main content

The Anthropology of Infrastructure: Between Fad and Singular Contributions

Lecture series AnthroLab

Veranstaltungsdaten

“The environmental issue is far too serious a question and the attendant risks far too great to be allowed to dissipate in mangled meanings”, observed David Harvey almost two decades ago. The popularity of infrastructure in anthropology is, I argue, a symptom of today’s far reaching concerns about the relationship between humans and their environment. Infrastructure is, after all, just a word for designating a specific component of the built environment. In order to make a specific contribution to the analysis of the relationship between social organization and the transformation of nature, the anthropology of infrastructure must reclaim a specifically geographical-historical materialism.