Technology, temporality, and the study of Central Asia: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This issue is dedicated to the question of how research on technology and its inherent temporality and materiality can enhance our understanding of geography, culture and history in Central Asia. The articles provide fresh ideas on Central Asia as a region by unpacking the “hard” infrastructural base of its cultural, social, and economic geography. They offer a more inclusive view on Central Asian landscapes, focusing on permanent material structures and vernacular practices that are often overlooked in conventional historiography and social studies research. Finally, they explore how research on technology both supports and challenges the primacy of political history in defining the historical periods and legacies of Central Asia. The papers cover about 150 years of history, with case studies on what are today Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Mongolia. This introductory essay summarizes their key insights, situating them in a wider debate on technology in and beyond Central Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• technology
• infrastructure
• temporality
• post-Soviet
• history

Starting with technology

In area-based research in the social sciences and humanities, technology rarely serves as a conceptual point of departure. This is certainly true for Central Asia. Debates have largely revolved around concepts such as ethnicity, identity, religion, or governance. Besides, migration and labour, environmental issues have attracted more attention in recent years. Research on technology and infrastructure in Central Asia is being conducted. but still needs to be related more closely to current theoretical debates in fields such as the history of technology, science and technology studies, and the history of infrastructure. With this issue we encourage an interdisciplinary discussion about interpretive frameworks that can integrate studies on technology and material culture in the region and serve to formulate more inclusive research questions.

The conceptual point of departure is the notion that the permanent structures in which people live, including infrastructure and technological systems, are more than a backcloth for the analysis of social change and movement. They deserve attention on their own as they constitute the material base of state, sociality and daily life in Central Asia. By dedicating a issue to these structures, we intend to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of Central Asia as a region and its specific patterns of technological and infrastructural change. At the same time, the case studies in this issue will feed into more general debates on technology and material culture in the context of power asymmetries, ontological violence and economic inequality that are characteristic for many societies with a colonial and/or Soviet history.

This endeavour resonates with a current turn in the historiography of technology, a discipline that is gradually overcoming its concern with novelty in favour of a more differentiated engagement with the emergence, persistence and disappearance of technology. This debate revolves around what is framed as the temporality of technology and aims to unpack and critically reflect on the relationship between technology, time, and historical change (for an overview, see Weber 2019). It has emerged as a critique of a certain train of thought on technology that is largely concerned with novelty (Lindqvist 1994; Edgerton 2006). Scholars have highlighted the coexistence of allegedly ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies in daily life and the notion that the often very long phases of use, of gradual decay and the afterlife of certain technologies deserve as much attention as their innovation phase. They have called for a perspective that is grounded in the material world of technology-in-use that surrounds us, not in abstract imaginations of technologies that succeed each other on a modernization path.

This approach can be directly related to theoretical considerations in infrastructure history. Infrastructure systems can be seen as mediators between the sphere of technology and people’s everyday lives. The planning, construction, ceremonial opening to the public, and long-term usage of infrastructure installations and technological artefacts is closely connected with political rule and power and can have (de)legitimizing effects. Infrastructure is a means of integration, but can also separate, disconnect, and marginalize societies or natural surroundings (Van Laak 2001; Engels and Schenk 2015; Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten 2015). Studies on urban infrastructure have examined the interface of the human body, city spaces, landscapes, and technology taking into account power relations and social pressures (e.g., Gandy 2014). Sociotechnical change is understood as a contested discursive process, highlighting contingency and agency (Moss 2014). Infrastructure as well as environmental history have challenged conventional chronologies because the planning, construction, and use of infrastructure as well as environmental issues and problems do not fit neatly into political periodizations but often transcend them (for the example of water infrastructure, in Russian, see Obertreis and Malinova-Tziafeta 2019).

From a Western modernist perspective, the timelines of technological change in Central Asia must appear as a series of ruptures and tensions that arise from the asynchrony between changes in the technological landscape and the societies living in them. A first set of narratives revolves around the implementation of technologies that are – at least in the eyes of contemporary commentators – believed to be ‘ahead’ of their receiving societies. Scholars of Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Central Asia have studied the large-scale, mostly state-driven (and partly forced) modernization projects that have, to a great extent, shaped the region’s technological and infrastructural landscape. Irrigation systems and cotton growing have attracted much attention (Morrison 2008; Teichmann 2016; Obertreis 2017; Peterson 2019). Recently, some researchers have examined the politics, practices, and paradigms of development (Kalinovsky 2018; Florin 2019).

