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The City Electric
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Description
Over the last twenty years of neoliberal reform, the power supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s metropolis, has become less reliable even as its importance has increased. Though mobile phones, televisions, and refrigerators have flooded the city, the electricity required to run these devices is still supplied by the socialist-era energy company Tanesco, which is characterized by increased fees, aging infrastructure, and a sluggish bureaucracy. While some residents contemplate off-grid solutions, others repair, extend, or tap into the state network with the assistance of freelance electricians or moonlighting utility employees. In The City Electric Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. Moving from the politics of generation contracts down to the street-level experience of blackouts and disconnection patrols, he reveals the logics of infrastructural modification and their effects on everyday life. As politicians, residents, electricians, and utility inspectors all redistribute flows of payment and power, they reframe the energy grid as both a technical system and an ongoing experiment in collective interdependence. Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. Michael Degani is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Ethnography of(f) the Grid 1
1. Emergency Power: A Brief History of the Tanzanian Energy Sector 31
2. The Flickering Torch: Power and Loss after Socialism 71
3. Of Meters and Modals: Patrolling the Grid 109
4. Becoming Infrastructure: Vishoka and Self-Realization 150
Conclusion. The Ingenuity of Infrastructure 187
Notes 207
Works Cited 223
Index
“The circuits that connect and convey, whether power or collective aspiration, stretch and bend in order to keep their shape, modified to a constantly volatile outside world and to how they are variously and not always judiciously used by rulers and ruled. In a wondrous ethnography of how Tanzanian power ecologies both conjoin and fracture, Michael Degani links the social, technical, and imaginary dimensions of infrastructure in unprecedented ways to understand what it means to exist as a socially productive nation.”
“Michael Degani’s use of the energy sector to study the fraught and shifting relationship between citizens, the state, and public utilities is both novel and ambitious in scope, as the power grid proves a fruitful site to analyze responses to the privatization of electricity at different scales. Employing rich ethnographic observation and astute theoretical analysis to understand the complexities of Tanzanian nation building, postsocialist transformation, and day-to-day efforts to sustain urban collective life, The City Electric is a tremendous accomplishment and contribution to ethnographies of infrastructure.”
Additional information
| Weight | 1 oz |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 1 × 6 × 9 in |