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- Convenors:
-
Jolynna Sinanan
(University of Manchester)
Roger Norum (University of Oulu)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Infrastructure
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Exploring the negotiation of uses, meanings and provision of essential goods including water, electricity, transport, housing, telecommunications and other forms of im/material infrastructure, this panel asks how individuals and groups traverse infrastructural landscapes in an era of insecurity.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological and geographical enquiry in recent years has focused on both quotidian and extraordinary experiences of infrastructures of various forms. Through a range of studies, scholars have highlighted the political struggles around various infrastructures as well as the logics of racism, discrimination, power and privilege that underpin them (Harvey and Knox, 2015; Gupta, 1998; Kelty 2017). This panel seeks to interrogate the interplay between the material and immaterial infrastructures as they are experienced by different actors, whether individuals, workers, families or corporate, state and other institutional actors. In particular, we seek to draw attention to immaterial infrastructures such as the social relationships, emotional connections, individual and collective imaginations and other forms of obligation that shape how we produce and experience infrastructure. What can a focus on infrastructures reveal about the relationships between bodies, political and social relations in the negotiation of responsibility over the provisioning and use of goods such as water, electricity, housing, transport and telecommunications? We invite papers that draw on empirical and theoretical approaches for analyzing processes of producing, distributing and consuming infrastructures. This panel highlights how diverse populations traverse these landscapes of infrastructure to navigate the instabilities of the contemporary world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Gediminas Lesutis (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the Lamu Port construction as part of LAPSSET in Kenya, I discuss how mega-infrastructures function as infrastructural biopolitics - an infrastructure-based state intervention to capacitate its population to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of social power.
Paper long abstract:
I discuss how mega-infrastructures function as infrastructural biopolitics - an infrastructure-based state intervention to capacitate its population to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of social power. Focusing on the Lamu Port construction as a nodal point of LAPSSET in Kenya, I show how infrastructural biopolitics articulate conditions for a desirable life that, materially not yet present, are a deterred possibility of the future. At the same time, however, these infrastructural biopolitics disavow already limited possibilities of liveable life for the local fishermen of Lamu whose livelihoods are negatively impacted by the LAPSSET development. In this context, the local civil society mobilisation has resulted in the articulation of the fragile subject that is portrayed as needing the biopolitical care of the state. However, even if civil society's attempts to insert this subject into state's administrative apparatus is successful, due to the local elite competition over central state's resources and meanings of development unleashed by the favourable court ruling to provide fishermen with financial compensation, the fishermen are again displaced from the biopolitical machine of capacitation. As a result, the subject of care articulated by Save Lamu is constituted as a disavowed subject - it is both neglected by the state during the implementation of large-scale infrastructures, as well as is disavowed in the process of civil society struggles to constitute it as a subject needing biopolitical care and consideration.
Abhimanyu Pandey (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
Through the case of a Trans-Himalayan borderland, this paper investigates how configurations and shifts in geo-climatic and geo-political conditions can provide important insights into the uneven, creative, and transformative effects of connectivity infrastructures, particularly roads.
Paper long abstract:
In the recent decades, road and telecom networks, especially in developing countries, have been increasingly connecting places hitherto often considered remote and marginal - such as mountainous regions and borderlands - to regional, national, and trans-national spheres and flows of political-economies and material-cultures. During the same period, anthropology as a discipline has been making concerted efforts to better understand the complex embeddedness of intertwined cultural, economic, and political processes in geographies at different scales. Among the various media that engender different forms of connectivity, roads in particular have been seen as paradigmatic vectors of change, enabling the spread of governmentality, and the 'flows', especially the spread of electronic media and migrations, that usher modernity. This paper seeks to interrogate the practices, experiences, representations, and articulations in statutory governance, everyday lives of local communities, and tourism engendered by the gradual coming of roads into Spiti valley - a Trans-Himalayan, high-altitude, culturally Tibetan borderland in India - over the last five decades. By alongside looking at the valley's geographic layout, its climate patterns, and its proximity to the both the western Himalayas of India and to the western Tibetan plateau of China, the paper attempts to shed light on how the geo-climatic and geo-political particularities of Spiti valley need to be closely considered to be able to better understand the kinds of transformations, negotiations, and anxieties that roads have been vitally mediating in this region. This paper draws upon several phases of field and archival research conducted from mid-2018 to early 2020.
Jolynna Sinanan (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Workers from marginalised populations in Nepal are dependent on the Everest tourism industry. Yet, the region is experiencing severe ecological impacts due to pollution and climate change. This paper examines the desire for sustainable livelihoods within an increasingly unsustainable industry.
Paper long abstract:
The number of tourists arriving in the largely underdeveloped Khumbu region in the eastern Himalayas, Nepal, has increased between 2016 and 2018 (Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, 2017). Further, the increase in tourists has influenced the demand for workers in the region's Mount Everest tourist industry. Contrary to the visibility of Khumbu Sherpa who have been traditionally associated with Everest mountaineering, significant numbers of guides and porters are from the Tamang and Rai ethnic groups, populations from other parts of Nepal who have historically remained at the economic margins of Nepali society (Fisher, 1990; Frydenlund, 2019; Nepal, 2005; Ortner, 2001).
In this paper, I examine the material and immaterial infrastructures of exchange that make up the 'work' of the Mount Everest tourism. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the town of Namche on the Everest Base Camp trek with guides, porters, guest house managers, cooks and attendants, I argue that the Everest tourism industry forms the basis of an intricate network of exchange, reciprocity and cumulation of resources to counter forms of development provided by state and non-state actors. The experience of workers illustrates the strategies for meeting aspirations of life projects where the Everest tourism industry is the most dependable source of livelihoods, intergenerationally. Yet, the commodification of the increasingly fragile alpine ecosystem of the Khumbu region presents significant ecological and social impacts, where sustainable tourism is becoming less viable over time.
