Roads that separate: Sino-mongolian relations in the Inner Asian Desert
Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport › Bidrag til bog/antologi › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies, the many roads that are now being built or upgraded to transport natural resources, commodities and labour power between Mongolia and China serve to curb both the quantity and the quality of interactions taking place between Mongolians and Chinese. Thus, roads here act as technologies of distantiation, which ensure that the two sides become less connected as time passes.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Titel | Roads and Anthropology : Ethnography, Infrastructures, (Im)mobility |
| Antal sider | 15 |
| Forlag | Taylor and Francis Inc. |
| Publikationsdato | 14 apr. 2016 |
| Sider | 97-111 |
| ISBN (Trykt) | 9781138803572 |
| ISBN (Elektronisk) | 9781317621607 |
| Status | Udgivet - 14 apr. 2016 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
5. The research project is called ‘Imperial Potentialities’ and is funded by a research grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research in the Social Sciences (FSE). In it, the two of us along with Morten Nielsen from the University of Aarhus, who is a specialist on Mozambique (and a contributor to the present volume) explore China’s growing political-economic involvement in Cen-tral Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa via three integrated ethnographic fieldworks on Chinese interven-tions in infrastructure and resource extraction in Mongolia and Mozambique. Our project design involves the implementation of what we call the dual perspective approach: three tightly integrated subprojects that explore Chinese infrastructure projects from a local and a Chinese perspective, thus defining both internal and external comparative axes. More specifically, the project consists of: (1) a study of Chinese interventions in Mozambique from the perspective of African workers and state cadres, (2) a comparable study of similar interventions with respect to the same kinds of agents in Mongolia and (3) a study carried out in and around the same project sites as the others but from the perspective of Chinese workers, managers and officials.
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