 I hope you can see and hear me. Maybe somebody could just confirm that in the chat. That would be great. My name is Edward Simpson, and I'm a Professor of Social Anthropology. I'm also Head of the Department at SOAS. So, yes, it's brilliant. Thanks very much. And today I'm going to talk to you about Anthropology of Roads, which might seem an improbable topic, but I'd like to try and persuade you over the next 20 minutes or so that it will be deeply interesting. I've been interested in roads for a very long time. When I was a much younger person, I travelled from Calcutta to Istanbul and spent a long time contemplating the tarmac under my wheels and looking at borders and boundaries, and indeed the creative spaces that often appear at the sides of the road. And over the last five years, I've been fortunate enough to have a large research grant which has allowed me to explore the idea of roads, particularly in South Africa, in much more detail. I think roads are interesting because they're common sense. Roads are everywhere. You try to imagine a world without roads, and it's impossible. Roads are so influential that they're fundamental metaphors that we live by. We think of roads in terms of circulation or as national infrastructure. Roads have also become part of our cognitive process, if you like. And for anthropologists, this kind of everyday common sense of something is the starting point. How can you take apart something as common sense as a road, something as ubiquitous, something that is literally more or less everywhere? So other anthropologists have seen roads as places of encounter where strangers meet, places of exchange, trade, ideas. Other people have written about roads as a way of bringing peace or trade to wild lands. Roads could be part of an imperialist project, networking, empires, territory, connecting particular kinds of places and not others. And that's all true. But in my view, roads do something more. They've become kind of magical in many parts of the world. Roads have developed an enchantment. And my project has really been looking at this kind of idea of enchantment, that roads have the power to change people and places. Roads can create new kinds of expectations, new forms of friendship. And in order to do this, I've spent some of the last five years talking to road builders. Road builders, if you like, have been my tribe, my group of people that I've studied and got to know. If anthropologists traditionally studied tribes, then the road builders have been mine. And I've asked them in rather straightforward terms what they think about their work, what it is that they think they're doing, and what kind of world they're looking to build. And alongside that, I've also conducted what anthropologists call fieldwork on a couple of roads. These roads have been in Pakistan and India and Sri Lanka. And I've tried to bring these two pieces of research together. So for the first part of the research, when I've been speaking to road men, as they often call themselves, I've been trying to understand the context in which they work, what their cultural values are, how they see progress or human dignity, and what it is that they believe they're doing when they construct roads. And for the second part of it, the fieldwork on the road, we've been looking in a very different way at what roads do to places, how they change them, how they bring different kinds of people or economies, different notions of speed to villages, how roads divide people and territories. And the result of bringing these two pieces of fieldwork together is the realization that in many parts of the world, road building has become a nationalist project, so deeply entwined with ideas of nation building and the future, that to question road is to ask almost anti-national question. But when you hold that up against the idea, the threat, the risk of climate change, the result is rather interesting, that road builders themselves are building a world that is anti, it's a carbon intensive world, it's not a world that's designed around thinking about carbon trading. But yet why is it that those two ideas, one of development and progress through roads and the idea of climate change and having to change a model, never actually brought together? So that's what I've been focusing on in South Asia. And I'd like to say a little bit more about both of those parts of fieldwork, fieldwork with road men and then fieldwork on the road before I turn to the conclusion about the relationship between road building and infrastructure. So in my view, the kind of anthropology I'm interested in is about understand other people's point of view to try to understand their morality, their sense of future and progress and the unspoken assumptions that motivate them to action. I don't believe particularly in an exotic world, road builders are very much global citizens. And the way I've gone about it is to focus on South Asia but to talk to people from all over the world whose lives and careers intersect in road building in South Asia. So although the project has been about South Asia, it's not about South Asians in any bounded sense, it's about Australians, people from Britain, people from America as well as people from India and Pakistan and other parts of South Asia who are involved in road building. And I've interpreted road building really broad sense. It's not just people out there with shovels and bulldozers. My road builders are bankers, planners, government workers, engineers, all of those people who work in institutions or roads to be built. And many of these groups of people have very clear ideas about what it is that they're doing. They say that roads are about development, roads bring development. This is something that's been repeated so often that I find it difficult to listen to it anymore. But roads also bring, they say, economic growth. Roads bring prosperity. Roads are a way of stimulating economies and they often say and they use the phrase, roads open up the country, roads open up life in a village. So in a way, for many