Abigail King (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Telehealth—healthcare provided at a distance—is often employed to address gaps in the access to care. This paper argues that the use of telehealth involves both material and immaterial infrastructural shifts in the healthcare landscape, leading to new understandings of care and sociality.
Paper long abstract:
Telehealth refers to any type of healthcare provided at a distance. This includes telephone calls from a doctor, sending a picture of a rash to a dermatologist over text, or speaking face-to-face over video-conferencing technology with a healthcare professional. New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States, is sparsely populated with a large part of the population living in rural areas, often hours away from a larger city. For multiple reasons, this state has turned to telehealth as one way of providing care to its residents who otherwise do not have access to many healthcare resources in their local areas. Drawing on ethnographic material from within the mental healthcare system in urban and rural New Mexico, this paper explores New Mexico's shifting health infrastructural landscape, as the absence of one type of infrastructure (healthcare workers) is addressed and replaced by the presence of another (broadband connections, computer screens, and software programmes that link virtually to healthcare workers located elsewhere). This infrastructural transformation raises important questions about related immaterial infrastructures: social relations within health systems and the logics and values surrounding care. This paper argues that the use of telehealth involves a material and immaterial reconfiguration of health infrastructure, leading to new forms of care and sociality in New Mexico's health system.
Vibha Arora (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) Raile Rocky Ziipao (Central University of Punjab)
Paper short abstract:
Our article is on connective infrastructures (roads and highways). The road in Manipur state of Northeast India is the symbol of developmental hope, epitomizes state's governmentality, nonetheless it also emerges as a central locale of politics.
Paper long abstract:
Roads are bitumen covered concrete metaphors of modernity and development, and they materially represent fantasies, collective hopes, and aspirations of futures. They symbolize movement, connectivity, transactions and transportation, the agency of humans in the built environment, and eminently are key to understanding governmentality. Our article is about Manipur's connective infrastructures, and it focuses on internal roads, and a border highway that connects Imphal (Manipur's capital city) to Dimapur of Nagaland, North-east India. We explain the infrastructural deficit within Manipur and decision-making about them being influenced by a hill-valley socio-ecological ethnic distributional conflict. The road links and is part of the development route. To illustrate our argument, we provide an ethnographic account of a recent truck journey undertaken between Dimapur and Imphal in 2018, and this enables us to understand routinized corruption and the collusion of state and non-state actors therein. The road is the symbol of hope, and a developmental desire, and epitomizes state's governmentality and developmental project of progress, nonetheless it also gets transformed into the central locale of political protest, ethnic conflict, as ethnic groups appropriate it forcibly to erect blockades and organize protests in its arterial space. The roads and highways spatially produce and reproduce (il)legality, (il)legibility, and (il)legitimacy of the Indian state. Our ethnographic research unpacks and invokes the multivalence of roads.
Maria Teresa Borraz Doubell (Swansea University)
Paper short abstract:
A rural community is dealing with the impending construction of a new transmission line.The project is called the North-South Interconnection Development. The prospect of the increased industrialization of the rural landscape has mobilized the community to defend the environment that defines them..
Paper long abstract:
A new electricity transmission line is being developed between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This paper critically evaluates how the Nationally Significant Electricity Infrastructure impacts on the individual's connection to place and on their sense of identity. It explores how the physical environment and the relationship with it are socially constructed, and underpinned by a cultural, political and colonial context. The development of the transmission line shines a light on the disputed values between those of a broader society, represented by the state-owned developer; and those of the local receiving community. The European classification of the project as a "Project of Common Interest" compels its prioritisation at national and European levels due to its importance for the country and for European integration. The prioritisation has also impacted on the local communities who contest the validity of the resulting consultation process and the roles of the authorities. The contested values and the administrative actions of the developer have fuelled the distrust of the local community and the disconnection between both parties involved. According to Leonard (2006), rural Ireland's dramatic transformation precipitated by multinationals and local government into a more industrialised and modern economy has resulted in a concept of 'rural discourse'. This discourse, Leonard describes is a "representation of a primordial or visceral rural sentiment, etched within the subconsciousness of rural dwellers, that becomes a discourse of fundamentalism when faced with external threats". The paper analyses the dimensions of this impasse while taking the greater context into account.
Ben Bowles (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
The infrastructure finance community in the UK have a particular understanding of risk and, through their influencing of public bodies, this translates into the creation of new mega infrastructure and new revenue streams through which financial actors can directly gain access to service users.
Paper long abstract:
The financing mechanisms behind infrastructure - not just whether infrastructure is privately or publicly funded, but where finance is raised for projects - is an important and oft neglected factor that determines the nature and quality of service provision and effects the lives of those who are daily dependent on those services. The social world of global infrastructure finance is greatly influenced by "the immaterial infrastructures such as... social relationships" that this panel seeks to interrogate. In an interdisciplinary project drawing together myself, an anthropologist, and two economists, we have sought to ask how the understandings of particular financial actors lead to particular infrastructures becoming financed and built and what the effects of this may be for the infrastructure's users. Through interviews and observations with actors involved in project finance in the UK, we found that the particular risk-bound understandings that dominate the financial world has led to projects being created whereby public bodies take the bulk of risk, allowing private actors to take on projects that will clearly provide them with regular and stable revenues; a key example being the Thames Tideway super sewer. There has also been a growth in large high-capital projects at the expense of small builds and regular maintenance, again due to the particular demands of the finance community. This privileging of large, often over-engineered, infrastructure is both changing our material world and opening up UK citizens as a revenue stream for global financial actors in a way that they have not been before.