Infrastructural Anxieties

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2021-2024, this article explores how China’s state-led ‘Toilet Revolution’ campaign has generated a complex landscape of infrastructural anxieties as it intersects with the everyday lives and ontological worlds of villagers in Xuhao. These anxieties primarily emerge from the tensions between the spatial and material logics of modern sanitation and the traditional geomantic principles of fengshui that have long governed the organization of rural homes and lives. Rather than simply obstructing the Toilet Revolution, I argue that these anxieties play a productive and generative role in shaping its uneven unfolding. Villagers actively adapt, improvise, and stitch together hybrid solutions that braid together the old and the new, the cosmological and the hygienic. Furthermore, I contend that these infrastructural anxieties are deeply entangled with concerns about the ecological, social, and economic sustainability of village life in the face of rapid change. The Toilet Revolution, far from being a seamless grid of modern sanitation, emerges as a fragmentary, porous, and piecemeal patchwork that is continually reshaped by the affective currents of anxiety and improvisation. Ultimately, I argue for a reimagining of infrastructure not as a rigid hardware of pipes and grids, but as an affective software that is constantly being rewritten through the creative negotiations and adaptations of local communities. The Toilet Revolution thus serves as a prism through which to examine the complex lived experiences of rural transformation in contemporary China, and the ways in which villagers navigate the uneven seams of modernity and tradition in pursuit of viable futures. In this way, my article contributes to broader anthropological discussions on the affective and cosmological dimensions of infrastructure, and the role of anxiety in shaping the contours of social and material change.