Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures

Description

What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. Through ethnographic studies of bulbs, bicycles, dams, power grids and much more, the contributors shed light on practices that are often overlooked, showing how electricity is enacted in multiple ways. Electrifying Anthropology moves beyond the idea of electricity as an immovable force, and instead offers a set of potential trajectories for thinking about electricity and its effects in contemporary society. With new contributions on an emerging area of research, this timely collection will be of value to students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology studies, geography and engineering Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Current thinking – an introduction Introduction Situating electricity Articulations of electrification The structure and themes of the book Thinking through electricity Notes References Chapter 2: Electricity is not a noun Not a thing, stolen The same story, again differently Thinking with things, for better or worse Of containers and turns of phrase A case in point Being in time Unwieldy Notes References Chapter 3: Widened reason and deepened optimism: Electricity and morality in Durkheim’s anthropology and our own Automatic reactions Forces and feelings Collective powers The ideal of force A different constitution Reason and optimism Notes References Chapter 4: No current: Electricity and disconnection in rural India No current The electric village To whom the current flows The solar future Only disconnect References Chapter 5: What the e-bike tells us about the anthropology of energy Cycling routines Materiality Sensory stimuli Dependency Temporality Discussion Note References Chapter 6: At the edge of the network of power in Japan, c. 1910s–1960s Not so much of a bright life: Electricity comes home ‘Consumers cheat companies’: Electricity theft and misappropriation Culture of safety and energy governmentality Conclusion Notes References Chapter 7: Can the Mekong speak? On hydropower, models and ‘thing-power’ Alternating currents: Electricity and climate change in anthropology Stopping one flow to start another Knowing the Mekong The ‘thing-power’ of models How to minimize the thing-power of dams The curve of electricity Can the Mekong speak? Notes References Chapter 8: Electrification and the everyday spaces of state power in postcolonial Mozambique Electricity and the state Mozambique’s evolving energy provision system Electricity, contested territory and state power Statecraft and the practice and discourse of rural electrification Conclusion Notes References Chapter 9: Big grid: The computing beast that preceded big data Big grid was before big data Big grid is an instance of big data Conclusion Notes References Chapter 10: Touring the nuclear sublime: Power-plant tours as tools of government The technological sublime Sublime tourists and nuclear power The genealogy of openness Demonstrative safety and the controlled gaze The paradox of nuclear transparency Humanizing the industrial monster Managing human resources Conclusion Notes References Chapter 11: Afterword: Electricity as inspiration – towards indeterminate interventions References Index