The Promise of Infrastructure contains the latest set of ideas to emanate from the "infrastructure turn" in anthropology and the social sciences and humanities more broadly. This edited volume contains highly generative articles by nine scholars who take the ethnographic study of infrastructural systems into new, exciting realms. For these scholars, ordinary infrastructures like roads, railways, water taps and meters, dams and bridges, electric wires, oil and gas pipelines, buildings, power stations, and radio and media technologies are "dense social, material, aesthetics, and political formations" (p. 3) that structure social life and produce experiences of difference and othering. As the editors Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel state, the aim of this volume is to show how infrastructures shape and alter interpersonal relations to "make a variety of social, institutional and materials things (im)possible" (p. 4).
Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle‐class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper‐caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.
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