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From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of
Infrastructure / Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta
1
Part I. Time
1. Infrastructural Time / Hannah Appel 41
2. The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of
Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta 62
3. Infrastructures in and out of Time: The Promise of Roads in
Contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey 80
4. The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in
Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel 102
Part II. Politics
5. Infrastructure, Apartheid Technopolitics, and Temporalities of
"Transition" / Antina von Schnitzler 133
6. A Public Matter: Water, Hydraulics, Biopolitics / Nikhil
Anand 155
Part III.
7. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure /
Brian Larkin 175
8. Sustainable Knowledge Infrastructures / Geoffrey C. Bowker
203
9. Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution / Dominic
Boyer 223
Contributors 245
Index 249
Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Hannah Appel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
"The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on
the current academic, social, and political moment that we find
ourselves in. . . . While The Promise of Infrastructure as a whole
offers a surprisingly comprehensive condemnation of the 'radically
human-centered thinking' that has produced the Anthropocene
challenge that we now face, it also suggests the tools we will need
to map out possible futures. Appropriately, these are not
prescriptions promising a better future. Rather they are openings
for possibility, for action, and for wonder."
*Technology and Culture*
"The volume offers a highly valuable contribution to the study of
human/non-human relations. Taking up Brian Larkin’s call against a
premature separation of the material from the discursive, the
editors argue that infrastructural matter becomes political only in
relation to human ideologies, aesthetics or histories."
*International Journal of Urban and Regional Research*
"The Promise of Infrastructure is a timely and compelling account
of the myriad ways in which infrastructures can be theorized and
the limits and potentials of the same."
*AAG Review of Books*
"The Promise of Infrastructure is a stellar collection of essays by
anthropologists and social scientists who explore roads, buildings,
bridges, water meters, pipelines, power stations, and other
structures which we encounter on a daily basis but whose
contribution to the production of difference we frequently
overlook."
*Anthropology Book Forum*
"This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and
an engaging ethnography."
*Economic & Political Weekly*
"The Promise of Infrastructure is essential reading for scholars
and students who wish to more fully understand the ethical and
social role of the 'Ideal Infrastructure,' its history, its
criticisms and its (uncertain) future destiny."
*Environment and History*
“The edited collection by Anand, Gupta, and Appel highlights
infrastructures as a promising site for ethnographic research....
[It] reveal[s] the potential of infrastructural ethnography to make
visible power inequalities and exclusionary practices and expose
infrastructures as powerful sites for redefining governance and
belonging.”
*American Anthropologist*
“The Promise of Infrastructure teaches the reader how large
state-run infrastructures can possibly induce and solidify regimes
in pursuing their political promises. . . . Insights stemming out
of The Promise of Infrastructure—especially the concept of
‘ruination’—enable researchers to acquire a ‘fuller’ account of the
lifecycle of an infrastructure.”
*Journal of Cultural Economy*
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