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Caring for Divine Infrastructures: Nature and Spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India
Abstract
This paper investigates spirit (būta) worship in a special economic zone (SEZ) in India by considering practices of care around specific constellations of nature and infrastructure: fluid, contingent assemblages of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ environments. Occult phenomena in modern settings have often been interpreted as metaphorical critiques of modernity by neophyte proletarians. In the SEZ, however, it is not workers but executives who undertake the primary role in būta rituals. In addition, the rituals’ main aim is towards not division but connection among modern technology, nature, and divinities. The SEZ management assumes the role of primary caretaker of an assemblage which constitutes both industrial plants and spiritual landmarks. The rituals enable the people to manage the entanglements of infrastructure with spirits and nature, which are not only modern but also untamed and divine. In the process of caring for these entanglements, people experiment with novel ontological arrangements.
... In the study, I argued that, although the deities that were believed to have divine power (śakti) in the wild were marginalized through forest destruction and the construction of a special economic zone, they exercised their agency via oracles and rites concerning disasters in the zone. They held a unique indigenous logic, different from that of modern rationality, thereby facilitating interactions between residents of the industrial zone and the realm of the wild (Ishii, 2017(Ishii, , 2019. ...
... To achieve these goals, intermediaries such as Jayanand are essential. The role Jayanand plays in translating the inhabitants' Lebenswelt logic into modern, legal, and political logic and vice versa is like that played by the Andean priest-activists described by De la Cadena (2010, 2017. For the Kunbi people, however, unlike in De la Cadena's example, the ontological demarcation is drawn not between those who are "fully human", and are thus to be kept alive, and "nature", which is to be left to die but, rather, between "nature", which is to be kept alive, and "incomplete humans", who are to be left to die. ...
This study examines the multi-tiered manifestation of the natural environment and social-ecological milieu of people living in a tiger reserve, located in the Uttara Kannada district in the Indian state of Karnataka. The Kali Tiger Reserve is in the northwestern part of the Western Ghats, which is a designated biodiversity hotspot and home to wildlife such as the Bengal tiger and the Indian elephant. After the forest was designated as a tiger reserve, the Kunbi people living in this area were excluded from the laws and policies designed to promote nature conservation. Their traditional hunter-gatherer activities and agricultural practices became severely restricted and were subjected to management and surveillance by the Forest Department. This demonstrates the operation of biopower acting in line with the distinction between rare animal species deemed worthy of being kept alive and human beings who are not, and are thus left destitute. In this situation, the Kunbi attempt to recover their legal rights to land and forest resources by invoking the Forest Rights Act and petitioning the state government to designate them as a scheduled tribe. Moreover, they struggle to maintain their emotional ties to the forest by creatively modifying their ritualistic hunting groups. The Kunbi's attempt to deal with their plight by participating in the modern political arena, while placing themselves within the realm of nature, shows that modernity and indigeneity exist in an inseparable duality. This study examines the experiences of people living in this duality by focusing on their emotions regarding the forest and efforts to deal with conflicts over the tiger reserve, which is simultaneously considered to be the natural environment as well as their intimate Umwelt.
... 'Sikh infrastructure', 'sacred infrastructure'). 7 Though the term itself is typically used in a cursory manner, several researchers offer more extended discussions of how prototypical infrastructural formations -railway lines (Walker 2019), electrical grids (Trovalla and Trovalla 2015), bridges (Schwenkel 2017), telegraph networks (Supp-Montgomerie 2021), roads (Ellis 2020;Handman 2017;Harvey and Knox 2015;Kirsch 2023;Sjørslev 2017), canals (Rodríguez-Plate 2024), waste management systems (Fredericks 2018(Fredericks , 2024, IT networks (Mellquist Lehto 2021), and industrial facilities (Ishii 2017) -become entangled with and even constituted by religious meanings, spiritual forces, and the lives of religious groups. Researchers have also examined the infrastructural arrangements that religious groups themselves develop in order to facilitate their religious practices and to expand their influence, including auditoriums, audio-visual systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, mobile phone apps, and streaming channels, in addition to security services, housing estates, and private utilities (Burchardt 2022;Larkin 2008;Mellquist Lehto 2021;Rocha 2021;Ukah 2016;Walker 2019). ...
Infrastructures are ensembles of social and technical components that make practices and relations possible. In this contribution, I develop a notion of ‘religious infrastructure’ and delineate why I find it to be a generative analytical category. Thinking with religious infrastructure spotlights new sites of empirical inquiry for scholarship on religion, as well as fresh ways of apprehending familiar objects of analysis. It brings into focus how religiously marked arrangements support, depend on, and mutually transform wider landscapes of action and relation. These lines of inquiry point to dynamics that cut across different religious boundaries, and they uncover sometimes surprising entanglements between religiously and secularly marked domains of practice. They also help to foreground the multiple modalities of religious operation that a given arrangement can perform, beyond that of mediating transcendent encounters. Accordingly, religious infrastructure elicits questions about what qualifies as ‘infrastructure’, but also about what qualifies as ‘religion’.
... The case of the Chacao Bridge in Chiloé brings an additional element to the study of infrastructures: the presence of myths that are actualized by the idea of the infrastructural project. Although existing literature takes notice of the interplay of infrastructures with ritual practices and religious beliefs (Bonelli and González 2017;Ishii 2017;Sizek 2021), there is no direct engagement with how the interaction between narrations and infrastructure projects shapes specific spaces and local temporalities. ...
The very nature of large-scale infrastructure projects (long design and construction periods, high investment, and impact on social and natural spaces) makes them prone to social-ecological and technical conflicts. These conflicts materialize in stories that become keystones in the making of infrastructures. In this article, we analyze the infrastructuring power of stories by drawing on the case of the Chacao Bridge on Chiloé Island, southern Chile, a controversial infrastructure project that has been in the making over the last six decades. We argue that the "absence" of the bridge creates a space for the production of stories on the Island's inherited past and imagined future that keeps recurring and growing in the form of myths. Thus, we propose the concept of "mythical infrastructuring" to capture this process. The article concludes that the project of the Chacao Bridge develops its infrastructuring presence over landscape and culture in contradictory ways that cannot be solved technically or symbolically.
... These things are interwoven into the fabric of the region, its past, it geography, its future, its contradictions and identities for residents as modern subjects of national (India) and local (Sikkim) power. There has been limited attention to the politics of concrete in India, including in the Himalayas (Belz, 2013), though there is an emerging corpus of literature on the politics and rituals around infrastructure more generally in India ranging from pipes (Anand, 2011) to highways (Sabhlok, 2017) to special economic zones (Ishii, 2017). For these and other authors, infrastructure has been central to nation-building in India (as elsewhere), yet distinguishing the formal from informal components can be difficult, even within what appear to be public bodies (Roy, 2009). ...
Sikkim is a geopolitically sensitive frontier state in India sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Nepal. As distinctions between urban and rural dissolve across the Himalaya, concrete narrates the transformation of these landscapes and the assemblages that hold them together. Using Cloke and Jones’s (2001) notion of ‘dwelling’ we explore Sikkim's concrete manifested in tourism, hydropower and housing to make four arguments. First, concrete is central to the way development is conceived and enacted in Sikkim and offers a critical reading of the ways landscape is imagined, reproduced and politicised. Second, concrete foregrounds the ways peoples' aspirations are materialised in the built environment of a ‘remote’, yet geopolitically significant territory. Third, concrete is an integral component of Sikkim's political culture, part of the assemblage of incongruent elements that undergird the state's dependency. Finally, concrete has further entangled Sikkim within India, producing a loyal border state out of a recently independent polity.
... Ong 1988). Regarding this issue, see also Ishii (2017). 6 Regarding this, see Kimura (2016), who describes the conflicts and negotiations between locals in the Tohoku region of Japan, who recognise the danger of earthquakes and tsunamis and still long for an intimate relationship with sea, and the state, which aims to build a gigantic seawall. ...
... As mentioned, Amazonia's uncontrolled environments allow informal mining to proceed clandestinely through the 'fluid spatiality' of remote infrastructure alluded to above (see also Ishii 2017). Without these characteristics, the gold mining that takes place in Amazonia would be unable to participate in capitalism's edges (see Tsing 2015). ...
Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The ‘wild’ landscapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach and work in these far‐flung mine sites consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and unpredictable waterways, locales that restrict and confound formal infrastructural development. In such terrains, prospectors must devise innovative ‘fluid infrastructures’ that allow the mine's continued existence against all odds. Local perceptions of the wilderness in these locales offer insights into remoteness not as regions untouched and inaccessible, but as intimately connected to the diffuse and manifold forms that global economies take. These are zones in which the wild is in fact turned inside out. Nichée dans l'arrière‐pays amazonien, l'extraction informelle de l'or se fait de façon largement inaperçue. Les paysages « sauvages » doivent traverser les prospecteurs pour accéder à ces sites miniers reculés et les exploiter sont constitués de forêts primaires, de chutes d'eau déchaînées et de cours d'eau imprévisibles – des lieux qui limitent et empêchent le développement d'infrastructure de base. Sillonnant ces terrains, les prospecteurs conçoivent des « infrastructures fluides » innovantes qui permettent de continuer l'exploitation de la mine, mais qui dévoilent également la connexion subtile entre les périphéries et les centres économique. La perception de la nature sauvage de ces lieux donne une idée de la conceptualisation et de l'utilisation de « l'enclavement » non pas pour désigner des régions vierges et inaccessibles, mais plutôt comme intimement liées et, à bien des égards, définissant les impacts diffus et multiples de processus mondiaux plus vastes. Ce sont des zones dans lesquelles la nature est en effet retournée à l'envers.
... A lot of attention is paid to the questions of organization and functioning of special economic zones in the world economy, to the specifics of their activities in different countries in several economic researches (Anwar, 2016;Ishii, 2015;Mohiuddin, 2014;Pan, 2016;Shi, 2015;Stroeva et al., 2016 andSibirskaya et al., 2016). ...
The article is devoted to studying the theoretical and practical aspects of special (free) economic zones' functioning. The authors, by analyzing the relationship between the Institute of public-private partnerships and special economic zones, proved that the special economic zones are not a form of public-private partnership, but the environment of its implementation.
... Unusual events such as breakdowns and accidents make the workings of infrastructure highly visible to the observer (see Ishii 2016). The science studies scholar Geoffrey C. Bowker calls the analytical strategy that foregrounds such circumstances 'infrastructural inversion' (Bowker 1994). ...
This paper aims to elucidate the central role floating rice has played in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain overlooked by the actors that rely on them. However at certain moments, such as breakdowns, infrastructures make visible usually hidden connections between humans and non-humans. In recent years, the infrastructural role of floating rice has become a matter of concern for many actors in and around the Chao Phraya delta. This paper examines the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructure, farmers and rice in the delta. In particular, the paper traces moments of infrastructural inversion that shed light on rice's involutions as part of a multispecies infrastructure. Attention to these involutions, the paper argues, facilitates a reconsideration of infrastructure's relationship with nature.
Focusing on how the inhabitants live and work next to a coal-powered plant in the Senegalese town of Bargny, I explore the atmosphere of anxiety that arises from the cohabitation between the dust-creating infrastructure, the inhabitants, their animals, as well as the natural and spiritual landscape. I demonstrate how this anxiety is directed towards the future as the dust impacts the lives of the residents' children, while also reflecting concerns about the past as the infrastructure gradually destroys an important, sacred heritage site. Nonetheless, I argue that the activism and protests against the polluting infrastructure reawaken animistic beliefs, thereby creating new constellations of human and non-human resistance.
This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.
Focusing on the domestication and undomestication of nature around the River Vere in Tbilisi, Georgia, this article analyses how modernization projects seemingly overcoming nature simultaneously reinforced the complex entanglement between nature and infrastructure, the material and immaterial, the human and non-human. The article centres around a flooding event in 2015, shedding light on the entanglement of different approaches and temporalities. The river and its infrastructure are caught up with ideas, beliefs and materialities. The paper analyses how the crisis gave rise to questions about ‘morality’ of materiality, ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ handling of nature. Based on ethnography and archival work, it shows how the infrastructural developments conceived as projects of Soviet atheist modernity emerged as sites where nature, technologies and religion meet. Rather than looking at Soviet and post-Soviet as two different modernities, the article shows them as continuities.
The “Cowshed Tree” (Cây đa nhà Bò), located next to a maternity hospital in urban Hanoi, has long been a destination for women and men who offer prayers to ensure a successful birth and to give thanks for a healthy baby. As the nearby hospital also performs abortions, the crown of the huge banyan tree with its aerial roots has come to be regarded by many city residents as a home for unredeemed souls. But the history of the tree and narratives about its existence predate the construction of the hospital in the early 1960s and refer to the arrival of migrants from India in the French colonial period. In this article, I explore how the Cowshed Tree became a location where affective relations between the living and the dead are created and fostered through prayers and offerings, and hence as a site where sensations and material objects mediate between this world and other worlds. Taking the performance of popular religious practices at the Cowshed Tree as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on the urban sacred in late socialist Vietnam and on unfortunate deaths and commemoration in times of rapid transformation; it also contributes to recent research on the relationship between humans, trees, and spirits in the urban environment.
The term control used to be central to the scholarship on modern water management. More recently, however, scholars have remarked that the world is too unstable and capricious for control to ever fully succeed. They propose that technologically facilitating water to flow depends instead on care. Building on this, we here propose that holding on to a single catch-all theoretical concept, even if it is ‘care’, does not suffice. Instead, analytical terms are better adapted – and re-adapted to local specificities. To exemplify this, we here present the case of the Huallabamba, a canal that makes horticulture possible in the arid valley of Motupe on the Pacific coast of northern Peru. In this case, while ‘control’ was hard to find, ‘care’ took different forms: the tinkering that compensates for the not-quite-modern character of the infrastructures; the adaptive managerial style necessary given the absence of information; the watchful, hands-on cuidar of the men who walk along the canal high up in the Andes, repairing what is broken, cautious lest they anger the spirits; the listening to and singing for water in the catchment area; and the activism that resists the invasion of mining companies. This open-ended list is not meant to travel as a theoretical grid, but rather to inspire others to propose locally salient analytical terms to explore the sites and situations in which they are involved.
This article examines ethnographically the embodied infrastructures of waste picking labour at Dakar’s dump, Mbeubeuss, as a lens into the material politics of disposability in the Anthropocene. Through examining the lifeworlds threatened with erasure by a World Bank-funded project to modernise the dump, it interrogates the shifting dialectics of waste and value in an era of disposability urbanism. Specifically, the article examines the material, social, and spiritual infrastructures of waste picking to trace how the pickers forge value through their craft, expertise, and toil. Living with toxins allows them to pursue the good life and stake claims to an urban commons—but with violently uneven bodily burdens. It then explores the uncanny, often violent, consequences of state efforts to “valorise” dump economies as they enclose the commons and disrupt pickers’ ritual practices. The research extends understandings of infrastructure and offers new provocations for how socio-material relationships may be revalued in the Anthropocene.
As a new wave of infrastructure expansion takes place globally, there has been a parallel turn to infrastructure in geographical research. This article responds to recent calls within this research for less human-centered engagement with the infrastructure turn. More specifically, this article aims to destablize anthropocentric discussions about infrastructural violence and infrastructural justice. Using the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline Project as a case study, we advance two main points. First, we show that infrastructural violence is not solely directed at humans. Rather, all agents, objects, and conditions—from humans to fish to carbon sequestration—entangled in webs of relations within zones of infrastructural expansion risk being subjected to violence when new and existing infrastructures meet. To illustrate this point, we detail two examples of competitions between new and existing infrastructures along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, which together reveal the various forms of violence experienced by the more-than-human world when new infrastructural arrangements are layered on top of already existing ones. Second, we advance debates on infrastructural justice by adopting a more-than-human perspective in our conceptualization of this term. Recent writing on infrastructural justice has reflected on efforts to repair and rebuild infrastructures to produce more just futures (Sheller 2018 Sheller, M. 2018. Mobility justice: The politics of movement in an age of extremes . New York: Verso. [Google Scholar]). Drawing on the observations and reflections of our fieldwork along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, we argue that just infrastructure projects must not only be inclusive of marginalized human and nonhuman populations but they must also avoid interfering with the infrastructural work done by nature to sustain the more-than-human world.
The purpose of the work is to determine the top-priority directions of implementing the new Internet technologies on the territories of rapid economic development by the example of modern Russia. In order to determine the effectiveness of application of financial tools for stimulating the growth of territories of rapid economic development, the authors use the classical method of evaluation of effectiveness, which supposes finding the ratio of results to expenditures. The indicators of the result include the volume of manufactured product in the territories of rapid economic development and the volume of taxes paid into state budgets of these territories, and the indicator of expenditures is the volume of investments into territories of rapid economic development. The authors come to the conclusion that financial tools (investments) of stimulating the growth of territories of rapid economic development are peculiar for low effectiveness, as they lead to high load on the federal budget. Non-financial tools – including Internet technologies – have wide perspectives and high effectiveness in the sphere of stimulating the acceleration of growth rate of territories of rapid development. The authors determine top-priority directions of implementation of new Internet technologies on the territories of rapid development and develop the mechanism of activation of growth of the territories of rapid economic development on the basis of implementing the new Internet technologies by the example of modern Russia.
Dakar's city streets have oscillated between remarkably tidy and dangerously insalubrious as the city's garbage infrastructure has become the symbol, object and stage for struggles over government, the value of labour and the dignity of the working poor. For Dakar's garbage infrastructure, Senegal's neoliberal experiments have left much of the collection equipment degraded, especially the system's backbone, the garbage trucks, most of which are imported used from Europe. Workers personally and publicly frame their labour as an act of Muslim piety. Cleanliness is godliness, they argue, so those who work to cleanse Dakar should be valued appropriately. In this way, they creatively wage a 'refusal to be refuse' which turns the stigma of trashwork on its head. The piety of refusal raises important questions for the horizon of politics in urban Africa. Much of the Africanist literature interprets spiritual understandings of infrastructure as reactionary critiques of capitalism, globalization, neoliberalism and other elements of contemporary modernity.
The ritual practices of the low castes have often been considered through concepts such as Sanskritization as well as consensus and replication, but have also been interpreted as resistance against the dominance of the high castes. The tendency common to these analyses is their interpretation of the low castes’ ritual practices in terms of caste hierarchy and power relations. Focusing on the relational aspect of divinity and the importance of wild sacredness in ritual contexts, this study will provide an alternative perspective from which to view the complementary opposites in the rituals of the low castes. These are not merely a reflection of unequal caste relations, but are the basis of the relationships among all the various actors—including human beings, wild animals, and spirits—personified as būtas that constitute a fluid network in a social, ecological, and cosmological sphere.
Numic people in the western United States are co-adapted with their traditional lands and these lands are spiritually and physically co-adapted with these people. This relationship has been documented through studies funded by the Department of Energy, Nevada Operations. 1 The u.s. Department of Energy Nevada Operations studies of American Indiacultural impacts from the transportation of Low Level Radioactive Waste were managed by Frank DiSanza. Consultation with the involved tribes was guided by Robert Furlow through the American Indian Program. Elders from twenty-six Indian tribes participated in two studies in order to explain why the transportation of radioactive waste poses serious threats. Key in their interpretation is the perception that radioactive material is an angry rock. Indian knowledge and use of this rock goes back for thousands of years. As a powerful spiritual being the angry rock constitutes a threat that can neither be contained nor controlled by conventional means. It has the power to pollute food, medicine, and places, none of which can be used afterwards by Indian people. Spiritual impacts are even more threatening, given that the angry rock would pass along highways where there are animal creation places, access to spiritual beings, and unsung human souls. A most troubling concern is that radioactivity would be transported along the path to the afterlife. The juxtaposition of the angry rock and human spirits being sung to the afterlife is unthinkable.
In this article, I explore how some Hausaphone Mawri in postcolonial Niger materialize their experience of modernity. I examine the fundamental role that space plays in local perceptions of modernity by discussing stories people tell about what happens on the road. In particular, I focus on their attention to the road as part of a complex economy of violence, power, and blood. By linking the road and its deadly spirits to the region's history of civil engineering, emergent capitalism, and religious transformation, I show that rather than simply being iconic of modernity, the road is a hybrid space that condenses past histories at the same time that it concretizes the perils and possibilities of modern life for rural Mawri. [space, roads, mobility, modernity, imagination, spirits, Niger]
This essay explores different interpretations of spirit possession episodes in multinational factories based in Malaysia. Drawing on fieldwork data and secondary sources, it deciphers the cryptic language of Malay spirit possession in relation to gender symbolism, social boundaries, and morality. This interpretation is contrasted to the corporate view that, by using the cosmopolitan medical model, converts workers into patients. By presenting these divergent views of spirit possession in factory settings, the essay seeks to illuminate general questions regarding the connections among affliction, cultural experience, and hegemony in the process of social change. [Malay culture, industrial capitalism, spirit possession, gender, symbolic analysis, medical anthropology, hegemonic discourse, world system]
Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual murder," the sale of body parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation—mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global" and "the local"— treated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities—into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkward" scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there,
We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback, and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson's model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designer-user communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.
Chapter to be included in a forthcoming book: ‘New Ontologies,’ in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), 'The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming', Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming. In The Mangle of Practice (1995) I argued for a specific ontological vision of the world and of our place in it, a vision in which both the human and the nonhuman are recognised as open-endedly becoming—taking on emergent forms in an intrinsically temporal ‘dance of agency.’ Here I seek to enrich and extend that vision, beginning from some different places. I first discuss the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning as exemplars or icons of, respectively, a Modern dualist ontology and a non-Modern mangle-ish ontology. Echoing Martin Heidegger, I argue that the Mondrianesque stance (1) is associated with projects of domination and (2) veils our true, de Kooning-like, ontological condition from us. My second example concerns the struggles of the US Army Corps of Engineers with the Mississippi River. Again, these exemplify a project of domination and control, now including scientific knowledge, that is both embedded in and conceals the flow of becoming. In the second half of the essay, I ask whether it would make a difference if we adopted a stance of self-consciously acting out an ontology of becoming. I argue that it would, drawing upon examples from the arts, religion and philosophy, but seeking to draw attention especially, and contra Heidegger, to branches of science and engineering that themselves assume an ontology of becoming. I conclude with a brief discussion of a ‘politics of experiment’ that would go with an ontology of becoming.
Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time-space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta-narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to "situate" the particular in "wider" contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method-its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people, money, and consumption and the other from Africa on born-again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by reflecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta-narratives in returning relevance to anthropology but also on the contemporary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledge practices of ethnography and render such meta-narratives plausible.
Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time‐space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta‐narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to “situate” the particular in “wider” contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method—its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people, money, and consumption and the other from Africa on born‐again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by reflecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta‐narratives in returning relevance to anthropology but also on the contemporary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledge practices of ethnography and render such meta‐narratives plausible.
This paper aims to elucidate the central role floating rice has played in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain overlooked by the actors that rely on them. However at certain moments, such as breakdowns, infrastructures make visible usually hidden connections between humans and non-humans. In recent years, the infrastructural role of floating rice has become a matter of concern for many actors in and around the Chao Phraya delta. This paper examines the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructure, farmers and rice in the delta. In particular, the paper traces moments of infrastructural inversion that shed light on rice's involutions as part of a multispecies infrastructure. Attention to these involutions, the paper argues, facilitates a reconsideration of infrastructure's relationship with nature.
New technologies have stimulated the rehearsal of old debates about what is new and what is old in descriptions of social life. This article considers some of the current uses to which the concepts of `hybrids' and `networks' are being put. It could be seen as following Latour's call for a symmetrical anthropology that gathers together modern and nonmodern forms of knowledge. In the process, the article reflects on the power of analytical narratives to extend endlessly, and on the interesting place that property ownership holds in a world that sometimes appears limitless.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
Acquisition of land and reallocation of previously acquired land for Special Economic Zones (SEZ) has stimulated protests that provide a terrain for exploring the changing landscape of contestation in the liberalizing political economy of India. Social movements, organizations, and communities resist the land, development, and sovereignty implications of SEZs. Although there are common concerns, efforts to co-organize protests on a national or regional scale have proved difficult. In place of nationwide narratives critiquing the model, anti-SEZ resistance predominantly reflects localized interpretations. The parochial nature of resistance to date is a product of diverse opinions on preferred outcomes, regional, or local viewings of the state, particular political dynamics, and the range of actors involved in SEZ struggles. I argue that the state is not a monolithic entity, but rather the anti-SEZ struggles view and make demands upon distinct levels of or individuals within the state. In developing this position, I explore the localization of SEZ struggles in Goa, India, examine the dynamics of resistance at the state level, and address political opportunities that emerge in the context of protest. The state's recent electoral change provides a chance to reflect further on the shifting ‘state’ target for political protest.
The Panama Canal requires an enormous volume of fresh water to function. A staggering 52 million gallons are released into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with each of the 35—45 ships that transit the canal daily. The water that facilitates interoceanic transportation and global connection falls as rain across the watershed surrounding the canal and is managed by an extensive system of locks, dams, and hydrographie stations. These technologies - which correspond with the popular understanding of infrastructure as hardware - were largely constructed during the early 20th century. Since the late 1970s, however, administrators and other concerned actors have responded to actual and potential water scarcity within the canal system by developing a managerial approach that integrates engineered technologies and new techniques of land-use planning and environmental regulation across the watershed. Through this process, techno-politics and environmental politics have become increasingly inextricable in the transit zone. Whereas canal administrators previously emphasized the control of water in its liquid state, watershed management emerged as an attempt to manipulate water flows through the legal protection of forests and restriction of agriculture. As forested landscapes have been assigned new infrastructure! functions (water storage and regulation), campesino farmers have been charged with a new responsibility (forest conservation) often at odds with their established agricultural practices. Consequently, I bring together scholarship on infrastructure in science and technology studies and political ecology in anthropology and geography to examine why, how, and to what effect landscapes around the canal have been transformed from agricultural frontier to managed watershed. I suggest that the concept of infrastructure is a useful theoretical tool and empirical topic for analyzing the politics of environmental service provision. By paying attention to the contingent history of engineering decisions and the politics embedded in the changing socio-technical system that delivers water to the canal, we can better understand the distributional politics of environmental service provision in Panama today.
The aim of this study is to investigate spirit possession through the lenses of mimesis, permeability, and perspectivity. Recent studies have explored the significance of perspective exchange as reciprocal subjectification. At the same time, the importance of reflexive self-awareness amid perspective exchange has been noted. Linking studies on perspective exchange with those on spirit possession, this article tries to show an alternative understanding of perspective exchange as the de-subjectification and generative transformation of self and other. Focusing on the buuta ritual in South India, I examine perspective exchange as the capability for freeing oneself from one's subjectivity enough to let various perspectives come and go through the permeable self. Being permeable and reflexive, the buuta impersonator plays with multiple perspectives to transform both his and others' perspectives to enable all to become ‘real’ humans in relation to the deity.
It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropology's critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.
In this article I attempt to analyze the transformation of savanna-originated spirit or suman shrines in a cocoa-producing migrant society in the Eastern Region of the Republic of Ghana. At the beginning of the twentieth century, various suman shrines were established as places where people were accused of witchcraft or exorcized in Akan societies. Earlier studies have called these 'anti-witchcraft shrines' and interpreted this phenomenon as being a result of the social change caused by the booming cocoa industry. In the meantime, the main function of suman shrines has been transformed from one associated with witchcraft, which is connected with kinship order in Akan societies, into one offering treatment against magic relating to ethnic conflicts over land. I point out that this shift in the function of suman shrines reflects a shift in local political disputes, namely from maintaining the birthrate within matrilineal kin groups in order to keep up numbers in the work force to the inter-ethnic relations found in the usufruct and contracts concerning farmland between landowners and tenants.
This is the story of how one company created and codified a new science "on the run," away from the confines of the laboratory. By construing its service as scientific, Schlumberger was able to get the edge on the competition and construct an enviable niche for itself in a fast-growing industry.In this engaging account, Geoffrey Bowker reveals how Schlumberger devised a method of testing potential oil fields, produced a rhetoric, and secured a position that allowed it to manipulate the definition of what a technology is. Bowker calls the heart of the story "The Two Measurements That Worked," and he renders it in the style of a myth. In so doing, he shows seamlessly how society becomes embedded even in that most basic and seemingly value-independent of scientific concepts: the measurement.Bowker describes the origins and peregrinations of Schlumberger, details the ways in which the science developed in the field was translated into a form that could be defended in a patent court, and analyzes the company's strategies within the broader context of industrial science.Inside Technology series
In this paper we investigate the intricacies of an admirable water pumping device - the Zimbabwe Bush Pump `B' type - so as to find out what makes it an `appropriate technology'. This turns out to be what we call the `fluidity' of the pump (of its boundaries, or of its working order, and of its maker). We find that in travelling to intractable places, an object that isn't too rigorously bounded, that doesn't impose itself but tries to serve, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive - in short, a fluid object - may well prove to be stronger than one which is firm. By analyzing the success and failure of this device, its agency and the way in which it shapes new configurations in the Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape, we partake in the current move in science and technology studies to transform what it means to be an actor. And by mobilizing the term love for articulating our relation to the Bush Pump, we try to contribute to shaping novel ways of `doing' normativity.
In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have changed in one way and how little in another. Scotland Yard is now incredibly scientific. The assumed ritual murder of ‘Adam’, the African boy whose torso was found in the Thames, has allowed a dazzling exhibition of what scientific method can now achieve. On the other hand police interpretations of the African occult still combine ignorance, scepticism and credulity.
This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over-accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra-economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non-productive economic activity and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation.
This paper aims to encourage an ethos of care in the study of science and technology. It starts with a reading of Bruno Latour's notion of'matters of concern' as favouring an awareness of the ethico-political effects of constructivist accounts in STS. Introducing attention to concern brings us closer to a notion of care. However, there is a'critical' edge to care that Latour's politics of things tends to disregard. Drawing upon feminist knowledge politics, I propose to treat matters of fact and sociotechnical assemblages as 'matters of care' and argue that engaging with care requires a speculative commitment to neglected things.
Blast at Mangalore SEZ: Korean, Two Others Killed
- Daily News
Daily News & Analysis. 2011, May 27. Blast at Mangalore SEZ: Korean, Two Others
Killed, Four Injured. http://www.dnaindia.com (Accessed 23 August 2014).
A Report of People's Audit of SEZ Karnataka
- Dhakal
- C N Shiva
Dhakal, Shiva C. n.d. A Report of People's Audit of SEZ Karnataka. Mumbai: Tata Institute
of Social Sciences.
Special Economic Zones: What Have We Learned? Economic Premise: Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network
- Thomas Farole
Farole, Thomas. 2011. Special Economic Zones: What Have We Learned? Economic
Premise: Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, 64:1-5. http://www.
worldbank.org/economicpremise (Accessed 23 August 2014).
Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments
- Casper B Jensen
- Atsuro Morita
Jensen, Casper B. & Atsuro Morita. 2016. Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments.
Ethnos. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2015.1107607.
A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged
- Monier Monier-Williams
Monier-Williams, Monier. 2008 (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and
Philologically Arranged. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
- Meyer Birgit