Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods

This section presents infrastructures as a matter of anthropological concern and argues that attention to infrastructuring—that is, the processes through which infrastructures shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and political life—is a key element for the anthropology of technology. The inherent relationality of infrastructures and infrastructuring, this section shows, is an occasion for anthropologists to attend to infrastructures as both ‘product’ and process without necessarily having to do a study of ‘an infrastructure’. In contemporary social life, thinking in terms of infrastructuring is exactly what allows ethnographers to study, for example, global interconnectedness across multiple scales, sites, and practices, including digitalisation practices and politics, the climate crisis, pandemic governance, multinational corporations, financial systems, deforestation, biodiversity, welfare, and much more that happens on a more-than-human scale. By paying close attention to the methods and effects of infrastructuring, anthropologists will be better equipped to analyse the role of infrastructure in social life and politics.