of these road builders, what they're doing is profoundly political. It's not only about the materials of roads themselves, this is infrastructural politics. This is, they see themselves in some ways as the agents of capital, the agents of new economy and that's what roads are doing to the places where road builders work. And in South Asia, there are some very well-known stories about what roads do. They're told often and repeatedly and over the course of hundreds of interviews, people have told me road builders, road men and they are mostly men, some women, but mostly men. But roads bring villages closer to hospitals. Roads bring children closer to schools. Roads bring men closer to labor markets and employment opportunities. And in some ways, all of these things are true in the frames in which they're told. Roads are about development. They are about connecting things. There's much less agreement on who actually benefits from roads and what roads actually do. But they're glossed in these terms of development, economic growth, prosperity and opening things up. These are also the kinds of words that you hear on promotional videos from organizations like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank who also fund roads of the region. So you have a very powerful discourse of roads bringing development and progress. And these are the ways in which roads have become political projects across South Asia. One of the most notable politicians in India is in fact a road builder. And he's made an entire political career out of promising to build roads. Roads have got so much political currency that in nationalist stories of growth, roads are central. Roads have become central to political promise and central to what governments do. Now, the second part of the fieldwork has been conducted on roads, quite literally on roads, talking to people who live along them, travel on them, work on them, manage them, repair them. And that work tells a very different story to the one that the roadmen tell. It's a much more ambiguous story of how roads divide places, speed things up. Yes, roads do connect villages to towns, but to what effect and what consequence? What does it mean that children have access to schools? It also means that children leave villages, that children head to towns. And the research on these kind of things is so varied that it's very difficult to come up with a consistent sort of story. So what me and the other anthropologists on the team did was spent a lot of time alongside roads, thinking about what they were doing and how they connected people and places in new ways. Roads bring property speculation. There is no doubt. Roads bring industry, and over the longer period of time, new main roads actually encourage villages, not villagers, villages to move out of the hinterlands and to be closer to main roads themselves. So roads have these extraordinary transformative effects, but placing these transform effects within the framework that I've just discussed about development banks, governments, and these promises of development, the story is a little bit different. Many of the roads that I've been looking at in South Asia are toll roads. They're roads that you pay to use, pay to drive along. A model that's very common in many parts of the world, quite possibly where you are, and not particularly common in the UK, where roads mostly, with one or two exceptions, are paid for by other forms of tax. But the toll booth, the place where you stop to pay the money, became one of our fieldwork sites. I didn't do it myself, I must admit, that somebody else on the team spent six months living and working in and around one toll booth in central India. He ate there, he slept there, got to know everybody, every trick, every routine that happened in this toll booth. And he could see that these toll booths were places of enormous friction, where companies running the roads were extracting toll attacks on the people of central India. And many of these people resisted. They thought they resented paying the tax, and quite often these were violent places of conflict and contests. Once during the period of fieldwork, there was a violent protest at the toll booth, and on another occasion one was set fire to. So to give you some idea, the roads are actually places of revenue extraction. Yes, they do connect places, but they're also there to extract, put a tax on travel, a tax on mobility. And of course that tax pays for the maintenance of the road itself. So you have a sort of circular system of mobility that is promoted by the state, that is then taxed, which then produces mobility, and so on. But the ethnographic research, as anthropologists call it, revealed this very different view, the idea that roads were actually a form of friction and taxation. And it got rather hot when you tried to convert mobility into a form of revenue through the rising and falling of the toll bar, toll booth barrier. So we became very interested in this. And as anthropologists, we were trained to look for connections and to think about things in a broader, holistic way. What was really happening here? So we decided to follow the money. The money that was paid by travelers passing through along this road in Central India, and that was a very different success because that involved tracing money through the world of international finance, through connections, through Shell firms, and through all different sorts of institutions that were quite unfamiliar to me when I started research. So for example, we found that when the money was paid by the car driver or the lorry driver, the toll worker, it sat in the toll booth for a day. Before it was driven by a secure truck to nearby town where it was back, we couldn't follow the money through the banks. That was too difficult, but we managed to follow it through institutions. And we found that the toll booth money paid by someone driving along a road in Central India went to headquarters of a bank in Mumbai where it went to Mauritius. Mauritius is an offshore tax haven. Mauritius, it