Introduction—Building Infrastructural Lives: Mobile and Creative Livelihoods in India and Vietnam

Abstract

Articles in this special issue compare and contrast how secondary roads and wireless communication devices shape mobility and connectivity for four communities affected by economic, political, and ethnic marginalisation in socialist Vietnam and democratic India. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastructural lives’, two urban case studies explore the ways by which marginalised migrant communities in India’s Hyderabad and Vietnam’s Hanoi use, adapt, or resist their states’ desires for all residents to embrace secondary roads, greater internet and cellphone interconnectivity, and digital monitoring. In parallel, and by comparing the realities of the Sino-Indian and Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, two rural case studies explore whether upland ethnic minority groups similarly modify or adapt their livelihoods to the expanding secondary roads and wireless communication technologies across the rural highlands of northern India and Vietnam. Taken together, this issue asks: How do the creative engagements of marginalised communities with these infrastructures shape infrastructural lives?

Keywords:

• Infrastructural Lives
• India
• Vietnam
• Mobility
• Livelihood
• Road
• Wireless Technology

Infrastructure building in Asia is a source of national and regional integration that both changes and challenges the ways centres look at their margins, in both rural and urban contexts. In India and Vietnam, new infrastructures of mobility, such as highways, bridges, and airports, rely on vastly different political structures and ideologies, but their market objectives are gradually converging. Little is known about the impacts of these new and upgraded infrastructures on marginalised rural and urban communities through their construction, maintenance, and politics of access and operations. Infrastructure may indeed yield new social and spatial capacities for marginalised communities (e.g. ethnic minorities, religious minorities, women), but it can also reinforce their social and economic exclusion (Ghertner 2015; Schindler 2014). For example, a new road linking a remote rural village in mountainous Vietnam or India can bring about increased connectivity to permanent marketplaces for trade and new social ideas, or bring increased exposure to disease and unwanted cultural changes (Dewar and Watson 1990; Songco 2002). This issue reveals the infrastructural lives built through two oft-overlooked, but steadily expanding, infrastructures of mobility. Both of these infrastructures of mobility operate as socio-technical systems and state-making projects in the Asia-Pacific region: ‘secondary’ roads and wireless communication technologies (e.g. internet, cellphones, GPS, and surveillance cameras).

Regional Connections

Why India and Vietnam? This issue compares the roles and impacts of these infrastructures in two contrasting political systems, and in two countries with very different relationships with China, their mutual financial ‘big-brother’. In 2017, the Asian Development Bank highlighted that developing countries in Asia and the Pacific would need to invest US$26 trillion in infrastructure from 2016 to 2030 to sustain economic growth and address social and environmental concerns such as climate change and the eradication of poverty (Bank 2017). Vietnam leads Southeast Asia’s infrastructure development with 5.7 per cent of its GDP invested in infrastructure projects in recent years (Yap and Uyen 2017). In India, the Department of Economic Affairs has identified a need for $4.5 trillion for infrastructure development by 2040 (Abi-Habib 2018; India P.T.O. 2018). China is at the epicentre of many of these initiatives, and neighbouring nations are partly advancing infrastructure development in reaction to China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) (Sidaway and Woon 2017; Oakes 2021). China launched, in 2016, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a multilateral development bank from which India and Vietnam have both sought (and continue to seek) the financing of many large projects. In parallel, India and Vietnam also share expertise across borders and collaborate around infrastructures of mobility, partly in reaction to China’s territorial claims. In 2016, for instance, India built a satellite station in Southern Vietnam that could track China’s activities in the South China Sea with the support of the Vietnamese government (Vu, Soong, and Nguyen 2021). In and beyond their urban cores and common mountainous borderlands, these overlapping and, at times, conflicting initiatives tie India and Vietnam to China through infrastructure projects, even if the two countries have not fully embraced the BRI initiative (ASEAN 2018).

These two countries also share an inclination to elevate dominant cultural identities, which, in turn, have tended to further marginalise less powerful populations. Major infrastructure projects are rarely conceived for the clear benefit—or with the significant participation—of lower caste communities and ‘scheduled tribes’ in India, or ethnic groups distinct of the ethnic Kinh majority in Vietnam. Instead, new infrastructures are often designed to strengthen government control on parts of the countries that they wish to uniformise and infuse with dominant cultural and social politics. Tight alleys in major cities, and mountainous paths disappearing on the horizon of rural areas in Vietnam and India, may be difficult to reach, but the efforts to get there have remained relentless.

