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Anthropology
& Environment

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure…

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit and Risk

Earth systems continue their collapse and the shadow of recognition spreads that humans (northern capitalist moderns anyway) are to blame. Still, a weird optimism rings out, promising a sustainable way of doing more of the same—the same consuming, the same ways of moving, the same models of living in the world, the same impulse to growth and ballooning wealth. The optimism roots in the idea that capital can be dyed green rather than…

Verdant Optimism: On How Capitalism Will Never Save the World

The knowledge anthropology produces is remarkably heterogeneous in terms of topic, style and analysis. What differs less is that this knowledge is always in transit, composed of representations and analysis of anthropologists’ mobile experiences that are then set into circulation hopefully to be cited, linked, posted, mashed along unseen trajectories. But epistemic transit, one might note, does not seem so very distinctive to anthropology. Citationality and circulation are the currency of any number of intellectual professions…

Portable Analytics and Lateral Theory

Renewable energy projects are ethically laudable for their cleansing intentions, but they also produce effects upon other‐than‐human beings in their orbit. Taking the case of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which is home to the densest concentration of on‐shore wind parks anywhere in the world, and following Foucault's reading of the speech form ‘parrhesia’, this essay argues that the bodies of affected nonhuman beings, particularly those whose existence is actively balanced against a ‘greater good’ for humanity…

Greater Goods: An Ethics of Energy & Other-than-human Speech

Energy creates both possibilities and liabilities. Plentiful, inexpensive energy has long been a cornerstone of modernist dreams of never-ending expansion. While this may be a fantasy, the truth—at least according to overwhelming scientific evidence—is that our use of fossil fuels has led to distressing global consequences. In May 2013, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the average daily level of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had exceeded 400 parts per million…

Latin America in the Anthropocene

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