Cultural Anthropology: Infrastructure (2012)

“Infrastructures are the systems that enable circulation of goods, knowledge, meaning, people, and power. In Splintering Urbanism, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue that we can see the role of public infrastructures and new technologies in facilitating the mobility of people, goods, and utilities when old forms decay. As Brian Larkin notes, the ongoing life of these structures and networks themselves create new social collectivities. With more and more scholars looking to infrastructure as an object of study, anthropologists are positioned to document and witness the role of infrastructures, both technological and human, in cultural life. […]

Cultural Anthropology has published many articles that present and analyze situations where people create and interact with networks that facilitate flows of value. Rather than considering infrastructure to be something with static effects, anthropological approaches to the study of infrastructure look for its construction and maintenance through everyday practices in particular ethnographic contexts. Here we have brought together six articles published in CA that have contributed to the emergent anthropology of infrastructure. […]

To enrich our understanding of the selected articles, authors Nikhil Anand, Julia Elyachar, Daniel Mains, Jonathan Bach, and Filip De Boeck have offered new commentary on their works. Additionally, AbdouMaliq Simone, a scholar whose study of “people as infrastructure” has led the way in this emergent area of inquiry, composed an essay reflecting on this collection.” (from the Introduction)

Edited by Jessica Lockrem and Adonia Lugo
Publisher Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2012
ISSN 1548-1360

View online (various formats, updated on 2019-7-8)