The anthropology of infrastructure: The boom and the bubble?

The anthropology of infrastructure The boom and the bubble?

This article engages with the constitution of the anthropology of infrastructure as an autonomous subdiscipline. Rather than laboring in the service of demarcating a new field of study, anthropologists, I argue, should strive for a critical deconstruction of the contemporary infrastructural moment....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Focaal Vol. 2023; no. 95; pp. 46 - 60
Main Author: Buier, Natalia
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Brooklyn Berghahn Books, Inc 01-03-2023
Subjects:
Anthropology
Built environment
Deconstruction
Epistemology
Ethnography
Infrastructure
Infrastructure (Economics)
Interdisciplinary research
Materialism
Ontology
Spain
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Summary:This article engages with the constitution of the anthropology of infrastructure as an autonomous subdiscipline. Rather than laboring in the service of demarcating a new field of study, anthropologists, I argue, should strive for a critical deconstruction of the contemporary infrastructural moment. In the first part of the article, I engage with the arguments in favor of infrastructure as an analytical lens by focusing on their treatment of relationality and materiality. I pinpoint the limitations of these approaches and argue that their epistemological and theoretical assumptions blunt the critical potential of anthropological studies of infrastructure. The second part of the article looks at theoretical alliances that favor connecting the anthropological study of infrastructure with a critical analysis of the production of nature and the built environment.
ISSN:0920-1297
1558-5263
DOI:10.3167/fcl.2022.012401