Infrastructure is often thought of in big material terms: dams, buildings, roads, and so on. This study, instead, draws on literatures in anthropology and the social sciences to analyse infrastructures in relation to society and environment, and so cast current conceptions of infrastructure in a new light. Situating the analysis in context of President Biden’s recent infrastructure bill, the paper expands what is meant by and included in discussions of infrastructure. The study examines what it means for different kinds of material infrastructures to function (and for whom) or not, and also consider how the immaterial infrastructure of human relations are manifested in, for example, labour, as well as how infrastructures may create intended or unintended consequences in enabling or disabling social processes. Further, in this study, we examine concepts embedded in thinking about infrastructure such as often presumed distinctions between the technical and the social, nature and culture, the human and the non-human, and the urban and the rural, and how all of these are actually implicated in thinking about infrastructure. Our analysis, thus, draws from a growing body of work on infrastructure in anthropology and the social sciences, enriches it with ethnographic insights from our own field research, and so extends what it means to study ‘infrastructures’ in the 21st century.
As sustainability gains popularity in public discourse, scholars have noted its diverse uses, multiple meanings, and contradictory outcomes. This paper explores how the current proliferation of the concept of sustainability stems in part from its varied normative appeals, which in turn motivate, legitimate, and unsettle its diverse mobilizations. As the concept of sustainability calls for an extension of moral horizons beyond the immediate here and now, this redrawing of moral boundaries has simultaneously produced new externalities as well as enduring anxieties and responses within these moral bounds themselves. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials, we argue that sustainability’s moral boundaries have become both an object of scholarly critique and their own productive site of anxiety and negotiation. Questions about sustainability’s moral horizons and externalities often surface in the concept’s public deployment itself. We suggest that these tensions can be made visible by attending to the intersections between sustainability and a broader range of moral concerns at work.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drawn renewed attention to bushmeat consumption in the Global South, with the risks and consequences of zoonotic disease transmission proving critical for global public health. Conservation and development practitioners have long targeted bushmeat trade and consumption, seeking to reduce hunting pressures on wildlife and natural ecosystems by introducing alternative proteins and livelihoods to rural communities. While the shortcomings of these interventions have frequently been attributed to failures to integrate local perspectives and needs in program design, in this study we ask how the unexamined values of conservation and development practitioners themselves may contribute to the further marginalization of rural communities. We consider three prevalent framings of the “bushmeat crisis”: the juxtaposition of global conservation priorities against local resource use, the developmental distinction between industrial food production and bushmeat hunting practices, and the problems that arise when bushmeat consumption shifts to urban centers from rural communities. By turning our attention to the ideologies that structure interventions for bushmeat consumption and trade, this paper questions the imagined neutrality of conservation and development interventions. We highlight how moral valuations are embedded in the prioritization of the “global” good of biodiversity conservation, to the exclusion of local relations with these same species and ecosystems. At the same time, cultural biases privilege a developmental pathway away from dietary dependence on bushmeat. Finally, we note the substantive differences between urban and rural bushmeat consumption practices, often occluded in blanket condemnations of the wildlife trade. At a moment when bushmeat trade and consumption are broadly identified as the source of a devastating pandemic, it is ever more critical to ensure that future interventions for public health and conservation alike are based on a more nuanced understanding of the multiple and diverse actors, practices, and worldviews involved.
For many, the phenomenon of food insecurity can be reduced to a fundamental fear: what happens if I run out of food? People were made acutely aware of this fear at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, when supermarkets began to run out of essentials. In Singapore, I propose that this fear was rooted in the narrative of scarcity and accelerated by the pandemic's crisis rhetoric. It extended a scarcity narrative developed since Singapore's independence, being an island nation cut off from Malaysia that had to survive with limited resources. Concurrently, this built on the neo-Malthusian logic seen in the Green Revolution of food scarcity as the main framing of the problem of hunger, instead of malnutrition and interconnected social issues. This way, the narrative obfuscated a more important statistic -10.4% of Singapore's population was still food insecure in 2020 (Nagpaul, Sidhu, and Chen 2020). 1 This chapter reframes Singapore's narrative of food insecurity away from a misapplied scarcity and securitisation lens, instead connecting food insecurity to the lived experience thereof. Engaging this challenge paves the way for key discussions about how food insecurity is not isolated but intersects with consumption and malnutrition through axes of inequality such as class, gender, climate, and race. Solely increasing food production has not been nor will be the solution to eradicating hunger, especially without attention to its wider social processes. This has vital implications for the current national strategy of ramping up food production and diversifying food sources. In the wake of the pandemic, it has become even more vital to consider the heterogeneity of Singapore's social body to ensure future foodscape policy decisions do not reproduce existing inequalities.
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