Do anthropologists know they are not all that helpful in this definitional debate over "infrastructure"? Like the politicos arguing for a minimalist definition, anthros (for the most part) have relied on the same extensional strategy: what (now/former) public works are included?
This makes it difficult to see beyond the usual suspects: especially bridges, roads, pipes, dams, reaching out to privatized cables, power & communication grids, etc. The political opponents of Biden's infrastructure plan are also relying on this sense of what the term covers.
This is where the relational definition—of something acting in a supporting relation to something else—could be of more use. So instead of getting the inevitable pushback when you try to push past the common sense extension, aka, . . .
https://twitter.com/SenGillibrand/status/1379773312482607106?s=20
you lead w/ what needs support, then the underlying things/processes/labors that supports it. When the pundits keep dragging you back to their extensive dictionary definition, you reframe to the properties of the relation embedded in the canonical examples.
Gillibrand eventually got there:
https://twitter.com/SenGillibrand/status/1380148963664363521?s=20
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