Electrifying Anthropology

Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures

Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik, Thomas Yarrow, Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik, Thomas Yarrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

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.

1
Current thinking – an introduction

Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik and Thomas Yarrow

Introduction

Since the nineteenth century, electricity and its various infrastructures have proliferated to the point where they now reach into every aspect of contemporary life. Whereas the first industrial revolution was helped along first and foremost by the steam engine, electricity was centrally implicated in the second (the rise of Fordist modes of production in the early twentieth century), and it is now inextricable from far-reaching and profoundly transformative socio-technical transformations. After a third industrial revolution associated with automation, ‘Industry 4.0’ is now being promoted strongly by European governments and industrial manufacturers, to connect producers and consumers through real-time digital networks (Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2014; EEF 2016). At the same time, counter-pressures to limit anthropogenic climate change caused by burning fossil fuels imply decarbonizing the energy system and, not least, decarbonizing electricity grids and transport systems. These pressures problematize the workings of electricity grids and the need to balance supply and demand, adapt to intermittent and distributed supplies, rethink electricity storage and work out how all this is to be financed in distributed, competitive and international markets. All of this raises doubts about the future of existing mass-generation infrastructures and demonstrates that any transition to more sustainable living is neither linear nor purely technical.

Changes in infrastructure have significant effects on the everyday lives of people living in industrial societies as well as those who do not. Electrification of transport and heating, for example, may generate forms of electricity dependence that would have been unimaginable just a short time ago. In short, the majority of people in Europe and America, at least, live in what we might term an ‘electromagnetic field’ to which they have become thoroughly habituated and whose scope is growing.

While it is pervasive – though by no means universally available or accessible – electricity nonetheless has qualities that make it recede from view: it participates in daily routines familiar to the point they are taken for granted (Pink 2011); it is channelled by infrastructures designed to conceal their workings; and it is known through expert technical vocabularies with which few non-specialists are conversant, as well as through poetry and popular language. For scholars of the social sciences, the internalization of electrical metaphors to the imagination of ‘the social’ is not new, yet it produces its own lacunae (Coleman, this volume). Electrifying Anthropology aims to render electricity visible and interesting – a matter of concern to social sciences and the humanities. It seeks to pursue this aim by rendering electricity socially and materially lively and by placing electricity firmly amid everyday practices and politics. Electrifying Anthropology thus explores how electricity is not merely a resource for social life but also part and parcel of infrastructures in which people live. Taking inspiration from the growing field of infrastructure studies, we adopt a broad approach to infrastructures; the book points to electricity and electric infrastructures as phenomena increasingly embedded in the ordering systems, including the ontologies, by which we live.

Electrifying Anthropology demonstrates how ethnographic approaches to electricity may illuminate and transform an already spectacular scene of research on energy, infrastructures, identity, history, language, communication and more. Analytically, we seek a subaltern approach to electricity production and use, which includes relativizing forms of authority and expertise that consider electricity as first and foremost a technical issue. Our discussion of electricity, as will be clear, is produced by the simultaneous ethnographic specificity and analytical variation presented. Framed by the deceptively simple question of what electricity actually is, we trace the multiplicity of practices by which it is produced, consumed, (re)-invented and transformed.

Situating electricity

Central to our approach is the proposition that electricity-in-practice is not a singular kind of thing, but a very varied phenomenon. The book collects chapters that explore electricity as tied into social and material infrastructure that can sometimes be sites of controversy. Studying electricity in a comparative way means paying attention to the language, metaphors, classification systems and devices used to deal with it in our daily lives as well as in engineering and policy work. It also means that readers who consider themselves to be ‘technical experts’ or ‘social experts’ must adopt an agnostic perspective on what electricity is, where it can be found or how it can be researched.

The approach taken in the chapters departs in key respects from the two broad approaches taken in the past. Engineers, on the one hand, have sought to define how electricity can be used, in terms that have mostly isolated technical and infrastructural considerations from the ‘social contexts’ of various users, as well as from their own epistemic practices (Marvin, Chappells and Guy 1999; Rial and Danezis 2011). Social scientists, in contrast, have tended to focus on ‘social context’ specifically in relation to practices of consumption, in terms that do little to describe how electricity materializes in technical and infrastructural terms (Shove and Walker 2014; Miller, Iles and Jones 2013). Here, in contrast, we are inspired by a small body of existing work that seeks to describe and analyse electricity-in-practice with attention to infrastructural, epistemic, political and material elements (Winther 2010, 2012; Rupp 2016; Wallenborn and Wilhite 2014; Anusas and Ingold 2015; Boyer 2015; Schick and Winthereik 2013) to add renewed impetus to efforts to move beyond binary framings of electricity as a variously ‘social’ or ‘technical’ entity. Such work has been inspired by social studies of science and technology and by the anthropological approaches intrinsic to the debates around actor–network theory (Law 1986; Law and Mol 2002; Jensen 2010; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Yarrow et al. 2015).

Contributors to the volume come from a range of conceptual and disciplinary traditions, including anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), geography and history, but are unified by the collective aim to better understand how electricity is formed and what it forms. Rather than treat this as a stable or singular object, we demonstrate how electricity implicates people in diverse forms of subjectification and objectification that reflect and reconfigure the lives of those involved, including through concerns with identity, emotion, ideology, language, ethics and knowledge.

Our efforts to understand how electricity is activated through specific articulations of concepts, practices, meanings, materials and infrastructure build on various conceptual approaches, as we demonstrate how electricity is involved in understandings, practices and concerns as diverse as life itself. Our borrowings are deliberately and unapologetically broad and do not, in the final analysis, resolve across chapters. Borrowing from some classic literatures, including on religion (Durkheim 1968), totemism (Lévi-Strauss 1962) and kinship, helps resituate classic concepts and insights.