Despite significant differences in political structures and approaches, there have been some noteworthy rapprochements between the two countries in recent years in the ways in which infrastructures are funded, constructed, and maintained. Foreign investments and technical exchanges have increased in both countries, especially in the shape of ‘public-private partnerships’ that have been set up across urban, suburban, and rural areas. In Vietnam, the state still ensures that it is known that successful infrastructural projects have been approved and only proceed under the guidance of the Communist Party’s long-standing ideological rhetoric of collective progress and equality. But the new ‘PPP law’ just passed in 2020 is likely to facilitate these types of foreign investment and to grow the number of infrastructural projects in the country, which appears to be a new way to acquire recognition for modernisation—through deal breaking—rather than only through the productiveness of state-led industries.

In India, the nationalistic stance of the ‘Make in India’ campaign established by Prime Minister Modi in 2014 (followed by the ‘Skilled India’ campaign in 2015) have indicated the desires of strengthening domestic growth and developing the necessary local infrastructures to achieve this objective. And yet, at the same time, the country’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been built around the very idea of minimising the overall cost of intensive production for multinational companies to convince them to move their headquarters into these secured zones, where, in effect, the national and regional states’ legislations can be reworked to the benefit of these companies.

Public reactions and political engagements with such infrastructural initiatives in India and Vietnam have included protests, strikes, and criticisms. In India, organised protests for farming land acquisition and infrastructural development are common even if they generally result in minimal negotiations with the people displaced. Most often, these displaced people must still adapt their mobility practices and livelihoods (Bedi 2013; Da Silva, Bo Nielsen, and Bedi 2020; Levien 2018). In contrast, in Vietnam, although protests and strikes have been known to be effective, they have generally been less visible. Protests in Vietnam also tend to target specific working conditions in industrialised areas rather than infrastructural development per se (Kerkvliet 2010; Buckley 2021).

The rapidly expanding new digital infrastructures in each country have been criticised in contrasting ways that correspond to the political structures and communication channels available. In India, policies to develop and ‘secure’ residents’ mobility through digital technologies have been openly criticised by citizens and activists in both mainstream and alternative media. Recently, for instance, the country-wide Aadhaar project, meant to provide a unique 12-digit identification number for all Indian residents to comply to a verification by the Indian government, was criticised persistently in public opinions and media. Eventually it was officially contested at the Supreme Court (which ended up limiting Aadhaar ID usage by private parties) (Rao and Nair 2019). In Vietnam, the media ecology has changed quickly following the Đổi Mới (Renovation), which notably led to the privatisation of certain aspects of media production and distribution, as well as a growing (but still controlled) internet access and social media. In such a context, blogs, Facebook, and other social media platforms have offered virtual ways to criticise recent policies, including the Special Economic Zone Law that ‘allows foreign investors to obtain up to ninety-nine-year land leases in selected areas’ (Nguyen-Thu 2018, 895). Despite stern efforts to ban and punish these criticisms online, the Vietnamese government has not managed to catch up with a constantly evolving digital landscape. This digital infrastructure facilitates the flows of capital the government seeks but also provides its detractors with information channels that cannot be reined in as easily as before.

Across these shifting political realities, the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in infrastructural ventures tend to remain fuzzy, especially for people who are not privy to these initiatives but are nevertheless using and building infrastructures on the ground. The local ethnographic analyses proposed in this issue aim to attend to these realities and to explore the forms of labour and livelihoods that are being reshaped and adapted through new infrastructures. To do so, the contributors touch upon and connect with a set of significant discussions in the recent literature regarding infrastructure.

Two Forms of Infrastructure

In contrast with highly visible infrastructure such as expansive highways, secondary roads remain in the background, less used, and even hidden, like some of the vehicles that circulate on them (Dalakoglou 2012, 2016). Similarly, portable wireless communication technologies enable alternative virtual exchanges of information, ideas, and images beyond traditional state and private sector media, physical locations, and state frontiers. These two infrastructures are often also closely intertwined: secondary roads connect people to workplaces, marketplaces, tourist attractions, and their homes; and wireless technologies provide information and security, track road users, visitors, and marketplace traders.

