The best works in environmental anthropology often redirect our attention, showing us something on the landscape that we had been looking at all along but not seeing. In a fine example of this tradition, Ashley Carse suggests that in order to understand infrastructure like the Panama Canal, we need to turn it 'upside down' to examine its otherwise unexamined 'background work.' Going 'beyond the big ditch,' Carse gives us an engrossing history and ethnography of the canal's headwaters, floodplain, interior, and backwaters. Whereas the canal is an icon of global assembly and connection, in this important new work Carse tells the untold story of the dis-assembly and dis-connection that have also attended its construction and operation—a tension that continues to play out down to the present day.
Michael R. Dove, Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, Yale University; author of The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo
For a century we have celebrated the Panama Canal as a discrete and complete work of heroic engineering. But, as Ashley Carse suggests in this important new book, the canal is better conceptualized as a piece of living infrastructure, one that has reached beyond its banks, into the lives and landscapes of Panamanians and other global citizens. By redefining what the Panama Canal is, and how it works, Carse has given us a powerful new narrative of environmental modernity.
Paul Sutter, Associate Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder
Beyond the Big Ditch is a thoughtful, deeply informed, multifaceted, and nuanced look at the history, meanings, and varied impact of the Panama Canal. Ashley Carse's transdisciplinary approach is masterful, allowing the reader to see physical infrastructure in its inception, construction, maintenance, and decay, as an evolving entity and force in social, political, economic, and ecological realms. This immensely valuable text is an essential read for students and scholars in environmental social science, international development, earth science, and civil engineering.
Barbara Rose Johnston, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Political Ecology; editor of Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change
