Larkin’s review establishes infrastructure as a central object for anthropology by defining it as the material network through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people and finance are trafficked. The iconic idea is that infrastructure is simultaneously technical, political, biopolitical, aesthetic and sensorial. Its theoretical contribution lies in shifting attention from infrastructure as neutral support to infrastructure as a form that structures movement, temporality, vulnerability, aspiration and desire. Methodologically, the article surveys and organises anthropological literature across technopolitics, state formation, circulation, aesthetics and breakdown. Its conceptual operation is infrastructural thickening: roads, cables, ports and grids become dense social forms rather than inert background systems. The bridge to the wider field links anthropology with STS, urban studies, media theory, development studies and political ecology.
