Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in twenty-first-century Asia, this edited collection demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political and economic relations.

The Chagos islanders were forcibly uprooted from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean between 1965 and 1973. This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It thus provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community.
Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritius and Crawley (West Sussex), the six chapters explore Chagossians' challenging lives in Mauritius, the mobilization of the community, reformulations of the homeland, the politics of culture in exile, onward migration to Crawley, and attempts to make a home in successive locations. Jeffery illuminates how displaced people romanticize their homeland through an exploration of changing representations of the Chagos Archipelago in song lyrics. Offering further ethnographic insights into the politics of culture, she shows how Chagossians in exile engage with contrasting conceptions of culture ranging from expectations of continuity and authenticity to enactments of change, loss and revival.
The book will appeal particularly to social scientists specializing in the fields of migration studies, the anthropology of displacement, political and legal anthropology, African studies, Indian Ocean studies, and the anthropology of Britain, as well as to readers interested in the Chagossian case study.