Across India and Vietnam, infrastructures of mobility are social and material configurations that work individually or together to enact interconnectedness between and within communities. They are performed, dynamic, and interdependent, and they shape and they are shaped by political realities. The case studies in this issue compare and contrast how secondary roads and wireless communication devices shape mobility and connectivity for four communities affected by economic, political, and ethnic marginalisation. Two urban and two rural case studies explore the ways by which marginalised communities in India and Vietnam remake, adapt, or resist their states’ desires for all residents to embrace secondary roads, greater internet and cellphone interconnectivity, video surveillance coverage, and markets’ expectations. Brought together, these articles aim to respond to these questions: Do the ways by which these marginalised communities use these infrastructures align with state goals? Do local populations subvert state intentions for infrastructure? If yes, do they do so similarly in such different spatial and political contexts? And what does all this mean for state development goals and projects?

Infrastructural Lives

In South and Southeast Asia, infrastructure projects providing roads, water, electricity, communication channels, and trading spaces bring the politics and poetics emerging from colonial histories and contemporary geopolitical realities into sharp relief (Larkin 2018, 2013; Lindquist and Xiang 2017; Hill 2013; Schnitzler 2016). Recent scholarship challenges understandings of infrastructure as neutral, natural, or apolitical (Lemanski 2022), and instead attempts to shed light on how infrastructure projects’ exclusions and inclusions are experienced daily in unexpected ways, through and beyond the materiality and design of infrastructure (Amin 2014; Graham and McFarlane 2014; Murphy 2016). Infrastructure is often used to justify and legitimise land acquisition, as well as its organisation and securitisation (Heming, Waley, and Rees 2001; McLean 2014). One possible way to highlight mobility injustices and inequalities is to look for sites of ‘friction’ when specific groups of individuals find their mobility limited, and examine why this occurs (Cresswell 2014). Along with canals, dams, and bridges, roads and marketplaces reconfigure rural and urban spaces, centres and peripheries, as well as borders (Barnes 2016; Borzooie, Lak, and Timothy 2021; Carse 2012; Gonzalez 2020; Hetherington and Campbell 2014; Mains 2012). The environmental, aesthetic, social, and historical dimensions of such projects invite new forms of theorisation that can tackle the effects of different political regimes in India and Vietnam.

Building on science and technology studies, social scientists have recently produced scholarship on infrastructure studies that questions human exceptionalism. From such views, technologies and infrastructures are conceived as co-evolving through human interactions—an ongoing process that interrogates clear distinctions between matter and form (Simondon 2017; see also Helmreich 2007). Other studies are reassessing the ontology of the material world by reflecting on how materiality has implications for political processes (Bennett 2010; Jensen 2017; Jensen and Morita 2017; Larkin 2018; Latour 2007; 1996; Mitchell 2011). Infrastructure is thus theorised as a range of technical systems that connect heterogeneous networks and bring different actors (engineers, politicians, activists, bureaucrats, citizens) into a single system (Anand 2017; 2015; Appel 2012; Björkman 2015; Collier and Lakoff 2008; Gandy 2008). Seemingly ‘boring’ and mundane as objects, different infrastructures have social lives of their own (Star 1999). Infrastructure is not only shaping societal and individual everyday experiences, but it is also fashioning subjectivities in ways that exceed intended functions (Meehan 2014; Millington 2018; Truelove 2016). As a range of socio-technical systems, infrastructure is both shaped by and entails power relations and differing agencies (Pfaffenberger 1988). Understanding the connections that make these systems therefore requires an attention to geometries of power that play across caste, class, gender, and religious lines.

Following Jacob Doherty and Kate Brown (2019), the articles in this issue probe how ‘[i]nfrastructure’s vitality depends on the ways that it enrolls human bodies and living human labor in the daily work of maintenance and repair’ (2019, 8; in Addie 2021, 1356). The populations discussed across this issue may be ‘enrolled’ (see also Callon and Law 1982) by new infrastructures, but they also reshape their livelihoods through inventive usage of infrastructural extensions, bifurcations, and diversions. The new and/or repaired paths that they take result from acute knowledge of the ways in which older and newer infrastructures mesh and take different shapes.

