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.