Introduction: Infrastructuring Value

Abstract

Exploring infrastructure has much to offer for economic anthropology. Inspired by the convergence of literatures on value and infrastructure in studies of financialisation, we develop the analytics of ‘infrastructures of value’ on old terrain: agriculture. Infrastructure facilitates valuation practices and enables valorisation as fixed capital. Material networks emerging from practices of infrastructuring also mediate value by facilitating, channelling, or hindering the circulation–movement and metamorphoses–of objects, people and ideas. Shifting attention from the social life of things to the infrastructure undergirding their circulation fills a major gap in David Graeber’s theory of value: it directs attention to how actions become incorporated into larger wholes. Various infrastructures and the frictions between them shape value by connecting producers and consumers, separating contents, and communicating evidence of qualities of food. Ethnographic attention to this material relationality of value invigorates dialogue between new and historical materialism and challenges binaries in economic thought.