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Infrastructure | Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology

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Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.

Rehabilitation of the L train tunnel in New York, 2019. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York Anthropocene Environment Methods & Methodology Science & Technology State Hannah Knox University College London Evelina Gambino University of Cambridge Initially published 1 Mar 2023 Cite as: Knox, Hannah, and Evelina Gambino. 2023. “Infrastructure”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology , edited by Felix Stein. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/23infrastructure Abstract: Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipe

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