In this project, Christof Lammer and André Thiemann develop the new analytical lens of ‘infrastructures of value’ on old terrain: agriculture. Bringing together converging literatures on value and infrastructure has much to offer for economic anthropology. Exploring infrastructures connects otherwise partitioned visions of value that focused either on production, exchange, or consumption. Infrastructure not only undergirds valuation practices and enables valorisation as fixed capital. It also fills a major gap in David Graeber’s theory of value by directing attention to how actions become incorporated into larger, social wholes. Infrastructures – material networks emerging from practices of infrastructuring – mediate value by facilitating, or hindering, the circulation of objects, people and ideas. Various forms of infrastructure (transport, containment, science, law, information) and the dynamics of compatibility and friction between them shape value by creating uniqueness for some and genericness for others. Redirecting ethnographic attention to the material relationality of food’s value challenges binaries in economic thought and invigorates dialogue between new and historical materialism.

Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture
Special Issue of Ethnos – Journal of Anthropology

Introduction: Infrastructuring Value
by Christof Lammer & André Thiemann

Infrastructures of Farmland Valuation in Australia
by Sarah R. Sippel

Nature’s Value: Evidencing a Moldovan Terroir Through Scientific Infrastructures
by Daniela Ana

Peasant in a Bottle: Infrastructures of Containment for an Italian Wine Cooperative
by Oscar Krüger

Valuing Organics: Labels, People, and the Materiality of Information Infrastructure in China
by Christof Lammer

Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country
by André Thiemann

Infrastructuring Value Worlds: Connections and Conventions of Capitalist Accumulation
by Edward F. Fischer