Electrifying Anthropology

Simone Abram is Professor of Anthropology, Durham University, UK. She has an MEng in electrical engineering. Brit Ross Winthereik is Professor of Science and Technology Studies, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Thomas Yarrow is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Durham University, UK.

"This bracing collection gathers together scholars who expertly show, across a range of cases, the all-at-once literal and figurative making of today’s global flows, currents and circuits of forms that fuse the technical and political in ever-switching and potent ways. - Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USAThis bookdelivers what it promises. To anthropology and associated disciplines, it constitutes a break-through in terms of theorizing electricity by refusing to accept assumptions embedded in established, dominating sciences. To policy makers, planners, civil society and members of engineering communities, it is likely to become an intriguing eye opener in terms of what electricity actually is. - Tanja Winther, University of Oslo, Norway"

• List of figuresNotes on contributorsAcknowledgements1 Current thinking – an introduction Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik and Thomas Yarrow2 Electricity is not a noun Gretchen Bakke3 Widened reason and deepened optimism: Electricity and morality in Durkheim’s anthropology and our own Leo Coleman4 No current: Electricity and disconnection in rural India Jamie Cross5 What the e-bike tells us about the anthropology of energy Nathalie Ortar6 At the edge of the network of power in Japan, c. 1910s–1960s Hiroki Shin7 Can the Mekong speak? On hydropower, models and ‘thing-power’ Casper Bruun Jensen8 Electrification and the everyday spaces of state power in postcolonial Mozambique Joshua Kirshner and Marcus Power9 Big grid: Th e computing beast that preceded big data Canay Özden-Schilling10 Touring the nuclear sublime: Power-plant tours as tools of government Tristan Loloum11 Afterword: Electricity as inspiration – towards indeterminate interventions Sarah PinkIndex