| Beschreibung: |
Exploring infrastructure has much to offer for economic anthropology, and in particular for studying value. Inspired by the convergence of literatures on value and infrastructure in studies of financialization, we aim at developing the new analytical lens of ‘infrastructures of value’. Historically, scholars have often discussed value with examples from agriculture, probably because of the multi-faceted materiality of food and its close connection to the environment (nature), needs (survival), desires (taste), and the pleasures of sharing and commensality. On this old terrain of food and farming, this panel develops infrastructure as a new lens for exploring value beyond the genericness of finance. Infrastructure not only facilitates valuation practices and enables valorization as fixed capital. Material networks emerging from practices of infrastructuring mediate value by facilitating, channeling, or hindering, the circulation—movement and metamorphoses—of objects, people and ideas. Shifting attention from the social life of circulating things to undergirding infrastructure can fill a major gap in David Graeber’s theory of value: it directs attention to how actions become incorporated into larger wholes. Various infrastructures (such as processing, transportation, containment, information, law and science) transform matter, connect producers and consumers, separate contents, and communicate evidence of singularized and standardized qualities of food and land. Striving for analytical symmetry in agri-food studies, the papers explore the infrastructures that undergird what is often treated as separate: ‘conventional’ food systems and ‘alternative’ food networks, standardized ‘mass’ products and unique ‘specialty’ foods and drinks. The ethnographic insights from Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe collected in this panel explore these dynamics as well as friction and compatibility issues that shape value of land, soil and yeasts, wine, rice, vegetables, berries and fufu. Taken together, ethnographic explorations of the material relationality of value promise to invigorate dialogue between new and historical materialism and challenge persistent binaries in economic thought. |