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

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Marilyn Strathern: Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life (2016)

“Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.

Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.”

Edited and with an Introduction by Sarah Franklin
Afterword by Judith Butler
Publisher Hau Books, Chicago, 2016
Open access
ISBN 0986132535, 9780986132537
xlv+311 pages

Commentary: Sarah Green, Margaret Jolly, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern (J Ethnographic Theory book symposium, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Third Text, 6: Magiciens de la Terre (1989)

A special issue of the journal consisting of a translation of the special issue of Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne published to coincide with the exhibition Magiciens de la terre.

Foreword by Rasheed Araeen, introduction by Yves Michaud, interview with the exhibition curator Jean‐Hubert Martin by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, essays by Fumio Nanjo, John Mundine, Jyotindra Jain, Louis Perrois, Carlos Severi, Sally Price, James Clifford, Jean Fisher, Yves Michaud, Guy Brett

Publisher Third Text, Spring 1989
ISSN 0952-8822
96 pages

Publisher

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