Anthropology

Date: November 18, 2016

Location: Turlington 1208     

Time: 3pm

Speaker: Aaron Victoria

Talk Title and Description:

Finding ‘Rhythms in the Road’: How Mobilities become Livelihoods on Central America’s Pan-American Highway

How do roads produce rhythms that pace and give texture to social worlds? How do communities that emerge in the vicinity of transit infrastructure capitalize on how movement is patterned in order to generate livelihoods? During this colloquium Aaron Victoria discusses these questions through a review of his ongoing dissertation research. His project ethnographically tracks the material and storied life of the Pan-American Highway, specifically a 1,300 kilometer stretch that connects the Panama Canal to the construction site of the planned Gran Canal of Nicaragua. On this busy section of the highway infrastructural ‘inconsistencies’ generate a primary set of transactions where the specific organization of materials and social relations impedes the mobility of highway users in exchange for security, more efficient mobility, and socio-political demands. He applies theories of the reciprocity of time to Henri Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis” to not only discuss how the Pan-American Highway is an agentive force whose materiality shapes how people move, but also how its inconsistencies set in motion a cascade of transactions that reflect converging temporalities of mobility. His research focuses on these transactions by studying the everyday work of mobile vendors, roadside vendors, tramitadores (document runners), truck drivers and the things that they exchange with highway users within the spaces of the Pan-American Highway. In doing so, he explains that the transactions of these workers are crucial to sustaining the incomes of local communities and also the flows of the Pan-American Highway.