Overview

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

Full Product Details

Author:   Nikhil Anand ,  Akhil Gupta ,  Hannah Appel
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.499kg
ISBN:  

9781478000037

ISBN 10:   1478000031
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   08 August 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure / Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta  1 Part I. Time 1. Infrastructural Time / Hannah Appel  41 2. The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta  62 3. Infrastructures in and out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey  80 4. The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel  102 Part II. Politics 5. Infrastructure, Apartheid Technopolitics, and Temporalities of ""Transition"" / Antina von Schnitzler  133 6. A Public Matter: Water, Hydraulics, Biopolitics / Nikhil Anand  155 Part III. 7. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure / Brian Larkin  175 8. Sustainable Knowledge Infrastructures / Geoffrey C. Bowker  203 9. Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution / Dominic Boyer  223 Contributors  245 Index  249  "

Reviews

The volume offers a highly valuable contribution to the study of human/non-human relations. Taking up Brian Larkin's call against a premature separation of the material from the discursive, the editors argue that infrastructural matter becomes political only in relation to human ideologies, aesthetics or histories. -- (01/01/2019) This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and an engaging ethnography. --Sudha Vasan Economic & Political Weekly (11/01/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure is a stellar collection of essays by anthropologists and social scientists who explore roads, buildings, bridges, water meters, pipelines, power stations, and other structures which we encounter on a daily basis but whose contribution to the production of difference we frequently overlook. --Natalia Kovalyova Anthropology Book Forum (12/02/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure is a timely and compelling account of the myriad ways in which infrastructures can be theorized and the limits and potentials of the same. --Siddharth Menon AAG Review of Books (09/01/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on the current academic, social, and political moment that we find ourselves in. . . . While The Promise of Infrastructure as a whole offers a surprisingly comprehensive condemnation of the 'radically human-centered thinking' that has produced the Anthropocene challenge that we now face, it also suggests the tools we will need to map out possible futures. Appropriately, these are not prescriptions promising a better future. Rather they are openings for possibility, for action, and for wonder. -- (10/01/2019)

The volume offers a highly valuable contribution to the study of human/non-human relations. Taking up Brian Larkin's call against a premature separation of the material from the discursive, the editors argue that infrastructural matter becomes political only in relation to human ideologies, aesthetics or histories. -- (01/01/2019) This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and an engaging ethnography. --Sudha Vasan Economic & Political Weekly (11/01/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure is a timely and compelling account of the myriad ways in which infrastructures can be theorized and the limits and potentials of the same. --Siddharth Menon AAG Review of Books (09/01/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on the current academic, social, and political moment that we find ourselves in. . . . While The Promise of Infrastructure as a whole offers a surprisingly comprehensive condemnation of the 'radically human-centered thinking' that has produced the Anthropocene challenge that we now face, it also suggests the tools we will need to map out possible futures. Appropriately, these are not prescriptions promising a better future. Rather they are openings for possibility, for action, and for wonder. -- (10/01/2019) The Promise of Infrastructure is a stellar collection of essays by anthropologists and social scientists who explore roads, buildings, bridges, water meters, pipelines, power stations, and other structures which we encounter on a daily basis but whose contribution to the production of difference we frequently overlook. --Natalia Kovalyova Anthropology Book Forum (12/02/2019)

Author Information

Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hannah Appel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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