Today the radar looks closer to home. Not in order to narrow its scope, but to take seriously the local as a place where some of the great contemporary questions condense. Social and cultural anthropology produced in Spain makes it possible to read the present without separating economy, technology, territory and everyday life.

Today’s thread runs from gas infrastructures to strawberries, riders, working-class neighbourhoods, support networks and commons. A Spanish, situated and very material way of thinking about what we sometimes call modernisation, platform or innovation.

Susana Narotzky and the moral economies of infrastructure

Direct link — Gas infrastructure in dispute, Dialnet

Susana Narotzky offers the most solid framework for opening this entry. Her work on gas infrastructure, moral economies and the production of space in the Ría de Ferrol makes it possible to think of infrastructures as social and moral conflicts. They are not only pipelines, plants, logistics chains or natural resources. They are ways of ordering territory, distributing harm, producing value and disputing whose lives count.

The article starts from the case of a liquefied natural gas regasification plant in Galicia and shows how one and the same space can be valued in opposing ways. For some, strategic infrastructure. For others, threat, violence or loss. There, moral economy appears not as ethical ornament, but as a field of dispute over what should have value, who decides and who benefits.

Extractivism, water and labour in southern Spain

Direct link — Extractivism as Predatory Accumulation, ResearchGate

Narotzky’s recent line of work with Natalia Buier on extractivism, water, labour and strawberry production in southern Spain extends that same question. Accumulation does not occur only in corporate balance sheets. It also occurs in stressed aquifers, in working bodies, in agricultural territories and in forms of social reproduction that fall outside economic calculation.

Read from AIthropology Lab, this point is key. Technologies and infrastructures never arrive on their own. They arrive upon prior relations of power, upon exhaustible resources and upon forms of labour that often remain hidden behind apparently clean words such as efficiency, innovation or growth.

The Big Mac as ethnographic object

Direct link — Entangled objects and Big Macs, UNED scientific portal

From there, the entry on home food delivery becomes clearer. The work of Diego Allen-Perkins, Carlos Diz and Montserrat Cañedo follows a Big Mac through the city and shows that the platform economy cannot be explained from the algorithm alone.

The food, the app, the rider, the street, the restaurant, the wait and the phone form an urban assemblage. Technology appears less as an abstract cloud than as a material practice, made of journeys, tiredness, split shifts and small decisions. The rider is not a mere executor of the system. They mediate between algorithm and city, adapting to obstacles, failures and the unforeseen.

Pizarrales and the ethnography that lets itself be guided

Direct link — Letting oneself be (dis)oriented, Dialnet

The fourth signal takes us to Pizarrales, a working-class neighbourhood in Salamanca. The work of Elízabeth Manjarrés, Lourdes Moro and Margarita Savchenkova on collaborative, on-demand ethnography turns disorientation into a research tool.

The researchers do not arrive to confirm a closed plan, but to let themselves be affected by a neighbourhood demand, by an unfamiliar territory and by the concrete relations that make the field possible. Anthropology appears here as a practice of listening, hospitality and the redistribution of interpretive authority. It is not only about studying a neighbourhood, but about learning to research with those who inhabit it.

Networks before the graph

Direct link — Liber amicorum for Professor José Luis Molina, Dialnet

It is also worth recovering a Spanish genealogy of networks. The tribute to José Luis Molina recalls the importance of social network analysis in Ibero-American anthropology, long before every social bond was translated into the language of graphs, platforms or digital analytics.

Migration, the informal economy, mutual aid and digital labour were already there as anthropological problems before the technological vocabulary made them seem new. This memory matters because it allows us to look at contemporary networks without confusing the visualisation tool with the social relation that sustains life.

Commons and slow social technologies

Direct link — Commons and transhumant shepherds, Dialnet

The radar closes with the commons and transhumance in the mountains of north-eastern Andalusia. The review of Comunales shows that collective governance and pastoral ways of life are not picturesque remnants of the past, but complex forms of ecological knowledge, climate adaptation and material subsistence.

In a present obsessed with technical innovation, the commons remind us that there are also slow, embodied, territorial social technologies. Not all decisive infrastructures take the form of a server, a pipeline or an app. Some are agreements, routes, forms of care, memories and shared uses of territory.

Closing

Read together, these entries sketch a Spanish anthropology that is especially useful for AIthropology Lab. Against the temptation to talk about AI, platforms or infrastructures as if they were autonomous systems, this research forces us to come down to the ground.

There appear working bodies, neighbourhoods that remember, networks that sustain, pastures that are governed collectively and territories that dispute the meaning of modernisation.

The key of the day might be put like this: no technology arrives on its own. Every technology lands upon moral economies, local histories, prior inequalities and concrete ways of living together.

Sources

  • Moral economy and infrastructures — Susana Narotzky, “La infraestructura gasista en disputa: economías morales y producción del espacio en la Ría de Ferrol”.
  • Agrarian extractivism — Susana Narotzky and Natalia Buier, “Extractivism as Predatory Accumulation. On Water, Labor, and Accumulation in Strawberry Production in Southern Spain”.
  • Platforms and riders — Diego Allen-Perkins Avendaño, Carlos Diz and Montserrat Cañedo Rodríguez, “Objetos enredados y Big Mac’s: Movilidad y contingencia en el reparto de comida a domicilio”.
  • Collaborative ethnography — Elízabeth Manjarrés Ramos, Lourdes Moro Gutiérrez and Margarita Savchenkova, “Dejarse (des)orientar: Experiencias en una etnografía colaborativa y por demanda”.
  • Networks — Deniza Alieva, “Liber amicorum del profesor José Luis Molina”.
  • Commons — Olga Mancha Cáceres, review of Comunales. El caso de los pastores trashumantes de las sierras de Andalucía nororiental.