Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon (Antipode Book Series)

Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon (Antipode Book Series)
Description
Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means.Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violenceDraws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the regionExamines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday lifeIncorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories
With this beautifully written ethnography, Uribe introduces us to a cast of actors, from enigmatic missionaries, wizened truck drivers, and 'never present' guerrilla for whom the road is material infrastructure and symbol of state power. By building his own road, Simon Uribe brings nature and the state into a dazzling new constellation.'Michael Taussig, Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York`A wonderful historical treat in the emerging field of infrastructure studies, Frontier Road is a rich and fascinating account of the relation between state and frontier in the