went to another shelter in the Isle of Man, which is another tax haven off the coast of the United Kingdom. The company in the Isle of Man traded on what is called the alternative investment market, which is part of the London Stock Exchange. It's like the Wild West, the unregulated part of the Stock Exchange, where profits and loss are great and regulation is at a minimum. And from there, by luck and by chance, we managed to follow the money further to the British Virgin and the Cayman Islands. So this money paid by toll, by motorists, by villagers, passing along this road in Central India, has now found its way into Caribbean tax havens. And there, despite my forensic patience and drawing on lots of connections who work in finance and investigative journalism, the trail stopped for a while. It was impossible to go any further. This was me learning how to use freedom of information requests and to learn the limits of what you could legitimately request, equal to disclose to you. But then just by chance, a yacht came up for sale in the name of the last shell company that was in the Cayman Islands. And that yacht was a very nice yacht. It was for sale for 18 and a half million. And the shell company in the Cayman Islands had what is called shuttered, closed down, put down the shutters as you would on a shop because perhaps they feared investigation. So they were selling their assets and before moving on to something else. And the people who worked on that ship were made unemployed. So they put their CVs onto LinkedIn and things like that, which gave us access to the people who had worked on the ship and eventually access to the names of the people whose ship it was and where they lived. And it turned out that this road in central India was financing the rather lavish lifestyle of people who lived in North America, one on the West Coast and one in central East. And they specialized in infrastructure finance. But they weren't really interested in the revenues from the finance from the road in central India, but in making money move the other way through the tax havens that I've just described. So essentially making money disappear by tax write-offs and by expensive loans from one shell company to another. This is called, I now know, called tunneling. And it's a good way to make money disappear but you need an asset. So there we were, we were thinking about roads and we ended up on yachts in the Cayman Islands. We were thinking about what development means in rural India and we ended up with a luxury yacht and Cayman Islands and the Americans. And we thought more and more about this rather odd story and this was one toll booth out of nearly 400 in India. What if you could tell a similar story for each toll booth if you had the time and effort to do that kind of forensic investigation? It made us think of the claims of politicians. Yes, this road is about development. This road is about opening up villages. Yes, it does do that but it also finances luxury lifestyles in North America for who the road is perhaps an asset that they're not really even aware of. They don't even realize that they own. So I've been left feeling rather uncomfortable by these two pieces of research. One where road went earnestly tell me that their work is about development, prosperity and opening things up. They are the agents of capital. And then the other story that comes from in-depth patient ethnographic field work which then led us to think about what happens to the money which tells a very different story. It tells the story of a world elite who live in offshore islands and have no real need for the nation's state because they've offshoreed everything. And they make money through making money past both ways, the revenue and the tunneling. I think in this case the road is a very powerful metaphor for how the world actually works. The mundane and the island hopping global elite which is very much in line with thinking of other anthropologists at the moment. I have in mind particularly somebody called Bruno Latour who wrote a wonderful book on climate change. And his description of the world is essentially the description that this road allows me to present to you. What it also makes me aware of finally and come towards a conclusion is that the world of road building is carrying on merrily as if there were no climate change as if we didn't have to restrict our carbon output. In India the boast is by the minister in charge that we're building 40 or 50 kilometers of four lane highway per day. And we're going to do this until 2050 putting so many other hundreds of thousands of four lane roads into the world. And roads roadmen will tell you bring traffic. Roads do not reduce congestion, roads that they might in the short term but roads themselves produce more movement and more traffic and therefore more carbon. But roads are so common sense as agents of capital, as ideas of progress and nationalism and forward movement of that metaphor of progress. It often comes even with a simple road journey. Road movie is all about discovery and in some ways individual progress and individual freedom. But that metaphor is so powerful that it stops you thinking about climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions. And I'll stop there. And then perhaps if you have any questions I could have a go at them. Hello everyone. So you can submit any questions that you might have in the chat function. So we'll just give it a minute and see if anyone has anything that they'd like to ask. Thank you Edward for the presentation, it was very interesting. So Brigid has asked, did I walk along the roads or use another form of transport? It's a very interesting question. We did walk along a long stretch of the road in central India. 125 kilometers of it over five days as a way of meeting the people who lived alongside it and talk to them about how they related to the road. But we also drove up and down it in many times, hundreds of times quite possibly. And we also drove up and down it with other people which was a really interesting part of the process. Driving up and down roads with divisional engineers and with politicians who see very different things in the roads that you're working along. They see maintenance, they see money, they see opportunity. And really you can, seeing a road through a road man's eyes is a deeply interesting experience. We actually used driving with them as a kind of form of methodology and got to know the road deeply and intimately by walking along it. So there's a question from Frédéric about how roads impact indigenous communities. That is, I'm well aware of the fact that that's a debate that has relevance in other parts of the world that roads essentially bring other forms of culture and violence into the lives of indigenous communities. In our case, in this particular road in central India there was one really interesting side effect of this road having been built. It was an old road, there's no two ways about it. It was a road that was built for military control of the region and during the colonial period and to control the supply of opium. There's another story behind the story I told you. But there, the pastoralist people, probably the closest that you get to indigenous people in central India, had found that the new road had created new spaces for them. Because of the way that the land had been acquired to make the road, the government had just acquired fields and had not used all of the fields for road construction. So in parts of it, there was a large verge of irregular shaped fields that nomads and pastoralists could use for their migration, for their transhumans which gave the road a sort of extra layer and life. But we didn't study the sort of ideas of deculturalization or the introduction of market economies to indigenous people that you might have had in mind. Somewhere were some other questions that they've disappeared from my screen. If you wrote me a question while I was talking, could you send us a game, please? A question from Josh about the ways in which roads bring drugs and cultural debauchery to places in Nepal. I think that's, there's certainly something to that. And had I had much longer to talk to you about why I think anthropology is a good way to understand these things, yes, on the surface in central India, you could see those changes taking place, but by really taking a long time to understand what it was that you were seeing by doing this long-term ethnographic field work, we had a very different sense. There was prostitution along this road and there were drugs. There was opium as I alluded to in the previous question. But these both had particular histories. Both the sex work and opium consumption were used in essence by the company that ran the road to attract people to the road itself. If you see what I mean, you've got a toll road. It's one choice amongst many. How do you make people, truck drivers in particular, use your toll roads rather than anybody else's? You make sure sex and drugs are available. So we, yes, you could see those sorts of things, but actually if you understood the broader political economy, it was much more complicated than simply cultural change or the opening up if I can use a road man's method. So there've been a couple of questions about sustainable roads and what would environmentally friendly roads look like? This is a great question and one that has occupied me in different ways for quite a long period of time. So in South Asia, the development banks have interpreted the problem of roads to be, they've described roads as having to be resilient towards climate change. So building a sustainable road at the moment in a rather cynical language means a road that will stand more extreme weather and more extreme climactic conditions brought about by climate change. It seems rather an odd response to the problem, but it's a common kind of response that you build what is often described by roadmen as resilient infrastructure. But whether that really is a long-term sustainable solution, I don't know. And as you may have noticed during the last eight weeks, the world has moved much less. There are fewer aeroplanes over my head and the world has not moved quite as much as normal. So it may think, it's made me think, that I don't think a system of politics and society and economics organized around roads as we are fundamentally. We're organized by distribution systems and logistics. I can't see that unless we slow that down, how you simply do business as normal while also reducing carbon emissions. That's the conclusion I have reached. You may have different opinions. So I think I have answered your questions. If you have any more, please feel free to write to me outside this by email. You can find me on the OS website. Priyanka has asked if what would happen if a psychologist came to work. What a wonderful question. On our team, we didn't have a psychologist. We had a development economist. We had a planner from the Indian government and we had a planner from the government of Pakistan. But a psychologist I think would have had a lot to say, both about the broader metaphors that I've been talking about, the ideas of progress and how they are hard led into ourselves, but also into notions of change and speed and possibility. I think, and I've never actually looked, and Priyanka, I might go away and do this, but I've never looked literature on the psychology of roads. So if I go away and find exciting things, I will hold you responsible and thank you. So I would like to thank you all for having come and to listen to me talk about roads and to have shown interest in anthropology and what we do. So as in a more general sense, I would like to emphasise that we are a vibrant place and for those of you who have been to the presentations of colleagues this afternoon, we do a lot of interesting and very varied work in our department. We would like to think really that we were at the cutting edge of raising difficult questions. So thank you for listening and I wish you a pleasant evening or noon or even morning depending on where you are.