Session 16

Class discussion

Rashmi and Keya

Our last and final session of this seminar addresses questions on the everyday life of infrastructures - what is infrastructure and why do need to examine it?

The context of such questions was established by looking back at the larger theoretical interests of the discipline of Anthropology. We discussed how enquiries into material culture went out of fashion after the intense interest it generated in the 1970s - anthropologists studying the 'social' did not pay enough attention to material aspects of social life - till Appadurai and others revived it towards the close of the 80s through a focus on the social life of things.

This renewed interest subsequently provided the impetus to address questions of materiality that underlay the social - in the form of infrastructure - and we see the emergence of new objects of inquiry such as traffic, roads, water distribution etc.  A question that was raised was whether and how such explorations were any different from the earlier approach on the social life of things. As a way of answering it, the discussion focused on changes in methodology, which break the distinction between the material and the social or begin investigations of sociality of things as in earlier approaches, but juxtapose material and social to see how they are enmeshed with each other.  We debated the nature of methodological difference flagged here by pointing to the shift that has happened from semiotics of infrastructure to its pragmatics. 

Our discussion on Larkin's piece led us to the view that studying infrastructures enables the study of 'relations among relations' and that this approach is not limited to the idea of a 'commodity'. The point of this new mode of inquiry was to allow us to see the political economy in which infrastructures are embedded - not just in terms of its materiality but semantically as well  (here an example from Chu's Cosmology of Credit was cited where the road as a piece of infrastructure had symbolic significance for the people of the village).

This was followed by a discussion on McGuire’s piece that allowed for us to rethink the concept of agency in relation to infrastructures and how people get entangled in the same.

Discussing Maurer’s ideas on mobile banking, we discussed how the project feeds into the global discourse of financial inclusion and the politics of global financial institutions. A criticism that was directed towards Maurer was his celebration of financial inclusions without any reflection on the politics of such inclusion. We opined that this inclusion is partly about disciplining unruly and socially marginal subjects to operate within the market economy. Mobile money comes close to the model of microfinance championed by big financial institutions globally. Further, we began to think of the possible reasons why mobile banking has not taken off in India. In this regard, we discussed how RBI has stricter injunctions on banking in India. The Indian financial climate is such that we are constantly plagued by the fears of illegal remittances that often fund terrorist projects.

We concluded the session with an examination of Elyachar’s article. Elyachar's piece highlighted the importance of the 'knowledge society' where capital is not limited to materiality and looks to extract a different kind of value from society. While complex machines are doing away with the social, the automated technologies everywhere are maximizing on the communicative labour and the surplus generated there. This is especially true of the Internet economies and the business models of many platform service-providing companies after Web 2.0.

We also discussed Elyachar’s ideas in the context of post feminist discourse, which celebrates entrepreneurialism while being blind to the oppressive structures that underlie it.  Practices of companies such as Amway, Avon and Oriflame were discussed as examples of multilevel marketing that facilitate women entrepreneurship and also build themselves on existing communication networks - a practice that characterizes the post industrial economy.

Session 15 - class discussion

Session 15 – Circulating subjects:

This session reviewed the circulation of people / bodies and its links to the circulation of objects. The class discussion largely revolved around Chu’s ethnography. There was general consensus that the book was an excellent read, a good balance of theory and ethnography. Carol suggested that we could maybe read Chu’s thesis as a comparison with the book to inform ourselves on approaches to ‘data, theory and methods’. Another takeaway in terms of research methods was how Chu dealt with the issue of standpoint and methodology.

The book discusses ‘migration’, a topic that is the subject of inquiry in a number of disciplines. However such literature tends to view the process of migration as an instrumental and migrants as agents of development. They are perceived to be a group of people who make rational decisions on the basis of a cost – benefit analysis of staying at home versus emigrating. On the contrary Chu demonstrates that migration as a social process in its own right.

Thus ‘migration’ is not a homogenous entity though it may look like one from a macro-level perspective. At the micro level a migrant’s social and cultural background has a bearing on the process of migration, both before and after emigration. Chu’s Chinese (Fuzhonese) subjects represent an entanglement of the provincial and global - they nay seem worldly and cosmopolitan but their value systems are very much traditional.

We then discussed how the concept of transnationalism as highlighted by Appadurai and Akhil Gupta no longer seems tenable. Migration as a process that contributes to de-stabilisation of place bound cultural identity is no longer seen as an indicator of globalisation. Chu plays with the perception of ‘cosmopolitan subjects’ as those not tied to any particular cultural identity as opposed to ‘transnational migrants’ who are rooted to their culture and create ethnic enclaves at their destination. 

Chu’s work ties the concepts of mobility and migration to older anthropological concepts of value, kinship and gender. For the Fuzhonese, desire plays out at multiple levels and kinship and community remain central concepts. As typically assumed migration does not displace but just modify family structures. Thus ‘migrants’ are not independent agents but very much part of the social structure and the current focus is on how they navigate this structure.

Session 14 Class Discussion- Circulation of Substances: body, relationality, personhood

We began our discussion by considering the relationship between the body and personhood within the ‘secular tradition’ of science and law. There seem to be contesting ideas about this relationship, and neither law nor science seem to have a clear conception of who (or what) constitutes a living person. While bodily (biological)-materiality of the person seems emphasized in this recognition, the non-material is central to notions of free- will, morality and agency that are central in law, thus bringing in the need to account for consciousness. Ethical dilemmas about abortion or assisted death are debated on this terrain of seeking to determine what constitutes a ‘living person’- is it the body, a well-functioning body or a person who can make choices about her or his own body? Even as science moves to areas such as cryogenics which demand new ways to think about the body and personhood, ethical frameworks derived from law (which in turn derive from rationalist principles as well as remnants of religious moralities) take time to alter. Also, science which claims to function in a realm of ethical neutrality is deeply embedded in socio-political contestations.

Commodification of the human body (including its parts or substances) raises ethical concerns, not only about self-commodification but the circumstances within which such commodification occurs. As Hughes forcefully argues, to see the trade in human organs merely as a transaction would elide the structural inequalities within which it occurs. How then do we understand these transactions and what they represent? Is there a way to account for ‘choice’ within such transactions? Can there be an ethic that pits the value of persons against capitalist humiliation?

We also discussed how Strathern’s notion of the partible person may compare with Hughes notion of the person. While Strathern conceptualized the possibility of a personhood in which the individual and social were not dichotomous entities, Hughes seems to emphasize individual-rights over her or his body. Even as we recognise the political urgency of Hughes demand to make ‘choice’ problematic, how do we consider the idea of individual-rights over the body in the context of neoliberalism which seeks to impose this as a ‘natural’ or given idea?

Questions about who controls knowledge, and how knowledge may be utilised came up for discussion. Ethics, in the modern bio-pharmaceutical industry has become a highly malleable term. While companies constitute ethical committees and express commitment to ethics, this malleability allows it to remain a largely perfunctory exercise. In this context, fields like bio-ethics/law which have recently sprung up seem to have to keep up with, and more importantly perhaps, seem to evolve their conceptions of persons / ethics, in response to scientific developments, often, perhaps even favouring them.

In the last part of the class, we discussed the role of metaphors in cultural anthropology, and the attempt to unpack what these metaphors stand for. Apart from expressions of relationality or disruption, the metaphor of blood also stands for the kinds of circulation we see in contemporary capitalism- which is not just prices, goods, services going one way – but also body, body parts that are mobile and are being circulated; and have human costs – but stand erased in the abstract /scientific / metaphoric representation of the working model of the economy.


-Maithreyi and Savitha

Link to term papers

Dear All,

Link to papers - Please note I have renamed the folder critical reviews as Anthro seminar submissions

Regards
Krupa

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B80EssmI64t4Rnh5dGRxZUI3Ulk&usp=sharing

From Anthropologist to Actant (and back to Anthropology): Position, Impasse, and Observation in Sociotechnical Collaboration

by Anthony Stavrianakis

http://culanth.org/articles/768-from-anthropologist-to-actant-and-back-to

Back to the origins of coinage

link to an interesting book dealing with the origins of coinage in embedded/disembedded economies...

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-historical-origins-of-coinage-in-the-democratic-polis-against-the-aristocratic-gift-economy/2015/01/15

Week 16

Rashmi and Keya

The set of readings this session focus on infrastructures, the foundations which enable the functioning of systems of circulation and exchange. Throughout the seminar we have looked at the processes of exchange, objects that move in different regimes of value, meanings those objects accrue as they circulate among people, relationships that are forged as a result. We have engaged with the classical anthropological theories on gift and exchange, we have discussed contemporary systems of exchange and circulation and also the alternatives to them. The readings on infrastructure coming towards the end of the seminar are encouraging us to recognize and critically engage with the material structures on which all the above things are standing. The readings make us think about these material structures not only as enabling conditions for other kinds of exchange to take place but look at them as having their own meanings, politics and poetics. The connecting thread running along all these readings is a Latourian idea that objects have agency too and they are not just acted upon.They bring to the fore the old theoretical dichotomy between structure and agency and problematize it in productive ways.