The second set of narratives are storylines of technologies being or falling ‘behind’ the societal requirements or expectations towards them. Historians have highlighted the initial transformative character of the Soviet modernization project as well as its shortcomings and deficiencies. After all, the Soviet command economy’s lack of innovative capacity has been widely cited as the root cause for it falling behind Western market economy and its ultimate collapse. For post-Soviet Central Asia, studies in this category are generally concerned with the deterioration of infrastructures; the shrinking or demise of whole industries; or the corrosion of large, formerly state-owned enterprises and their precarious afterlife on the ‘margins of capitalism’ (e.g., Trevisani 2018; Kesküla 2018). As a typical reaction to these processes, workers and consumers rely on or even return to ‘outdated’ technologies.

In line with several recent studies, this issue calls for a more differentiated analysis of the temporality of technology and infrastructure in Central Asia. Qualifiers such as ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ are insufficient and often inadequate to make sense of the ensemble of technologies that shapes everyday realities in the region.

Such an endeavour also connects with other current debates at the interface of Central Asian studies and neighbouring disciplines. Most recently, Central Asianists have engaged in a productive dialogue with the emerging, prolific field of the environmental humanities (Féaux de la Croix et al. 2021). This initiative breaks down the disciplinary compartmentalization in the study of human–environment relations by bringing different methods and sources into the conversation; from climate models to archival research, from ethnographic fieldwork to geo-archaeological approaches. It requires scholars to critically reflect and discuss their revered analytical categories, scales, and concepts, including such basic terms such as environment or landscape which can delineate very different objects of investigation in different disciplines.

These considerations can feed into a similarly moderate and self-reflective discussion on human–technology relations in Central Asia which has yet to begin. Fortunately, this discussion can draw on a growing number of case studies dedicated to technology in Central Asia (for a review of the literature, see van der Straeten 2019). We have discussed elsewhere how the history of technology can benefit from expanding its geographical scope to Central Asia (van der Straeten 2019). In turn, the articles of this issue highlight how concepts and ideas of the history of technology and infrastructure can be made productive for the study of Central Asia.

In the following three sections, we explore how the study of Central Asia, through the lens of technology, infrastructure and material culture can: (1) enhance our understanding of what holds Central Asia together as a region by unpacking the ‘hard’ infrastructural base of its cultural, social and economic geography; (2) expand our view on Central Asian landscapes to the ‘permanent structures’ and the vernacular practices that rarely find a voice in the grand narratives of different ‘technologies’; and (3) transcend the periodization that structures the historiography of Central Asia and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the layered legacies of the ‘post-Soviet’ condition. To achieve this purpose, we will briefly review the current debates and literature and put them into perspective with regard to the insights from the articles in this issue.

Tracing the (dis-)connections: technical infrastructures and Central Asian geographies

The identification and description of distinct cultural and social geographies has been one of the major concerns of area-based research in the social sciences and humanities. Four papers in this issue explore how the focus on technical infrastructures modifies the ideas of the making and unmaking of Central Asia as a spatial entity, and of its internal and external connections and boundaries. Infrastructures such as railways or roads have been extensively studied regarding their role in the (historical) processes of time–space compression (Harvey 1990), the creation of new connections, the integration of geographies, or the consolidation of state power in peripheral spaces (e.g., Uribe 2019). At the same time, they can have disintegrating effects, cutting places or whole regions off from the new connections. These processes of integration and disintegration lead to changing spatial hierarchies and mental maps (on the example of the railway in the Russian Empire, see Sperling 2011; and Schenk 2014). These typical characteristics of transport infrastructure are of special interest in a region such as Central Asia where large distances, remoteness and (overcoming) ‘isolation’ are frequently addressed as economic and political problems, and are also important as modes of cultural perception.

