and connectivity. Anyhow, individuals include the railroad into their future life plans, no matter if people have a positive, negative or mixed attitude towards the developments. While 'waiting' is frequently thought of something rather passive, in my paper I will show that 'waiting' and 'anticipating' is an active process. Furthermore, I will provide a critical elaboration of the anthropological notion of 'waiting' and discuss the manifold ways individuals throughout different age and social groups handle the fact that their region will be connected to the Russian railroad network.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on anti-high speed railway protests in Italy, this paper analyses how infrastructural conflicts lead to novel political configurations. Centrality, marginality, closeness and remoteness are constructed and contested, while activists develop place-based critiques of capitalist globalisation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how engineering infrastructures, and railways in particular, become foci of political contention in contemporary Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, with residents and activists resisting a high-speed railway project, the paper addresses infrastructures' generative roles with regard to social and political relations. I argue that conflicts over the construction of place, closeness and remoteness afforded by railways, can lead to complex reconfigurations of the political. The struggle in Valsusa, ongoing since the 1990s, is the most long-running and largest infrastructural conflict in present-day Europe. Contrary to common assumptions, protesters show the railway project is environmentally as well as economically unsustainable, and they denounce it as an expression of illicit interests linking figures in the Italian government to potent industrial and financial actors. Analysing this conflict, I highlight the production and dissemination of technical counter-expertise among activists and show how that knowledge about railways and their impacts becomes the basis for political mobilisation that overcomes ideological and lifestyle divides among very diverse groups. The movement brings together mountain farmers and retired workers with liberal middle-class intellectuals and experts, as well as Catholic church-goers with communist squatters and various kinds of anarchists. New kinds of individual and collective militant subjectivities emerge, focused on direct action and a critique of neoliberal governance, neoliberal capitalism and the anthropocene. The contestation of the specific infrastructural project becomes a point of departure for constructing alternative models of socio-economic and ecological relationships across scales from the 'local' to the 'global'.
Paper short abstract:
The Baikal-Amur Mainline, a late railroad socialist project, is undergoing technological modernization. The study of the reconstruction process illustrates the temporality of the BAM infrastructure as a network of actors involved in production and translation of memories, knowledge, and emotions.
Paper long abstract:
The Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) is a railway line built in the 1970s and 1980s in the northern areas of East Siberia and the Russian Far East. The construction of the BAM in the late socialist period was accompanied by communist propaganda, a mass population influx and the formation of new groups and identities. As result the railroad has become a largest technological and social engineering project, filled with the myths and promises of mobility, connectivity and modernization. BAM-2, a recently launched state program of technological modernization fueled by resource extraction interests is aimed at the construction of the once projected second track and renovation of stations. The reconstruction works engenders networks of actors - railroad organizations, extracting and construction companies, former builders of the BAM, local administrations and residents, as well as trains, tracks, stations, building machinery and financial flows. Public hope and expectations evoked by references to the glorified socialist construction project, contested distribution of funds and new jobs and varied perceptions of the railroad's role make the postsocialist BAM an affective infrastructure. The paper drawing on ethnographic data collected in the BAM communities seeks to contribute to the growing field of the anthropology of infrastructure (Harvey and Knox 2015, Collier 2004, Campregher, 2010). It addresses the process of co-construction of "hard" and "soft" infrastructures by studying reconfiguring networks of actors involved in the production and translation of memories, knowledge, and emotions at large-scale development projects in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the work of repair technicians in a locomotive shop in postsocialist Romania, this paper investigates the complex pragmatic, symbolic, and affective implications of dirty work.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the role played by dirtiness in a state-run locomotive repair workshop in postsocialist Romania. The poor state of the machines and the manual nature of their labor means that technicians are routinely in physical contact with grimy or viscous materials that are contaminating to the body and are seen as polluting outside the technological context in which they function. Although getting dirty is part of the job, Romanian technicians talk about the dirtiness of their labor and workplace in terms of embodied disgust and social abjection. I propose that dirtiness simultaneously functions as: 1. a practical matter (it needs to be removed from machines and bodies, and "read" in the process of diagnosis), 2. a symbolic vehicle that distinguishes between managers and workers and between workers themselves, and 3. an affective trope through which railroaders critique the devaluation of labor and express their dismay with the degraded condition of public railways under neoliberal conditions. Informed by twelve months of participant observation in an electrical locomotive shop in Bucharest, this paper draws on recent literature on anthropology of repair, and on theorizations of affect to explore the practical, symbolic, and affective implications of dirty rail work in a postsocialist context of underfunded public services, crumbling infrastructure and technology, and degraded workers' identity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of how railroad workers, commuters, and train enthusiasts learn to "read" railroad infrastructure in Buenos Aires. It argues that railroad history is etched in the materials that comprise track infrastructure and rolling stock, shaping daily mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Rust is ubiquitous in railway landscapes in urban and suburban Buenos Aires, where fungal-like constellations of burnt orange, speckled greyish-white and ochre, wrap rails and discarded train carcasses, and even surface on new rolling stock. Rust corrodes the layers of paint aimed at modernizing trains, and spreads over signaling equipment and track infrastructure like a bad case of metallic eczema. Rust indexes the dynamism of metal (Barry 2010, 2013), and infrastructure more generally, pointing to the manner in which surfaces and structures shift over time. In the vein of recent scholarship in anthropology that addresses infrastructure not in its fully functioning capabilities but rather as it falls apart (Anand 2012, Chu 2014, Schwenkel 2015), this paper attends to how aging railway infrastructure registers and shapes daily mobility in Buenos Aires. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with railway workers, commuters, and train enthusiasts (ferroaficionados) in Buenos Aires, I argue that railway history is etched in the materials that comprise railway infrastructure, contributing to shape its form and particular affordances. Railway infrastructure, I propose, can be read as an archive of sorts, a repository of memory. Focusing on the materiality of railway infrastructure, rolling stock, and the traces etched on these, I attend to the histories of abrasion and friction and the sociomaterial engagements that shape the vicissitudes of mobility, resulting in particular geographies of neglect and risk. What stories does railroad infrastructure tell? What does ethnographic attention to railway matter open up theoretically? What can it contribute to studies of mobilities?