Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology

Abstract

This article maps out a nascent field that is currently taking shape, one that bridges anthropological considerations of infrastructure, political ecology, and science and technology studies with transdisciplinary approaches to ethics of care beyond the human. This emerging field stimulates a re-thinking of the relationships between the built and the non-built environment and encourages exploring infrastructure as indexes by which to grasp, ethnographically and methodologically, the Anthropocene. In this article, I outline and review this field, paying particular attention to the multiple legacies that inform current anthropological research on the relations between infrastructure and the environment. In doing so I mobilize environing infrastructure as a guiding framework of analysis – a notion I borrow from recent scholarship in environmental history and that helps appreciating infrastructure as historically specific multi-species formations.