Paper short abstract:

Considering the relationship between indigenous irrigation and socio-cultural relations, and the way development interventions concretize infrastructure, harden social 'facts', and black-box controversies, this paper argues they both constitute and impact social life, and reflect power relations.

Paper long abstract:

The Central Highlands of Madagascar is materially and symbolically shaped by indigenous rice terracing and irrigation infrastructure. Dating back centuries, they play a central organizing role in sustaining livelihoods, socio-cultural relations, identity and spiritual connections to the ancestors. More recently, development projects have concretized infrastructure in material terms, hardened (reduced, fixed, bracketed) 'facts' about social realities, and black-boxed controversies, contradictions and disconnects regarding their effects. Within dominant development imaginaries, technical (material, scientific, modern, gender-biased) meanings of infrastructure are privileged over the historical, social, cultural and political. Further, the social lives of development practitioners in defining, deploying, interpreting and giving meaning to development interventions are silenced. Within anthropology, these conceptualizations, together with the social life of infrastructure and engineers, have tended to be invisible and outside the frame of analysis. This paper sheds light on the way development infrastructure shapes material realities, and mediates socio-cultural and political relations, while recognizing that development practitioners distinguish between the 'technical' and 'social': infrastructure (read as 'science') proceeds in isolation from, or in spite of social factors (Latour 1979). Based on two years of multi-ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates disconnects in indigenous and 'engineered' dams and irrigation works in terms of material and social construction, overlapping histories, relations of power and influence, and the way they are lived, negotiated and contested in everyday practice from the perspectives of Betsileo farmers and development practitioners. In doing so, it illustrates the way infrastructure both constitutes and impacts social life, as well as reflects power relations and struggles over resources and meaning.