Electricity’s manifestations are so diverse and abundant that we inevitably have to deal with a broad range of conceptual approaches, but our efforts towards a more syncretic understanding have developed through close dialogue with one another and with a number of literatures. Broadly inspired by post-human thinkers (Hayles 1999; Pickering 1992), we pay close empirical attention to the various ways in which the ‘social’ and ‘technical’ elements of electricity are inter-defined, imbricated and distinguished. Electricity, which is not strictly a source of energy, but rather a medium of energy transmission, can bring about material and social changes in contexts as diverse as nervous systems or modes of organizing societies. Without thinking about electricity as and in materials, we fail to see how ‘it’ shapes ontologies and is shaped by them in return (Bille and Sørensen 2007).¹ In rejecting binary distinctions between the social and the material, we also have to think about the relationship between electricity’s material properties and its manifestations in social and political worlds.

Extending recent interdisciplinary work on infrastructure (Furlong 2010; Chalfin 2016; Harvey et al. 2016), we highlight how electricity divides and connects through the material circumstances and technical arrangements that enable certain modes of stabilization and commodification. This focus brings to light a number of practices that have received limited attention and, by the same token, extends the conceptual repertoire of existing work: electrical infrastructures matter in specific ways as responses to the evanescent qualities of electricity itself.

What this volume seeks to add to the existing literature is a number of ethnographic studies and descriptions of electricity. From the case descriptions of how electricity is multiply enacted, the contributors offer vocabularies and concepts that can energize our scholarly and conceptual thinking around electrification of social life and infrastructures and raise a series of questions: How can the host of new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right, acknowledging that electricity is not one thing and not even ‘a thing’ (Bakke, this volume)? Through attending to electricity practices in many different places, the chapters all offer alternative vocabularies to engineering language. The question is whether, taken as a whole, they also provide the contours of a new grammar for analysing electricity.

All of the analyses walk a fine line between seeking not to lose the knowledge that science has already gathered and staying true to all the things we do not know much about, such as electricity’s political agency and the richness of action at the edges of electricity networks. A real strength of the contributions is that they manage to steer clear of a division between a ‘real’, scientific version of electricity on the one hand and a socially and culturally constructed version on the other. Instead they are seen as intertwined. If, as Kirshner and Power claim (in this volume), ‘energy infrastructure materializes state power and authority’, then once again our attention to the materialities of electricity and its equipment remains crucial, but how to attend to it remains problematic. As they argue, Ferguson alerted us many years ago to the reliance of ‘anti-politics machines’ on the presentation of political projects as technical procedures (1990, see also Abram 2005), and our drive is patently not to reduce complex socio-technical worlds to apolitical technological problems. Focusing on material things may carry related risks, however. Jensen (this volume) points to Jane Bennett’s focus on the many and diverse actual material things that make up something as complex as the infrastructure of an electrical grid and her arguments that these must be understood as heterogeneous networks of objects. But as Jensen argues, Bennett’s approach ignores the observation that ‘things and people are all internally heterogeneous, since all are shaped by emergent relations, entanglements and arrangements’. Instead, Jensen suggests taking as a departure point Isabelle Stengers’ (1999) refusal to purify the force of things or the actions of people.

Articulations of electrification

We now outline some of the developments – recent and less so – that have made electricity matter in new and pressing ways. Before electricity became a consumer good, experimentation with electricity had taken place for centuries. It was in the nineteenth century that engineers reached the basic theoretical understanding of electricity that we continue to use today and, around that time, expertise on electricity began to solidify. Ever since then, electrical applications have continued to develop, and electrical installations have grown and transformed. In much of the so-called developed world (although with notable exceptions), several decades of increasingly large-scale power-generation installations removed electricity generation from the domestic and communal domains towards a national or international scope. Increasingly large coal-fired power stations with huge cooling towers were built onto transmission networks, massive nuclear power stations loomed large on some coastal horizons and electricity pylons drew patterns on the landscape, holding electricity generation at a distance high above and beyond the everyday and very far from its domestic consumers.

Recent attempts to include more renewable-energy sources in electricity grids, fuelled, among other things, by green societal transitions, have helped to bring electricity down to a human scale and highlight the parallel histories of domestic and community-scale generation. Pioneers of alternative electricity systems showed how to build DIY solar heating and electrical mini-grids,² enabling enthusiastic independent householders to adapt their own dwellings. Since then, manufactured household technologies like solar panels or heat pumps have caught up and have dropped in price, enabling non-experts to install their own generation equipment at home, in small businesses or community groups. Wind turbines, solar panels, heat pumps, incinerators that turn waste into electricity, battery packs and electric vehicles are some of the electric technologies that facilitate everyday interaction with electricity generation and help make electricity a matter of increased public concern. These developments put questions about electricity grids centre stage in our ethnographic approach.

Electricity demands a unique kind of infrastructure: of networks, links and grids at contrasting scales and dimensions (from circuit boards to international power cables), requiring harmonization, surveillance, maintenance and management between states, geographical regions and commercial and public institutions and between citizens and economies of all kinds. Electricity can be bought, sold, stolen and generated, captured and transformed (Golden and Min 2012; Min and Golden 2014). It is generated, distributed and used locally and across global connections that are physical, virtual, economic and political and often ambivalent (Arora 2009). A growing body of ethnographic readings has helped contextualize these ambivalences and confront technical and political assumptions about ‘consumers’, ‘customers’, ‘prosumers’, ‘users’, or ‘providers’ (Jakobson 2007; Wilhite 2008, 2012; Rupp 2016; Ulsrud et al. 2015). Such work reveals how electricity is not a single stable technical object in need of added social context. Rather, electricity is located and produced through bodies, materials, concepts and technologies and is propelled by various logics, as Cross (this v...