Ethnographic construction of a road: notes on a nodal approach to a more-than-conventional field site

This contribution presents a modest insight into doing fieldwork on a road – the subject of the author’s research – by offering notes on a nodal approach to the road as an interchange of place and non-place. In particular, it concerns the challenge posed by the road as an anthropological subject that is fluid and without definitive boundaries. Such challenge thus prompts the device of a nodal approach that opens up a route in ethnographic practices that require making connections. An anthropological study of a city road reveals not only its multiple facets as an infrastructure, but it also prompts the ethnographic construction of a dynamic field site, writes Ximin Zhou.