Paper Short Abstract:

My presentation acknowledges political, theoretical, and methodological differences between the anthropology of infrastructure and uneven development scholarship but argues that the two fields form a complementary research agenda that is theoretically heterogenous and empirically comprehensive.

Paper Abstract:

If we depart from new materialism, the anthropology of infrastructure (AOI) can hardly uncover the political-economic drivers behind the global “infrastructural moment”. Yet, what if we start from Foucault’s influence, especially his work on ideology? Would the AOI remain analytically diluted and incommensurable with uneven development (UD) scholarship?

My contribution advances two arguments. First, both fields avoid the fetishization of the built environment through revealing different but complementary relations that guide spatial expansion. AOI is primarily concerned with ideological effects, with the enlargement of the logistical power of the state/corporations. On the other hand, UD highlights the ways places, classes and capital are mutually co-produced symbolically and materially. Notably, UD became methodologically closer to AOI with its recent move from structuralist towards historical-ethnographic studies. The second argument claims that both converge at the politics of the built environment. AOI focuses on distributive justice, and the governance of differentiated populations through developmental projects. UD looks at processes of valorization, as well as the strategies of the state and capital to compete through the production of scales. Therefore, points of convergence can be found in: “poetics of infrastructure” enabling us to look at the common sense of unevenness; changing ideological and socio-economic effects that follow modes of investments; and in a comparison of the ways politico-economic regimes deal with geographical unevenness through history. My presentation acknowledges their political, theoretical, and methodological differences between them, but argues that the two fields form a complementary research agenda that is theoretically heterogenous and empirically comprehensive.