The article by Per Högselius (2022), a historian of technology, critically revisits a fundamental ontological category of area-based scholarship, namely the idea of the ‘region’. Departing from common definitions of Central Asia as a region held together by linguistic and cultural similarities, or its distinct climate and landscape, Högselius draws attention to technology’s neglected role in both national and transnational historical narratives. In his paper, Högselius takes up earlier research on how technology forged transnational relations and ‘ushered in’ macro-regions such as Western Europe (Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten 2015) or the US South (Thomas 2011) and applies a similar perspective to Central Asia. His paper scrutinizes the region’s integration (and fragmentation) through waterways, railways, electricity grids, and gas pipelines over the past 150 years. This ‘hidden’ integration (in the sense that it remains largely invisible in general historical literature) created a network geography that called into question some of the internal and external boundaries that are taken for granted in the study of Central Asia, and the concordant timelines of their political making. As a result, the changing nature of northern and southern Central Asian network geographies becomes visible. The outer boundaries of what we are used to perceiving as post-Soviet Central Asia were surprisingly porous. For example, northern Afghanistan was very much integrated in the infrastructure systems of its northern neighbours, transcending the Soviet border.

A macro-perspective such as that provided by Högselius requires substantiation in microstudies that unpack the multiple ways in which the lines on the map representing railways, roads or waterways transcend, connect, and divide the social and political geographies, and, as we will see, the embedded temporalities. Three contributions to this issue apply such a perspective, using the example of road construction within different cultural, geographical, historical and contemporary contexts.

The first of these papers, by Oybek Makhmudov (2022), offers a historical case study of road construction during the Russian Tsarist era in the Pamir mountain range. Confirming Manu Goswami’s notion of imperial rule as a ‘scale-making project’ (Goswami 2004), Makhmudov describes road construction as a key strategy for Tsarist Russia to integrate one of the remotest and least accessible regions of Asia into its empire, thus legitimizing its rule over the Pamir. Based on a wealth of material from several archives in Russia and Uzbekistan, the author traces how a road built by Russian military engineers enabled the Tsarist empire to establish and maintain its military presence and administration in the Pamir, legitimizing its authority as protector of the local Ismaili from the neighbouring Sunni. The road was the first built for wheeled transport between the Western Pamirs, the fertile Ferghana Valley and Tashkent. By substantially cutting travelling time and transport costs, it had profound implications on the economic life of a region that had been largely isolated. According to Makhmudov, it further facilitated the identification of its inhabitants with other parts of Central Asia under Russian colonial rule (Turkestan). Notably, the new main road relied on smaller feeder roads built with local technologies to fulfil its purpose of increasing the connectivity of the Pamirs.

Two articles by anthropologists show that road construction has lost none of its potential to shape, transform and disrupt the political, economic, and social geographies of Central Asia. These papers feed into the expanding field of ‘roadside ethnographies’ that has drawn significant attention from Central Asianists in recent years.¹ The article by Zarina Urmanbetova and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi (2022) focuses on the mountainous district of Toghuz-Toro in central Kyrgyzstan, another area renowned for its ‘isolation’ and ‘distinctiveness’ even within the context of Central Asia. Toghuz-Toro is located halfway on a road between northern and southern Kyrgyzstan, two regions that are separated not only geographically by a mountain range but also culturally by distinct regional identities. The transregional road passing through the district hence becomes a site where identities are confirmed or contested, a fact that is reinforced by the uneven use, maintenance, and investment in the road’s ‘northbound’ and ‘southbound’ sections. While administratively part of the south, the road has fostered the identification of local residents with the north. Presently, this trend has been bolstered by mobile internet and social media such as Facebook, as well as access to private transport, that have breathed new life into journeys along the old, dilapidated, post-Soviet roads. The authors conclude that these new communication technologies have renewed the agency of residents to choose and preserve their desired connections – both physically and symbolically – in the absence of state-run public transport.

In his article, Björn Reichhardt (2022) extends this perspective of infrastructural connections to the question of embedded temporalities. The paper presents insights from ethnographic fieldwork along a newly built road in northern Mongolia that connects Khatgal, a touristic village, with the provincial centre of Mörön and the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The paper pays particular attention to the interconnections between the timescapes of roads and rural life within the context of infrastructural development. The road has reconfigured the interplay between the temporalities of the rural landscape, such as the cycles of dairy pastoralism and tourism, often raising problematic issues. The opportunities to earn extra income during the tourist season in summer, for example, are drawing the workforce away from the labour-intensive production of airag (fermented mare’s milk) during the same time of the year. Reichhardt argues that such conflicts with the embedded temporalities along and at the end of the road undermine the visions of incorporating roads into state-led development, prominently formulated in the often-repeated catch phrase that ‘development follows the road’. Taking the notion of ‘arterial road’ used by the Mongolian government and development agencies, Reichhardt also proposes to make anatomic analogies productive as a heuristic tool to critically analyse the interconnectedness of the spatial and temporal entanglements of infrastructural development.

