The Road

This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albanian-Greek cross-border highway. It is not merely an ethnography on the road but an anthropology of the road. Complex sociopolitical phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, transnational kinship, social–class divisions, or post–cold war capitalism, political transition, and financial crises in Europe—and more precisely in the Balkans—can be seen as phenomena that are paved in and on the cross-border highway. The highway studied is part of an explicit cultural–material nexus that includes elements such as houses, urban architecture, building materials, or vehicles. Yet even the most physically rooted and fixed of these entities are not static, but have fluid and flowing physical materialities. The highway featured in this book helps us to explore anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to the infrastructure. Categories such as the house, domestic life, the city, kinship, money, boundaries, nationalism, statecraft, geographic mobility, and distance, to name but a few, seem very different when seen from or on the road.