Project Details
Projekt
Roadside and Travel Communities. Towards an Understanding of the African Long-Distance Road
Applicant
Professor Dr. Kurt Beck
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
from 2011 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 180364447
Our project inquires into the regimes of the African long-distance road in Ghana and the Sudan by examining roadside and travel communities and the socio-technological orders created by their interaction in a state of interpretive flexibility of imported technologies. The project departs from the insight that motor roads, together with their rules and conventions for using them, are quite literally cultural constructions. The African road draws from North Atlantic models, but our previous research makes clear that beyond the surface of adaptation to North Atlantic models lie large spaces of creative reinterpretations and modifications. As a guiding concept, the project uses the previously developed notion of appropriation, which implies that technologies and their significations are open to significant modifications in the process of their transfer. Our project thus contributes to the main aims of the Priority Programme (PP) to understand the capacity and modalities for adaptation and creativity in Africa with regard to the technology of the road and its various users. Findings from the first phase show that African road regimes differ from North Atlantic models by low regulation capacities on the side of planners and highway authorities, with correspondingly high degrees of freedom for local creativity on the side of its everyday users. Yet we also find modernised road spaces, especially since, at the turn of the millennium, African states started to reconfigure their road regimes. In the second phase, we shifted towards cases where we assumed lower degrees of freedom for local appropriation. By introducing controlled comparisons into our inquiry, we thus searched for scenarios in which limits of local agency and conditions for appropriative creativity could be tested. The logical next steps consist in (1) consolidating and safeguarding our research results, thereby (2) generating substantive theory on the making of the African road by saturating our emerging mid-level concepts, (3) comparing our cases and concepts with those of thematically related projects within the PP and (4) generating primarily formal theory on adaptation and creativity on the PP level, thus consolidating our results from the first two phases and further developing a systematic contribution to the overarching analytical concepts of the Priority Programme. We thus expect to contribute to the main objectives of the PP as well as to the reformulation of established theories of a global automobility and the internationalisation of American road culture from an African perspective.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