Discourses of technological optimism that claim that ‘anyone can be innovative’ have accompanied new infrastructures and their associated devices and affordances (Ampuja 2016; Kaur 2016). The analyses proposed in this issue break from such perfect tales of all-encompassing innovation. Nonetheless, they highlight that the development of infrastructure is a moment when users can discover and stabilise new paths and functions. The contributions reveal these processes by contextualising specific understandings of inventive acts and their limits. Infrastructural lives are indeed not only about far-futures promises or past failures; they are also about everyday concerns over bits and pieces working perfectly, enough, incorrectly, or not at all. As such, infrastructural lives are made of one’s competence with navigating changing paths and systems that lead and relate to other possibilities and limitations. The infrastructural lives and livelihoods described in this issue are made of changing technical and social dimensions that users strategise around (Turner), hide from (Messier), adapt and resist to (Michaud and Bilodeau), or reinvent (Gagné and Lundup). Such creative engagements happen in the peculiar ways that infrastructures evolve in unexpected directions, in response to being realigned, slowed down, or stopped in their tracks (Barry 2020; Carse and Kneas 2019; Gupta 2018; Monstadt 2022).

Livelihoods of Roads and Wireless Communication

The articles in this special issue bring together two elements of infrastructure that have shaped current conceptual discussions on mobility. First, roads have been described as embodying individuals’ economic aspirations through state integration or incarnate hopes for a better livelihood amid insecure futures (Finnis 2010; Harvey and Knox 2015; Hussain 2015; Reeves 2016; Winthereik and Wahlberg 2022). Their management, their operations, and their functions are seen as generative of political subjectivities. They become terrains on which forms of citizenship are contested and performed (Bedi 2022; Coleman 2017; De Boeck 2012; Fredericks and Diouf 2014; Jensen 2021; Kaika 2006; Murton 2017). In India and Vietnam, they materialise visions of professional success and modernity (Hansen 2017; Jain 2017; Truitt 2008). Filled with cars and motorbikes, even secondary roads have an affective presence and can act as visible technological success stories of state-led infrastructure projects as they connect with larger projects in development (Barker 2005; Bovensiepen and Yoder 2018; Knox 2017; Mrázek 2002; Schwenkel 2015; 2020) and, also, show their limitations (Lesutis 2022). Indeed, main and secondary roads work with marketplaces to impose stability and order as they incorporate the movement of vehicles and customers and facilitate the exchanges of commodities every morning (Michaud and Turner 2017; Turner 2022). Within these interconnections, infrastructural activities are sensed in particular ways. Like Christopher Pool and Lisa Cligget say ‘[t]he sights, smells, and sounds of the market, the wharf, or the trading floor are every bit as evocative as the plaza, the palace, or the cathedral’ (2008, 5). Similarly, the smell of burned petrol and rubber, the sight of luxurious sports cars with tinted windows on a major road, and the sound of underpowered motorbike engines carrying a heavy load through tight alleys evoke certain views and attitudes toward new roads and their access. Such sensory relationships are potential threats to more ‘familiar sensorium’ and can obscure or remind someone of the alternative dirt trails that they used to walk on before the appearance of asphalt roads (Naidu 2018, 469; see also Bedi 2022, 2023).

Wireless communication technologies such as cellphones, internet, and GPS systems have been embedded into the fabric of existing infrastructure of mobility such as roads, bridges, airports, and marketplaces (Borzooie, Lak, and Timothy 2021; Dewar and Watson 1990; Gonzalez 2020; Hirsh 2016; Munn 2020; Pinch 2010; Vukov and Sheller 2013). They contribute to these processes by acting as both signs and creators of international connectivity and mobility in India and Vietnam (Doron 2012; Doron and Jeffrey 2013; Horst 2013; Hüwelmeier 2016; Reddy 2015; Tenhunen 2018).

Recent wireless communication technologies have shifted the amount of information (e.g. 3G vs 4G connectivity), the types of information communicated (e.g. audio files vs video files), and how information is compressed (Sterne 2003). New forms of surveillance and datafication have also been designed (Gates 2013; McKay 2020; Seaver 2022); they include aggregation algorithms that are being inserted into wireless devices, which, in turn, inform internet providers of the locations, desires, and habits of their users (Couldry and Hepp 2017; Just and Latzer 2017; Pedersen, Albris, and Seaver 2021; Simone 2004). These technical distinctions (speed, quality, and aesthetics) can become invisible over time as new infrastructure replaces older infrastructure, a process that creates differing social access (e.g. internet speed in rural vs urban areas) and new experiences of connectivity (e.g. ‘live’ vs delayed video transmission) (Cardullo 2017; Jackson 2014; MacKenzie 2002; Sterne and Mulvin 2014). In a larger context of digital and informational capitalism, vehicles on roads, especially recent cars equipped with wireless communication technologies, have been turned into ‘mobile spatial media’ through large-scale internet interconnection, automation, and growing platform economies (Leon 2019, 363; see also Plantin and Punathambekar 2019).

Like other infrastructures, roads and wireless communication technologies thus tend to work in a reinforcing loop, where one form of infrastructure valorises another through usage, and vice versa. During driving, for instance, smooth roads can facilitate physical movements of cars, motorbikes, and bicycles, while wireless communication technologies, such as low-cost cellphone internet connections for GPS tracking, can improve the anticipations of these movements (slower/faster, left/right). It is at these junctures and overlaps that roads and wireless communication technologies operate. Infrastructural lives such as the ones explored in this issue are formed where and when the technical capacities of digital surveillance (glitches, uneven video compression, and lost GPS signals) meet and intersect with broken pieces of tarmac, excessive mud after heavy rain, and changing regulations of traffic access. In this manner, infrastructural lives are, and happen through, multimodal activities that are rarely confined to one mode of interaction or communication. In everyday and exceptional events, the combined social and technical organisation embedded into more-than-one infrastructure can change appropriate conduct towards one infrastructure or its parts. A person driving a motorbike on a busy city road may not stop at a red light because they do not attribute legal authority to the sign but might decide to stop if a surveillance camera is pointing at them. Perhaps the person will keep driving if they believe that they can exert some power of dissuasion over (or bribe) the police officer who might catch them, especially if the officer seems distracted by their smartphone. In such a scenario, roads and wireless communication technologies work as one and the same infrastructure of mobility, alongside human interactions. In doing so, it initiates a set of modalities of action at ‘the intersections of semiotic, social and material aspects of mediation’ (Boyer 2012, 388).

In other ways, successful entanglements of this sort are often used as a rhetorical strategy meant to convince and legitimise the construction of new infrastructures and to convey their importance to privileged travellers or high-profile workers. In India and Vietnam, what are considered well-developed and highly effective networks of roads and wireless communication technologies are regularly showcased and touted as examples to be followed. In northern Vietnam, for instance, the mobility across desirable tourist locations, such as the scenic roads that lead to the uphill town of Sa Pa in Lào Cai Province, are easily viewable from a distance via wireless internet (websites, online videos, social media platforms). These locations are also portrayed to potential tourists as areas with reliable wireless connections, which inform future visitors that they will be able to share instantaneously (or quickly enough) their adventurous movements across the mountainous roads and paths. Similarly, in southern India, the new metros and the freshly paved roads leading to them in Bangalore or in Hyderabad have been equipped with surveillance cameras, but they have also been advertised as such to urban middle-class residents and expected common users, via promotional videos and photos displaying the systems’ capacities to move people securely and efficiently.

In contrast, the workers involved in building roads or those who install internet cables and antennas are also typically only occasional users of recent infrastructures (due to prohibitive costs). These workers are more likely to be targeted by advertisements for temporary employment for infrastructure construction or to be policed for the inappropriate usage of these infrastructures. In these contexts, following the words of Till Mostowlansky and Max Hirsh, infrastructure ‘serves a didactic purpose, both as a training ground for skilled and unskilled workers, and as a showcase for modern modes of geo­graphic displacement’ (2023, 2). Indeed, roads and wireless communication technologies—and their entanglements—do not simply mediate privileged forms of usage, they also transform in action the ways in which users and workers are ‘coming-to-terms-with’ a specific understanding of mobility and of one’s position in the process (van Loon 2009, 119). It is also through these processes of mediation—embedded in the infrastructures’ designs, but also in their standards of construction, maintenance, and promotion—that marginalised populations experience infrastructural lives.

