Afterword: The Infrastructures of Difference

Abstract

How might we think about the fluidities of those who live in high variability environments when they butt up against state and disciplinary stabilities? This Afterword explores this question by distinguishing between infrastructures of stability and infrastructures of fluidity. The differences between these – which the paper calls the infrastructures of difference – are not simply conceptual, methodological and epistemological, but also deeply embedded in normative, metaphysical, institutional and material relations. This explains why they are so resilient, and why the infrastructures of stability so powerfully enact the bias against variability of pastoralists, Roma and indigenous groups. However, the Afterword also argues that in practice stabilities and fluidities are entangled, relational, and are never mutually exclusive. Instead they go together fractally, so that stabilities lie within fluidities, and fluidities within stabilities. Finally, the Afterword rehearses the political and intellectual implications of this by touching on the tactics used by those who champion fluidities in the face of powerful stabilities. The lesson here appears paradoxical, but it is not: to be fluid is (also) to include stability.