Toward the Dust: Life Around the Un-dead Infrastructures of the Indo-Nepal Border

Keywords: Borders, Borderlands, Borderless, Infrastructure, Dust, Senses, India-Nepal, South Asia, Mobility, Hinderance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58

Abstract

In this newly growing field of anthropology of senses, infrastructure has been felt, smelled, and visualised, among other sensory experiences. But what happens when something hinders such experiences?
During my fieldwork on the Indo-Nepal border in the March of 2020, I encountered something as unacknowledged as breathing, and yet as visible as people. It has a brute omnipresence that spares nobody. It is behind the accelerating vehicles; on the faces of the people; on the entrances of the shops; on the market wares and covering various kinds of infrastructures in the region. It is dust. Some find the border by following it (border-less) and some stay away because of it (border-full). It connects the infrastructures facilitating the mobility to infrastructures delaying the crossing. The dust here is a part of the quotidian life.
This project is about the dual nature of the infrastructures — mobility-facilitation and mobility-hindrance, in the region through the ever-present dust. This article will study those ones that are either not quite fulfilling their purposes and have become medium to other purposes (hence, un-dead), including dilapidating structures, and halted construction work.
Instead of just experiencing the dust merely through a visual sense, this article studies it through the hindrances it produces to multiple sensory experiences that then mediate the meaning of infrastructures in this borderland. Infrastructures here are not felt, they are not smelled, and are not properly visible, and yet their mere presence is embedded in the lives of the people of the region.