Building Modernity

Building Modernity

Rosanna Dent

Please Note, this session will take place on Wednesday, 4 February, 2:00 - 4:00 pm, Room 204 ARB

This session explores infrastructures as a route of inquiry into relationships between science, technology, society, and the state in Latin America. The construction of Latin American modernity has unfolded through imperial interventions and elite projects,but it has also been embraced, contested and reworked by a wide range of actors. Rather than treating infrastructures as neutral or purely technical, the session foregrounds them as a set of socio-material fields where power, knowledge, race, citizenship, and nature are actively produced and contested. From colonial projects such as the Panama Canal, to the charismatic construction of Brasília, to a cybernetic control system for the Chilean economy or forensics databases in Mexico, we will explore infrastructures as a fraught route to establishing demonstrably “modern” states. Drawing on diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, the session shows how infrastructures are used to govern populations, reconfigure environments, and naturalise political projects, while also remaining incomplete, fragile, and subject to repair and ruination.

Key Issues:

Infrastructure; modernity; sociotechnical imaginaries; land, environment, displacement; repair and maintenance.

Assigned Reading:

Additional Reading:

  • Blanc, Jacob. Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil. Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Carse, Ashley, Christine Keiner, Pamela M. Henson, et al. “Panama Canal Forum: From the Conquest of Nature to the Construction of New Ecologies.” Environmental History 21, no. 2 (2016): 206–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emv165.
  • Hetherington, Kregg, and Jeremy M. Campbell (editors). Dossier on “Nature, Infrastructure, and the State in Latin America.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2014).
  • Folch, Christine. “Surveillance and State Violence in Stroessner’s Paraguay: Itaipú Hydroelectric Dam, Archive of Terror.” American Anthropologist 115, no. 1 (2013): 44–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01534.x.
  • Lasso, Marixa. Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal. Harvard University Press, 2019.
  • Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
  • López-Durán, Fabiola. Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity. University of Texas Press, 2018.
  • Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. MIT Press, 2011.
  • Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
  • Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.
  • Summerhill, W. 2006. “The Development of Infrastructure.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, edited by V. Bulmer-Thomas, 293–326. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Velho, Raquel, and Sebastián Ureta (editors). Thematic Cluster. “Frail Modernities: Latin American Infrastructures between Repair and Ruination.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2, no. 1 (2019): 428-559.

Reading Lists Online (LEGANTO)