Material Culture
MUNI, FSS SANb 2032     Session 9,
(Infrastructure / Consumption )
In honour of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday (in 2011), the ‘Infrastructurist’ (blog) compiled its own
list of Dylan’s top ten songs about infrastructure.
He’s now 81 and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016.
Highway 61 is on that list, one of his most performed songs in concert.
https://511contracosta.org/bob-dylans-top-10-infrastructure-songs/

Bob Dylan [1941 --    ]
(81 y.o.)
Dylan in the Alley:
The Alan J. Weberman Story
Claudia Dreyfus 1971,
 Rolling Stone Magazine
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-in-the-alley-the-alan-j-weberman-story-1892
54/

Now rubbish -- or rather, its removal, storage, destruction, recycling, etc. – is a huge and often
ignored or tabooed infrastructural catalyst.


Berta, Peter (2019). Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among
Romanian Roma. Toronto: Univ. Press.
(Ana)  Chap 11

Anthropologist Fred Meyrs states: "Annette Weiner would have loved to see the politics of
inalienable possessions carried so directly into a class of objects that are undeniably made what
they are by human activity" (Myers in Berta 2019: xiii).
Meyrs could also have said that these silver tankers and like Kula armshels and necklaces.
In giving us a brief historical overview on Gabor Roma trading across Europe, the author explains:
   "What makes dealing with Gabor traders attractive is primarily their
    prices (which are usually lower than shop prices), the possibility of
    intense price bargaining, and, in the case of less mobile customers
    living in small settlements, the “home delivery” of commodities that are
    otherwise difficult to obtain" (Berta 2019:6).

He then goes on to show how several of his informants were rather
'middle-class' and several could even afford to hire servants, drivers, cooks etc, of both Roma and
non-Roma sectors of Romania society. In his words: "The above livelihood strategies make it
possible for many Gabor Roma families to achieve a living standard similar to or higher than the
average one of their non-Roma neighbours (ibid: 7).
Multi-sited research across Romania and Hungary (as well as Western Europe, mainly London, Paris),
including auction dealers and another group of Roma. And over a long term, from 1998 until now.
Intellectually inspired by groupness work in sociology (Brubaker). And
communities of practice.
Prestige consumption (often connected to secrecy and identity values).
Book goes against stereotypes of Roam as marginalised and poor.

Later in the book (Chap 11), draws on Appadurai's Social Life of Things (1986), especially looking
at significance of 'things in motion' and object fetishism.
     "Methodological fetishism is a research perspective that includes
      the recognition of and conscious concentration on the significance
      of things. According to Pels (1998, 94), “‘methodological fetishism’
      is a reversal of the commonly accepted hierarchy of facts and
      values in social and cultural theory, which says that things don’t
      talk back” (Berta 262).
This is thus a form of ‘animism’ or ‘agency’ where things can speak  back. And this, rather than
being purely negative, can be rather illuminating.

What are some other examples of infrastructures?
Source: Jiang Hongjing
Xinhua News Agency
Sichuan, China, Daxi Village roads

Lammer & Thiemann give us their typology.
Information (media), libraries, knowledge institutions. governance inst. security structures,
(internet as human right in Estonia). Containment (storage such as grain sylos), ‘embodiment of
standards’ (i,e, pasteurisation of milk).
People esp. their labour but also their organisational foci, interest groups.
Etc. etc

L&T start with 'road quality' for distribution of consumer goods (examples they refer to are:
telegraph, rail, hydro electric power, energy grids, and so on)
They speak of ANT
" As material networks they combine technological, organisational and social components and emerge
out of practices of infrastructuring that enlist multiple human and non-human actors" (nd: p2).
But they argue, awareness of infrastructures fades away, esp. when things are functioning well. So
VALUE (chains versus webs, or other analogies) becomes a viable substitute. It brings old debates
of production, consumption and exchange, into the equation, helping to maintain the relevance of
the complexities of interactions.
Value esp. connected to shared sensorial experience of FOOD.

They draw on David Graeber to create the niche for their collection. For Graeber (2001: xii), value
is:
  ‘the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger,
social totality––even if in many cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor’s
imagination.’
They ask what is the diff between individual and social imagination?
New developments, which this Special Issue claim to be, tries to outline some of the new trends
(infrastructure being one). One example is the 'econ market'. So finance / money as a place where
value obviously resides.
In a rather structural way, infrastucture can produce inclusion or exclusion.

Buchli, Victor & Gavin Lucas (2001). Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.
Vienna Judenplatz
Holocaust Memorial,
Rachael Whiteread, DBE
[1963 -    ]

Recap on Hitchhiking… as road culture phenomenon , linked to infrastructures, as well as many
anthropological themes such as: gift reciprocity,  trust, fear, danger.
Certainly features of human-technology interactions are present, as well as human-environment
concerns. And of course commensality and sharing of the ’burden’ of travel.
Total Social Fact (Mauss) but also, total social fiction since it is mediated through the news and
the realms of the arts & literature.
Auto-stop is present in both high-brow culture as well as vernacular street-art.
Connected to the neo-liberalisation of global travel  (increasingly cheap travel, with social
structures that discourage the ‘itinerancy’ of student or vagabond travellers)

 Material Culture
MUNI, FSS SANb 2032     Session 10,
(Repair and Up-cycling / Overheating and Waste )

Broken bicycles
Old busted chains
Rusted handle bars
Out in the rain
Somebody must
Have an orphanage for
These things that nobody
Wants any more
September's reminding July
It's time to be saying ... good-bye
Summer is gone
But our love will remain
Like old broken bicycles
Left out in the rain
Broken Bicycles
Don't tell my folks
There's all those playing cards
Pinned to the spokes
Laid down like skeletons
Out on the lawn
One wheel won't turn
While the other has gone
The seasons can turn
on a dime
Somehow I forget every time
These things you've given me
They always will stay
They're broken... but I'll never throw them away
Thomas Alan Waits [1949 -    ]
Broken Bicycles 1982
© Fifth Floor Music, Inc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2P4xo9kmPM



In addressing ‘Theft’, this film could relate anthropologically to Michael Herzfeld’s The Poetics
of Manhood (1985).
Princeton: Univ. Press.
Wrangham, R.W.; J.H. Jones; G.Laden; D.Pilbeam and
N.L.Conklin‐Britt. 1999. The Raw and the Stolen:
Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins.
Current Anthropology, 40(5): 567-94.
It also captures many elements that we
haven’t been able to cover explicitly in
the course.
Such as:
??

Ownership;
Insurance;
‘Repatriation’;
Etc…