Bringing to the fore what is in the background: technology in the Central Asian ‘landscape’

In recent years, the concept of ‘landscape’ has experienced a revival and ‘is redesigning the research questions not only of archaeologists but also of historians and geographers’ (Féaux de la Croix et al. 2021, p. 182). Arguably, this renewed interest may be a reaction to a general concern with movement, mobility and change in the humanities and social sciences in the last two decades that has culminated in numerous studies on ‘global’ histories and connections. While the definition of ‘landscape’ varies widely, the scholars who employ the concept share the intention of producing dense, place-based, multivocal and multifocal accounts of a specific area. Instead of asking how people, things or ideas move, they ask how they are embedded or rooted in place-specific settings and structures created by various human and non-human agents. In several recent and ongoing research and publication projects, multinational and multidisciplinary groups of researchers have set out to map different ‘scapes’ and understand the transitions within them.²

How does the ‘landscape’ perspective change our view on technology and, in turn, how do we situate technology in the wider landscape? In the history of technology, a controversial discussion revolves around the question of what we actually look at when we study ‘technology’. In this regard, several scholars have criticized their discipline’s bias towards novelty. In their examination of the historical trajectory of individual technologies, many scholars have reproduced the linear narratives about invention and innovation in Europe or North America and their diffusion to global peripheries – not seldom as a technology of power in the context of colonialism and the uncompromising expansion of capitalist and socialist systems. This could be juxtaposed with the fact that supposedly outdated technologies have impacted on the course of history more profoundly than some of the most sophisticated inventions (Edgerton 2006).

A comprehensive view of the ‘technological landscape’ (Bray 2016), however, often reveals a different picture and invites alternative historical interpretations. It sharpens the gaze regarding the vernacular, immobile, and peripheral elements, noting what people do (practices) instead of what they talk and write about (discourses). It also brings the ‘permanent structures’ to the fore (built environment, large infrastructures), those in which people live. These structures come with their own explanatory power and their distinct timelines of change (Lindqvist 1994). In short, the history of (technological) landscapes differs from the history of a specific technology.

The relevance of this for the study of Central Asia cannot be overestimated. The study of individual (often industrial) technologies, for example, the mechanization of agriculture, the prefabrication of buildings or the construction of large dams invariably produces other narratives than those of the transformation of entire landscapes. Two papers in this issue experiment with this approach to writing history. Jonas van der Straeten and Mariya Petrova (2022) critically revisit the narrative of the Sovietization of Central Asian cities by taking a broad perspective on the transformation of Samarkand’s urban landscape following the start of the mass housing campaign in the city in 1961. Their analysis looks beyond the policies and discourses revolving around the introduction of novel, ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ urban technologies such as prefabricated large panel buildings, integrated micro-districts, or centralized infrastructures and the often-used written sources these discourses have left. In their attempt for a more balanced and comprehensive view of the landscape, the authors combine archival and published written sources with oral history interviews and an engagement with the city’s material legacies from this period, most notably the houses themselves. They show that Samarkand’s transformation was as much a result of (partly unregulated) private self-help building as of state planning and construction. The self-constructed adobe-brick houses with their ‘traditional’ courtyard layout dominated the cityscape of Samarkand at the end of the Soviet period (and still does today). Rather than addressing the linear, tidy timelines of planning, building, and housing that underly much of conventional architectural and construction history, this article focuses on the temporalities embedded in the landscape – for example, the life cycles of inhabitants, the change of season, or the timelines of building and material decay. As Petrova and Van der Straeten show, these temporalities cut across the state’s yearly construction and repair plans. The practices of private building and the site-specific cultural, material, and technical repertoires they drew upon largely remain hidden behind the ‘smokescreen’ (Huber 2017, 4; Obertreis 2019) of official planning.

In his article, Taylor Zajicek (2022) turns to another feature of Central Asian landscapes, namely their high seismic risk, and relates it to their colonial and technological history in a rather original manner. Zajicek shows how earthquakes both undercut the technologies of rule and foster the adoption of new ones, most notably the establishment of a novel scientific infrastructure for seismological research and observation. The contingent nature of Central Asia’s seismic landscapes frustrated the ambition of Tsarist Russia to control the social and natural landscapes of colonial Turkestan and the timelines of ‘civilizing’ and exploiting the region. The response of urban planners and architects to the seismic landscape also came with repercussions for the natural landscape. Their decision to rebuild Verny (today Almaty), once a city of stone, out of wood after the earthquake of 1887 led to the deforestation of the Semirechye forests.

The articles in this section show that choosing various aspects of the ‘landscape’ as a research focus (natural qualities, materiality, embeddedness, institutional arrangements) can serve to challenge established timelines and assumptions about overarching historical narratives such as ‘civilization’ and ‘Sovietization’.

Writing the history of ‘post-Soviet’ Central Asia: technology and the layered legacies

As the previous section has shown, the question of how we look at the ‘landscape’ changes the way we write history. After taking a panoramic view of Central Asian landscapes, we now probe into the ‘layers’ of that landscape and how they serve as the material foundation of state, society, and daily life in Central Asia today. We follow a group of scholars that has recently revisited the notion of ‘post-Soviet’ in the study of Central Asia (Alff et al. 2021). Their point of departure is a critique of epithets such as pre-colonial, colonial, Soviet, and post-Soviet that structure most forms of history writing on Central Asia, as well as public and academic discourse on the region’s heritage. These epithets convey an idea of historical chronology and teleological linearity, but which is oftentimes at odds with the transformations occurring in the daily lives of people, as Diana Ibañez-Tirado establishes in her ethnography of ‘alternative temporalities’ in Kulob, southern Tajikistan (Ibañez-Tirado 2015). Instead of thinking through periods, she proposes to think through ‘layered legacies’. A recently edited volume gathers multiple case studies tracing back various social phenomena observed in Central Asia to such layered legacies which ‘reinforce, interact with or contradict each other in complex ways and can have very different consequences in different local contexts’ (Alff et al. 2021, 4).

The landscape approach as outlined above and the notion of ‘layered legacies’ challenge conventional research designs. Instead of departing from linear, universal timelines and pre-established big periods, they can bring to light complex entanglements of the material manifestations and influences of differently shaped and at times very specific periods, among them the Soviet and post-Soviet ones. Arguably, the fact that lived, subjective time often escapes those ‘big’ chronologies and periodizations held dear in conventional history writing cannot be understood without reference to technology. Technological structures and institutions and the usage patterns that have formed around them often prove to be remarkably persistent, especially when compared with the volatile political and economic temporalities of the region. The debate on a specific technological heritage of ‘post-Soviet’ Central Asia has long concentrated on those technologies that once epitomized the region’s forced modernization (irrigation, industrial monocities, public transport systems) and have turned into highly problematic remnants of a ‘failed’ ideology. Recently, several authors have attempted to look beyond the corrosion of large, formerly state-owned enterprises, the demise of whole industries, or the deterioration of state infrastructures and their replacement with market-based, often ‘informal’ modes of service provision.

Wladimir Sgibnev, for example, draws attention to the astonishing comeback of public transport in Central Asia outside the large metropolitan centres, including the trolleybus systems that had been pronounced dead in public discourse (Sgibnev 2021). Such accounts provide a counterpoint to the narrative of the general privatization and informalization of transport in post-Soviet Central Asia that has found its most vivid expression in the omnipresent, privately owned and operated second-hand minibuses called marshrutkas (e.g., Rekhviashvili and Sgibnev 2018). In a similar vein, Tabea Rohner critically revisits the teleological deficiency narratives of ‘monotowns’, urban settlements that were built around a single enterprise or industry, as inhabited ruins of a failed Soviet industrial policy. Based on the lived experience of the residents of Tekeli, a monotown in south-eastern Kazakhstan, she argues that other trajectories are possible, including those that lead to substantial improvements in the social, economic and environmental spheres (Rohner 2021). In another noteworthy study, Aisalkyn Botoeva and Regine Spector show how clothing producers in Kyrgyzstan draw on the technical and managerial knowledge obtained in Soviet institutions to revive traditional crafts and develop innovative business models (Botoeva and Spector 2013). In a similar vein, Snejana Atanova highlights the confluence of artisanal practices and industrial technologies in the manufacture of Turkmen traditional clothing, most notably the lavishly embroidered dresses. She argues that in Turkmenistan, national and regional identity is being produced not only through manual needlework but also through sewing machines imported from Russia and computerized sewing-embroidery machines of Japanese origin (Atanova 2021).

Such case studies complicate the understanding of the different ways in which some technologies connect Central Asian societies to their past, symbolically and materially. While scholars of the post-colonial school have not tired of highlighting the potential of technology to perpetuate the ideologies and power relations inscribed into it, these studies point to the scope of action in dealing with the technological heritage. They suggest that the emancipation of Central Asian societies from the attribute of ‘post-Soviet’ does not necessarily lead to overcoming their technological legacy but rather to reinterpreting and reappropriating it, and therefore giving it a novel cultural, political, or economic meaning.

The contribution to this issue by Nelly Bekus (2022) underlines this argument with a study of a very specific kind of technological heritage, namely that of the Soviet nuclear and space programme in Kazakhstan. Bekus traces how it has turned into a ‘postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, that is, the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation’ (this issue, p. 347). Contributing to the debate on post-colonial technopolitics, Bekus uses the example of the space programme to unpack the complex ways in which the conventional domain of post-colonial national ideologies – nativism and tradition – becomes enmeshed with technology and science. Through collaboration with Russia, the programme allows Kazakhstan to claim its share in the Soviet space legacy, while at the same time a new internationalism fosters emancipation from that context. Finally, the resistance that the programme has provoked among Kazakh civil society groups is connected to a novel ‘eco-nationalism’ which is anti-imperial and, ultimately, anti-authoritarian in nature.

Yanti Hoelzchen (2022) presents a case in which material heritage establishes a link to a ‘pre-Soviet’ past, becomes a projection screen for religious identities, and serves (in a very physical sense) as an infrastructure for religious practices, notably in combination with other ‘modern’ technologies. Her ethnographical study is dedicated to the material base for the formation of Muslim selfhood and Muslim sociality in Kyrgyzstan. In her account, a mosque dating from the late nineteenth century serves as a central node of the ‘religious infrastructure’ that supports the current resurgence of religious practices in the country. Built in 1887 by the community with traditional construction techniques, its solid structure has survived decay and Soviet rule, thus facilitating its interpretation as ‘one of the mosques that Allah Himself saved’ and providing further a symbolic link to a ‘pre-Soviet’ Islamic history and collective identity. At the same time, it forms part of a wider technological ensemble that supports religious practice and education, including novel construction technologies, air-conditioning devices, central or floor heating, microphones, and loudspeakers, as well as new media such as cassettes, radio, television, DVD and the internet.

As the overview of the issue’s three sections and their articles has shown, arguments from recent debates in the history of technology, infrastructure history, and environmental research can effectively be employed to challenge the teleological, deterministic and epoch-centric historical interpretations which still inform public discourse on technology in Central Asia and, arguably, no small part of academic research. By examining the composition and decomposition of infrastructure systems and their political and spatial repercussions, providing detailed descriptions of technological landscapes, or analyzing the appropriation of different historical layers of technologies by various political regimes and value systems, we hope to contribute to and encourage debate on the temporality of technology that is truly emancipated from the modernization paradigm.

Acknowledgements

This issue is the result of a collaborative effort across many countries and academic communities. The work on it brought together authors from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Belarus, Germany, and Sweden, and commentators and reviewers from all over the world in an open, productive, and multilingual exchange. We thank the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Bishkek for its readiness to host our author workshop, even if we had to transform it into an online meeting due to Covid-19. We are specifically indebted to the senior academics who provided valuable comments on our first author manuscripts. Furthermore, it has been a pleasure to work with the journal editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The activities that have led to this issue were supported with funding from the H2020 European Research Council [grant number ERC AdG 742631].

Notes

1 See, for example, the foundation of the new e-journal Roadsides (https://roadsides.net/ejournal/).

2 For Central Asia, see, for example, Kreutzmann and Watanabe (2016). A special issue of the e-journal Roadsides applies the landscape concepts from archaeology and historical anthropology to the ethnographic study of roads (Joniak-Lüthi 2019). A research project on ‘cropscapes’ uses the example of global cash crops ‘to embed rootedness in mobility studies’ (Bray et al. 2019, p. 20).