The Case Studies

In this issue, Karine Gagné and Jigmat Lundup investigate how Ladakhis, a minority population of North India (and a scheduled tribe per the social classification system of the Government of India), seek to challenge state development projects for road building and the development of telecommunication infrastructure (Gagné 2022, 2019). Focusing on the Hemis National Park in Ladakh, a hotspot for wildlife tourism, snow leopard watching, and ecotourism, Gagné shows that the communities in this region are moving from pastoral-based subsistence to employment in the tourism sector. Inspired by current discussions on the concept of legibility regarding new spaces, Gagné examines how local populations are confronted by their desires for modern infrastructures (such as checkpoints on roads) and for preserving the untamed, wild constitution of the park. Gagné reveals how one checkpoint has been created by the communities’ members to meet local needs, and that the apparent ineffective and obsolete corroded metal it is made of betrays its significance and actual impact. The analysis underscores how these communities develop the checkpoint, a mundane infrastructure, to engage with the potential benefits of tourism development and invent their preferred forms of legibility on their own terms.

In rural and upland northern Vietnam, Jean Michaud and Simon Bilodeau analyse how rural ethnic minority Hmong communities respond to state-endorsed infrastructure projects introduced to uphold state ideals and imageries of productive upland workforces and which aim to integrate upland margins into the nation and the market (Messier and Michaud 2012; Michaud 2012). In Lào Cai and Hà Giang provinces, the tourism infrastructures that the authors investigate include a recently completed highway from Hanoi to the Sino-Vietnamese borderline connecting smaller older roads, greater internet coverage, increasing access to cellphones, and newly constructed fixed marketplaces (with newly introduced fees and fixed timetables) that have served to strengthen market integration (Michaud and Turner 2017; Turner, Bonnin, and Michaud 2015). Drawing on interviews conducted in 2023, as well as hundreds of interviews conducted over the last three decades, Michaud and Bilodeau ask how Hmong individuals engage strategically with such infrastructure projects as they seek to skirt around state-endorsed pathways and develop their own expertise and views of the highland terrain and its alternative futures. In contrasting these processes in two neighbouring provinces, the authors show how infrastructural projects operate in lockstep with state agencies’ priorities across northern Vietnam, and in correspondence with similar pushes from Southwest China. But they also unpack how these Hmong communities develop diverting practices and negotiate low-key postures to maintain flexible livelihoods despite imposing state infrastructures and tourism initiatives.

Back in India, but this time in urban areas, my paper in this issue shows how the construction of new roads, the integration of wireless communication technologies, and the audiovisual surveillance of marketplaces and labour practices represent and partake in the new Telangana State’s visions of connectivity and mobility in southern India (Messier 2020). I draw on video ethnography and interviews with urban migrant Vadderas, a marginalised group of stonecutters and farmers who produce granite stone blocks that are used to build information technology offices and roads in Hyderabad’s special economic zones. I first examine the capacities and limits of the growing digital surveillance infrastructure designed with the support of computer engineers. Made of ‘smart’ cameras, the digital surveillance can capture and identify illicit movements and working practices across the city. Next, I focus on how Vadderas navigate the communicative capabilities of their cellphones to develop their own locally relevant hacking practices in their neighbourhood and in stone quarries by exchanging information about their daily avoidance and obscuring strategies across Hyderabad’s small, hidden, and less monitored roads. Collaborative videos and interviews with Vadderas reveal the paths taken from stone quarries to Hyderabad’s market connections as these workers seek to keep away from police officers and the unwanted control of their supervisors.

In Vietnam’s capital city Hanoi, Sarah Turner observes how new infrastructure projects are being strongly endorsed and supported by the socialist state as it attempts to compete with other mega-cities across South and Southeast Asia to become ‘sustainable and modern’ (Turner 2022; Turner, Zuberec, and Pham 2021). Turner explores how war veteran 3-wheeler vehicle delivery drivers—both ‘fake’ and ‘real’, depending on their official registration as disabled war veterans—provide essential daily services for residents in Hanoi’s busy streets. These drivers must work alongside newer transportation technologies, such as app-based motorbike delivery services that are deemed more appropriate to ‘modern’ mobility needs. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with over 40 drivers, as well as customers and city planners, Turner shows how these drivers circumvent constraining state policies and maintain their livelihood against new forms of urban mobility and emerging socio-technical systems. Drawing from the notion of ‘disposable bodies as infrastructure’, Turner analyses rich ethnographic material that relates to the changing infrastructural lives of these drivers in Hanoi. Turner highlights how mobility is experienced relationally across ‘spatial, political, social, and cultural’ dimensions.

