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.