Living along infrastructural lines

Author(s)

Quirin Rieder

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the value of Tim Ingold’s work on lines for anthropological studies of ‘infrastructure’. It focuses on Ingold’s notions of lines and corresponding materials. The chapter explains how approaching phenomena like electricity with Ingold’s writings might widen our understanding of life along infrastructure. Electricity infrastructure means not generating but organising and channelling energy. The production of hydro energy and its unequal distribution in Hunza shows impressively how infrastructure is enmeshed in social and material worlds. Taking Tim Ingold’s ideas into account enables the ethnographer to observe the “energetic entanglements” around infrastructural lines, instead of being preoccupied with single entities containing ‘agency’, direct materialised political connections, or spectacular symbolic constructions. Seeing infrastructure as a loose knot in the lines of continuously flowing materials, sometimes halting energies, everyday practices and feelings might help us to better understand how life is lived.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Pages

171-184

No. of pages

14

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162773-18

Publication date

2023

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504008 Ethnography

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Social Sciences

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/63ac8857-93dc-4e49-a9fd-1bb5f3c2d273