Across the issue, China’s influences materialise in mobility practices, technologies, and ideas. Strongly guarded highland borders bring together the cases of Gagné and Lundup in the Himalayas, and of Michaud and Bilodeau in North Vietnam, where roads traverse, connect with, or point toward other infrastructure projects in China further North. In Vietnam’s northern highlands and alongside the roads and tourism infrastructures built in recent years (Michaud and Bilodeau this issue), cheap satellite antennas provide ethnic groups with regular access to China’s television channels. These have been sold and regularly used for some time—an infrastructural opening through everyday technologies (Arnold and DeWald 2012) that the Vietnamese government struggles to control and is suspicious of (see also Messier 2012).

Back in urban streets, we learn through Sarah Turner’s article that some of the three-wheelers driven by war veterans in Hanoi have been imported from China. Turner also highlights that young Vietnamese people appear to be more preoccupied about the country’s relationship with China than the United States—a geopolitical perception that undermines the social position and working opportunities of these war veterans. My article on Hyderabad describes how the CCTV cameras newly installed across the city may have their software designed to operate locally by computer engineers, but even these local engineers are quick to point to the fact that many of these cameras are originally built in China and even include Chinese firmware (Messier, this issue). As such, these engineers voice suspicions and concerns about Chinese spying. Yet these discussions also reflect on the strength of China’s infrastructures, a strength that these local engineers seek to develop for India. Overall, the local ethnographies in each of these case studies illustrate how China’s political impact can be experienced and perceived in infrastructural lives that overlap across India and Vietnam. And while the contributions in this issue identify significant policies at play in these contexts, they seek to reflect on the political in infrastructure projects in India and Vietnam ‘as an effect of socio-technical configurations rather than policy pronouncements’ (Oakes 2021, 263).

The special issue concludes with an Afterword by Leo Coleman, who builds on his work on infrastructure development in urban India (Coleman 2014, 2017) to identify specific elements of the arguments proposed in the articles of the issue. Coleman underlines that the contributions reveal the necessity to connect theoretical discussions on the techno-material politics of infrastructure development in the region with detailed and long-term studies on the changing livelihoods realities for marginalised communities. Coleman’s Afterword points to the notion of ‘hidden transcript’ that he discerns in the background of the case studies explored in this issue and as a potential path to understand the ‘relations and networks that are forged by or through infrastructures’. Coleman’s astute reading breaks down and reassembles the core elements of the comparative analysis proposed in this issue around three forms of engagement—relation, refusal, and reticulation. With this commentary, Coleman invites readers and contributors to interrogate the possibilities of infrastructural lives, in and beyond the ethnographic contexts studied.

Conclusion

This special issue ultimately seeks to show how the link between infrastructures of mobility and political subjectivity plays out between rural and urban marginalised communities in India and Vietnam. By offering a rare dialogue between the situations in one country from South Asia and one country from Southeast Asia, this issue underscores similarities and differences in infrastructural integration that are still often analysed within their typical regional ensemble.

Taken together, the issue asks: How do infrastructures of mobility—secondary roads and wireless communication technologies—encode aspirations, and how do they align or differ from their function as claimed by the state? And how might the creative engagements of marginalised communities with such infrastructures shape infrastructural lives? For urban and rural marginalised populations in India and Vietnam, secondary roads and wireless communication technologies are not just inert things—they bridge the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, and yet, at times, they also dissolve these distinctions.

The socialist and democratic dominant political systems in these countries continue to shape—legally and rhetorically—the realities of marginalised populations. But under the close examinations provided in this issue, these realities also appear to come together in specific and localised everyday infrastructural lives. Roads and wireless communication technologies are developed across individualistic and collective aspirational ideologies. These aspirational ideologies run on parallel imperatives of productivity, economic growth, speeds of connection, and techniques of control and management. Against this backdrop, and by focusing comparatively on everyday infrastructural lives within a set of shared contexts, this special issue has revealed how marginalised communities in India and Vietnam creatively integrate elements of technological modernity with their livelihoods.

Acknowledgements

The articles in this special issue were originally presented at the Association of Asian Studies (2022) and the American Anthropological Association (2022). I want to thank the contributors to this issue for their inputs in revising this introduction. Thank you also to Darcie DeAngelo for final revisions. I finally want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their productive comments and the members of the editorial team at TAPJA for their work in producing this issue in such a timely manner.

Additional information

Funding

Field research for this special issue has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada.