(Under)valuing infrastructures: transformations and frictions in Serbia’s raspberry value chain since late socialism

Résumé

This article proposes to study agriculture by focusing on its infrastructures of value, i.e. the sociomaterial technologies and networks that are essential for the production of commodities but that often remain invisible. Pivoting around the ethnography of a meeting of an association of raspberry producers that was led by an agronomist, the article reconstructs how, since socialism, the once cooperative agronomic infrastructure underwent first (capitalist) deinstitutionalization and later (municipal) re-and deinstitutionalization, while most agronomic modules remained stable. Notably, this agronomic, legal-scientific infrastructure had coproduced its modules—trellising and pruning raspberries in mini-plantations—with local smallholders. The cycles of invisibilization were linked to infrastructural inversion—namely, as long as infrastructures work, their contributions to a value chain tend to be undervalued, while as problems increase, infrastructures become revalued again. In marked contrast to the agronomic infrastructure, the cold chain—an infrastructure of containment and transport including freezing, storage, transport and export—was profitably privatized and selectively upgraded. The invisibility dialectic of infrastructures of value thus describes both selective defunding and investment, which increases the frictions and compatibility issues between infrastructural modules. In Arilje, this led to the overexploitation of the agronomists as people-as-infrastructure that were expected to care without voice. Infrastructures of value thus help to explain political-economic transformations and mobilizations as the result of technoscientific innovations, social transformations, and market fluctuations.