The Promise of Infrastructure

Abstract

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).