Week 7: Infrastructures are the structures between the structures

ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2, 2025)
September 19, 2025

Main reading: Ingold (2010); Rest and Rippa (2019); Rieder (2023)

Class agenda

1. Presentations: Freya McK., Harry C., Mia H.
2. Presenters’ agenda items

• “[R]oads are this recursive relation as much as its by-products…” (Rest and Rippa, p. 377).
• Why do roads have agency and what is agency?
• Large-scale infrastructure systems do represent a qualitatively different kind of society. Let’s discuss this, and whether there are trade-offs.
• Access to infrastructure is often necessary for life but unequally available. It reflects inequalities in society. Does scaling up always intensify inequality? Do we lose control over our own lives when we rely on technological systems? Should people be more aware of this dependence?
  

3. Desire lines
4. Why is infrastructure hard to think?
5. Are we closer to a definition of a network paradigm?

Notes

Infrastructure is a broad category and can refer to a specific class of technical systems or the abstract idea of a substrate which sustains other systems, or anything in between. In a roundabout way, a paper by Anusas and Ingold (2015) reflects on one of the problems with the current debates in anthropology about how to study and theorize infrastructure. Although they are talking about electricity and electrical systems, their conceit—that one can make a charge against and a defense of electrical power—mirrors the often unarticulated split among anthropologists who chose to write an ethnography of a technical system like a transit system, an oil pipeline, or an electrical grid. For the most part, ethnographies of infrastructure lay charges against infrastructure and to do so they resort to anthropology’s bag of tricks:

• What is believed to be an application of rational thinking to solve problems, and thus outside of social structures and institutions, is actually embedded in and dependent on social relationships.
• What is believed to be value-neutral is actually charged with the dominant biases and assumptions of a culture’s worldview and values.
• What is assumed to be constant and static is actually the result of complex historical processes unfolding on multiple scales and represents pressure by various interest groups or choices by select groups empowered to make political decisions.
• What is presumed to be a shared, public good governed by a just state is actually a site for exclusion and domination by elites of the masses and their resistance and challenge to their marginality.

In other words, the charge is that infrastructures (specific or general) are bearers of modern alienation and bourgeois values. It’s another way of saying we are trapped in the iron cage of modernity, societies ironically hoisted by our own collective petard and forced to confront the hubris that we could transcend and control our material conditions. There is little that considers why infrastructure might complicate and problematize this prevailing critical stance on modernity. This needn’t be a “defense” and may be very critical in spirit. But it would examine the unintended side effects rather than collapse infrastructural systems into familiar narratives.

Anand’s work, for instance, is innovative in that it also shows how infrastructural systems open spaces for alternative kinds of social and political processes, ones moreover that are rendered invisible by dominant ideologies and the limits of imagination sustained by particular social systems. Other ethnographies of infrastructure fall victim to a risk inherent in ethnography, which is to merely describe reality, perhaps with a bias in favor of the mundane, but under the premise that everything’s social and everything’s embedded, and perhaps with the not-novel finding that bourgeois modernity isn’t what it claims to be. Don’t get me wrong. These are important messages from anthropology. This is the ruthless criticism for which anthropology exists. But, also, we should try to ask new questions.

Infrastructure is like Palmolive: you’re soaking in it. For that reason it poses an epistemological challenge to ethnography, much as disease does for Mol. Yes, everything’s connected and embedded so people as individuals and societies as orders cannot transcend their historical or material conditions or deny their inherent interdependencies. But infrastructures lie in in-between spaces. So we also cannot simply frame infrastructure as a concrete example of a larger idea—capitalism, bureaucracy, etc.—and then tell an old critical story about what it means with new names, dates, and facts. When we say “everything is connected,” infrastructures (specific and general) are the connections. Because infrastructures are by definition connections among multiple systems, we should stop doing social-theory Mad Libs and think we will end up with true understanding of people’s relationships to technologies.

Here are some sources which allows us to see where anthropologists might go with an ethnography of infrastructure that is informed by a network paradigm. Rieder’s paper (2023), in addition to presenting a case from the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, also situates the study of infrastructure in relation to another theorist of connections, Tim Ingold. Rest and Rippa’s paper (2019) also builds on Ingold’s ideas. These papers also speak back to other ethnographic interpretations of infrastructure. Our task is to articulate the relatively implicit connections between an Ingoldian approach and the theory of a network we have been building based on other thinkers’ works in other contexts. By contrast, Fisch’s work focuses on ideas of cybernetic systems of information and communication. His work intervenes the debate on infrastructure but is primarily concerned with a larger goal of theorizing technical systems’ emergent properties. I am suggesting it just because I think it is particularly original but it is challenging and I think we should focus our efforts on Rieder and Rest and Rippa.

I have added these sources to the Canvas Reading List. They are available online via library subscriptions so they should be visible on the Reading List shortly if not already. They are also available via the Fisher Library catalogue.