Larkin’s review article covers a range of studies which engage with infrastructures not only as ‘things but relations among things’. Infrastructure is not considered in the limited sense of the term as ‘material and physical infrastructure’ but it is defined broadly to include built things, people, language/communication and knowledge. This collapses the neat separation we often make between people and things and make us reflect and think of ‘the social’ in material terms and ‘the material’ in social terms. Also Larkin’s article points to the social meanings that material structures come to acquire. Thus infrastructure is not something that has material existence which social theorists can take for granted as necessary preconditions to think about things social but infrastructure itself acquires aesthetic and political meanings and has a social function to serve especially in those nations which are invested in the projects of progress and development. The ‘infrastructure fetishism’ he speaks about reflects the current Indian climate and it is also representative of other developing countries. The dysfunctional infrastructure often has an aesthetic and poetic function even though it is not functional. We wonder whether this particular reading of infrastructure by Larkin can be made only of third world infrastructure. 

While breakdowns are common to infrastructures everywhere, the argument that dysfunctional infrastructure serving aesthetic and poetic function could be made only in the context of the third world. Can we speak about first world infrastructure in similar terms?

Mcguire's reading of the wall separating the borders of the US and Mexico puts into perspective the need for anthropology to study the impact of infrastructure as well as how it came to be - he uses the term archaeological assemblage to account for the latter. He articulates his point quite beautifully when he states that even though humans create things, once created, materiality has the ability to affect humans and constrain and enable different and unexpected forms of agency. Thus the presence of a steel wall as a means of controlling the agency of the transgressors/ undocumented migrants crossing over to the US simultaneously engenders new and different agency in non state actors who continue to find ways to cross over and inhabit the border space. An interesting contradiction that he highlights over the presence of the wall is the fact that while it attempts to curb and control the movement of  a "certain kind" of people it must also allow for the the expansion of the produce trade, other commodities, objects and wealth  (between the two states) that  global capitalism depends on.

The dependence global capitalism has on forms of infrastructure is taken a step forward by Elyachar when she demonstrates how women's phatic labour and sociality came to be recognised as a resource/ infrastructure within the political economy of Cairo in the course of developmental attempts at empowering and creating women entrepreneurs. Women's social practices came to be recognised for its potential and thus transformed into channels or infrastructure that could be accessed by people outside of the semiotic community for new kinds of economic projects and to build further infrastructure,

Maurer’s article also looks at social relationships and networks people build as infrastructures which support systems of circulation and exchange when he examines mobile money as a system of micro finance that serves as an alternative to branch banking. Discussing a technologically mediated financial system such as mobile money, he demands that we recognize the social relationships (MSO agents and their networks) that underlie it. It examines the nature of the agency as commonly understood in business circles, and juxtaposes that with the idea of agency prevalent in social theory. The most central question asked here is - are agents acting on behalf of others or are they acting for themselves? What is the difference between the two and how can we understand them? In this technologically mediated system, are MSO agents intermediaries or mediators or both depending on the context in which they act? Maurer argues that there is nothing fixed about relations. Intermediaries can become mediators, and mediators intermediaries depending on the ecology within which relations are embedded.

The concept of agency as deployed in the context of mobile money is not surprisingly new. It is how life insurance and other companies have historically been deploying as one of the distribution strategies to reach the masses. The question, we feel should be asked in this context is - How is mobile phone different from other forms of storing value? How is it different from corporate coupon systems in India such as Sodexo? Or plastic money? Instead of reducing it to mediator and intermediary level a richer analytical account could have been given of the way mobile money works within the sociality of agent networks that Maurer describes.  His argument that cash is becoming merchandise that is bought seems too simplistic. Banking is about merchandising cash, so are all kinds of financial business. There is no physicality to money – whether it is paper or electronic form, it always stands in for something else. What should have been the focus instead is – how does the circulation of money improves in electronic money connected to local business setups as against money in its conventional form of notes and coins? The question is about the relation of the materiality of money to its flow and circulation, not just conversion from one form to the other.

Anthropologist David Harvey on a world without money

http://truth-out.org/news/item/28879-looking-toward-a-moneyless-economy-and-sleeping-well-at-night?utm_content=buffer3a8f9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer