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
Industry Reviews
"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." -- Tim Oakes * 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." -- Laura Kemmer * 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." -- Siddharth Menon * 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." -- Natalia Kovalyova * Anthropology Book Forum *
"This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and an engaging ethnography." -- Sudha Vasan * 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." -- Marco Spada * 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." -- Daivi Rodima-Taylor * 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." -- Alex Christian * Journal of Cultural Economy *
