ABSTRACT

Infrastructure has always been a central part of development thinking because both concepts share a similar progressive temporality. Infrastructure is, of course, that part of an assemblage which fades into the background and which enables the foregrounding of other parts. But it is also, by extension, that which comes before something else, that which lays the conditions for the emergence of another order. The tense of infrastructure, like any development project, is therefore the future perfect, an anticipatory state around which different subjects gather their promises and aspirations. Yet any given infrastructural intervention does this differently, and the materiality of infrastructure enables the gathering of pasts and futures in novel ways. I argue here for an anthropology of development that pays more attention to the specific ways that infrastructures organize these progress narratives. And I do so in part because I recognize how often the ethnography of development falls into an evaluative mode and ends up uncritically reproducing the promissory time of infrastructure.1