Description
Book SynopsisMichael 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.
Trade Review"As
The City Electric so expertly shows, infrastructure then becomes a way to explore the moral economy of provisioning, from the headline grabbing corruption scandals over multi-million dollar contracts to everyday negotiations where people decide by what means, and to what extent, they will bend the rules to gain access to the electricity grid. In Degani’s hands, the channel where electricity sometimes passes and sometimes doesn’t, is an incredibly rich site for analysing movements of power more generally." -- Emily Brownell * Journal of Development Studies *
"Degani’s
The City Electric is useful not only to energy anthropologists but also to the larger STS community. It is an outcome of meticulous research and uses persuasive English to convey its substance." -- Frank Edward * Technology and Culture *
"Degani’s work combines both archival and ethnographic analyses into a coherent and engaging narrative helping us to gain unique perspectives on the everyday life of neoliberalism and the post-socialist state in Tanzania. The book will be of great interest and utility to scholars interested in the critical analyses of contemporary infrastructures and for those interested in the politics of neoliberalism in the Global South more generally."
-- Viswanathan Venkataraman * H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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 247
