Mountain Trails as Infrastructure

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Other Title
  • インフラストラクチャーとしての山道
  • インフラストラクチャーとしての山道 : ネパール・ソルクンブ郡クンブ地方、山岳観光地域における「道」と発展をめぐって
  • インフラストラクチャー ト シテ ノ サンドウ : ネパール ・ ソルクンブグン クンブ チホウ 、 サンガク カンコウ チイキ ニ オケル 「 ミチ 」 ト ハッテン オ メグッテ
  • "Roads" and Development in a Mountain Tourism Area in the Khumbu Region of Solukhumbu, Nepal
  • ネパール・ソルクンブ郡クンブ地方、山岳観光地域における「道」と発展をめぐって

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<p>The Khumbu region, the northern part of the Solukhumbu District of Nepal located on the southern foothills of Mt. Everest, is a famous mountain tourism area. More than thirty thousand foreign tourists visit this Sherpa residential area yearly, guided in their treks and climbs by "Sherpa" (trekking industry workers including Sherpa and other ethnic groups) as they walk along the steep mountain trails. In this rugged mountainous region, what is a road is not so obvious. Mountain trails often disappear because of such weather conditions as heavy rain and snow, and reappear as people or animals move on them. Also, people refer to such trails as bāto ("roads") in the same way that they do motorways in the lower regions or fixed ropes near the summit of a high mountain. The purpose of the author's paper is to analyze these mountain "roads" from the viewpoint of infrastructure.</p> <p>Chapter 1 presents the focus and outline of the paper. Chapter 2 then provides a brief review and critique of the anthropological studies on infrastructure and roads. In the history of anthropology, roads are usually regarded only as a stage on which people conduct important activities, such as movement, trade or war. Though some scholars have focused on newly-constructed motorways, analyzing their symbolic value and effects on communities, the road itself has never been regarded as a subject of study. From the early 2000's, the anthropological study of infrastructure has become an active field of research. Infrastructure is considered in general to be a huge network constructed by modern society; anthropological studies have stressed how the infrastructure that supports our self-evident everyday world becomes invisible as it works. Following that same current, some studies treat roads as key "actors" that symmetrically interact with people and societies, but anthropological literature on roads still has almost exclusively focused on motorways. Thus, the human bodies walking on the roads were never considered as part of them, as will be discussed later. Instead, the notions of infrastructure and roads have been deemed universal, and applied to many societies as such.</p> <p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.) </p>

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