Waiting Town - (Asia Shorts) by Lisa Björkman (Paperback)

About the Book

"Drawing on research carried out over a decade in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town is an ethnographic monograph about the fraught relationship between the word and the world - about the materiality of signs and the 'truths' that they seek to instantiate (and represent). On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai: about housing schemes and scams, about 'duplicate' documents (and duplicate 'duplicates'), and about the wreckage left in the wake of the city's 'world-class' ambitions. And at the same time, the book has broader ambitions: it is a story about the craft of ethnography: about how we know the world, about truth and falsehood, about time and memory, about the practices of interpretation and meaning-making that comprise the techniques of research, and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge-production more generally"--

Book Synopsis

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town is an unconventional little book - experimental in form - about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author's fieldnotes diaries as they wend their way through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a high-profile mega-infrastructure project that became an internationally celebrated prototype and model. Waiting Town complicates this celebratory narrative by revealing the conflicting temporalities and procedural pretentions of 'world class' developmentalism. On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai - about housing schemes and scams, about 'duplicate' documents (and 'duplicate duplicates'), and about the material wreckage wrought by the city's 'world-class' ambitions. And at the same time, it has a larger story to tell about truth and falsehood, time and memory - and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge production, interpretation and representation more generally.

About the Author

Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville and Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.