Beyond Price at Aurora. Reflection on politics, infrastructure and money in ordinary life

Abstract

This article analyzes the act of paying from the anthropological perspective on infrastructure. More specifically, the argument relies on its conceptual tools that point out the ordinary, banal and invisible dimension in which infrastructures are revealed to people in their daily interactions. This reflexive exercise is enriched by an empirical case that this bureaucratic consumption itinerary, paying for something, is organized in a different way: a restaurant in which the meal does not have a fixed, pre-set or even suggested price. The Aurora proposes the “sem preço” (without price) as a practice of “co-responsibility and mutual support” based on the understanding that money has different values in our society for each person. The contrasting effect this experience engages allows us to deepen the understanding about our naturalized commitments to the logic of the functioning of infrastructures through the constant exchange between materiality and ideology in which we are always agents and subjects.