Road Work: Highways and Hegemony in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

Resumen En Trinidad y Tobago, los caminos funcionan como un medio estatal para traducir los beneficios de petróleo y gas a fuentes de apoyo popular y electoral. Como resultado, las carreteras funcionan como sitios de confrontación entre funcionarios parlamentarios y ciudadanos descontentos sobre cuestiones de contratación pública, desarrollo y gobernanza. Basado en trabajo de campo prolongado con el Movimiento de Re‐Ruta de la Autopista (HRM)—un grupo de residentes movilizados contra el proyecto de autopista más grande en la historia de Trinidad y Tobago—este artículo propone el trabajo vial como un enfoque metodológico y teórico en la antropología política del Caribe. A partir de la interpretación dual de “vial” en la jerga trinitaria como vía material de tránsito y espacio carnavalesco de potencialidad democrática, este artículo define el trabajo vial como una práctica insurgente que desafía las lógicas instrumentales del estado rentier a través de una atención crítica a las infraestructuras materiales y las redes burocráticas que avalan el orden político postcolonial. [antropología social, desarrollo, movimientos sociales, politica, Trinidad y Tobago]

Beyond Petrotoxic Apparatuses

“…Denouncing the petroleum industry and/or modern capitalism-for which petroleum commodifi cation is a vital substrate-is an approach common to activism, scholarship, and activist scholarship (Estes and Dhillon 2017;Fiske 2018;Hughes 2017;Willow 2016;Wylie 2018), to studies of extractive industries (Kirsch 2014;Li 2015;Mintz 1985;Taussig 1980;Tsing 1994), and also to political economic approaches to the relationship between nature and ecology (Moore 2015). Such denunciation runs counter to scholarship that attends to the materiality of petroleum assemblages, scholarship labeling petroleum-based materials as being integral to modernity (Appel et al 2015;Barry 2013;Huber 2013;Jobson 2018;Rogers 2015). Th e politics and analytics of denunciation overlook how petroleum consumption is a matter of culture and ecology (Masco 2017), which makes modern humans' denunciation of oil tantamount to a Trobriand Islander of a century ago denouncing coral.…”

“…Th e requirements and eff ects of petroleum commodifi cation are predicated on socioecological conditions at a particular extraction site (Adunbi 2013;Appel 2019;Bond 2013;Breglia 2013;Watts 2012); pipeline (Barry 2013;Estes 2019); refi nery (Gill 2016;Valdivia 2017); or other less obvious manifestation of petroleum infrastructure and its attendant sociality, for example highways and suburbs (Huber 2013;Jobson 2018), or history and kinship groups (Rogers 2015;Shever 2012). DAPL was originally slated to go under the Missouri River north of Bismarck, upriver from the primarily White, urban state capital.…”

“…Such an ideological apparatus generates petroleum-supporting subjects and spaces with near-ubiquity, a pervasiveness proving the imperfect separation of ideological and repressive petrotoxicity. How the petroleum-based shaping of space and history generates hydrocarbon-reliant subjects and spaces in ways redolent of repression has been studied in Trinidad and Tobago (Hughes 2017;Jobson 2018), Argentina (Shever 2012), Nigeria (Adunbi 2013), and the United States (Bond 2013;Huber 2013;Seiler 2008). Other research analyzes petrotoxic subject-and space-making as overtly violent repression (Gill 2016;Sawyer 2004;Silva 2018;Watts 2008).…”

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

“…In a region where governments are increasingly headed by individuals born after the independence era, such activism against extractive-driven development is especially poignant. As such, Caribbean environmental geographies offer glimpses of how postcolonial and post-independence conceptions of (under)development are reconciled with dependence on or deference to external capitalist interests, sovereignty, governance of national patrimony, and sustainability (Machado 2017; Jobson 2018).…”

Infrastructural Incorporations: Toxic Storage, Corporate Indemnity, and Ethical Deferral in Peru's Neoextractive Era

“…Expanding on Farmer's (, 307) deployment of “structural violence,” Rodgers and O'Neill (, 404) look to infrastructure as the “instrumental medium” of socially structured suffering. By distributing vital materials in space, infrastructure organizes the available forms of ordinary life (Anand ; Appel ), forming key sites of contestation between citizens and the state (Jobson ). Together, these authors encourage ethnographic attunements to the (infra)structural, passive, distributed, and quotidian enactments of harm rather than looking for the autonomous culprit of any given crisis.…”