Browse results
Abstract
The universalisation of access to electricity in Africa is widely seen as achievable through a form of technification, in which a regular supply of energy is guaranteed by an infrastructure that works quietly and reliably in the background. In most places, however, this promise has been fulfilled only for the wealthiest. This chapter looks at Nairobi to find out why this is the case and how exactly it is managed. It examines the everyday provision of electricity, focusing on two very different types of neighbourhoods within Nairobi’s fragmented electricity landscape. The first is in informal settlements, where local “cartels” connect cables to the national grid and run them to informal settlement residents in order to sell them electricity at a lower price than the public utility would. The second is in upmarket real estate projects, where developers set up their own licensed utilities to buy electricity in bulk from the national grid at a lower price and then sell it to their tenants at a higher price. Both the regulated and unregulated ways of getting electricity to end-users point to the importance of intermediaries, which is often overlooked in conventional studies. The chapter examines how the utility negotiates trade-offs with different types of intermediaries and considers the implications for local electricity supply.
Abstract
Biometric identification technologies have been heralded by development practitioners, state bureaucrats, the biometric industry, and technology enthusiasts alike as a means to increase accountability and transparency, while reducing discretion in bureaucratic encounters. However, the proliferation of biometric technologies in Ghana since the early 2010s, has increasingly rendered the exchange of credentials for the purpose of establishing unique identities invisible, retreating thus into the background of person-to-person, person-to-business, and state-citizen interactions. Drawing on the case of Ghana, the chapter presents contemporary innovations in identity registration and the ways in which these have altered the production of personhood. Explicit attention will be paid to the processes “making up” personhood in relation to datafied selves and the technologies co-producing them. It will be argued that the immersion of identification technologies into the lifeworld, as a moment of technicisation, is necessarily incomplete. This is because data frictions bring into focus the moment of classification, including the haunting of hegemonic categories. These frictions produce an oscillation between immersion and detachment from the lifeworld, which can provide a potential starting point for the critique of postcolonial data politics in Ghana.
Abstract
This chapter is about mobile phone chain texting as infrastructuring of protest around the inauguration of Niger’s first oil refinery in 2011. It examines the role of pre-existing technical, sociopolitical, and commercial contexts in Niger and how the mobile phone as a travelling technology was translated into these contexts. Particular attention is paid to three interrelated dimensions of this translation process: political mobilisation and new media, infrastructure and commerce, and politics from above and below. Within this framework, the chapter makes three arguments. First, it reveals a dialectical process between technologically mediated and direct face-to-face interaction. Second, it shows how the practice of chain texting has enabled new forms of resistance mobilisation among male youth, while at the same time providing established political actors with new means of mobilising, and leading crowds. Thirdly, it argues that not only breakdowns but also effective functionality can make a taken-for-granted infrastructure visible again.
Abstract
Files within the Ugandan police force, breathalysers used in their operations to prevent drunk driving, and the policy of budget support by Western donors negotiated with the Ugandan government, are considered as technologies of government in this chapter. The key question is whether and to what extent these technologies of government have been taken for granted and thus sunk into different lifeworlds. This question, the chapter argues, can be a key to unearthing sedimented forms of power that have been institutionalised as domination. Based on the authors’ fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2019, the chapter proposes to combine elements of political sociology with ideas from the philosophy of technology by Hans Blumenberg and from STS.
Abstract
When a technology proves successful, it becomes woven into the routines of lifeworlds, taken for granted, and its meaning is suspended. Often a successful technology begins to travel. Much of the suspended meaning remains at the point of departure because it is not fully inscribed in the technology, but resides in a technological archive. In order for a technology to become interesting for another context that does not have a similar archive, it must be re-inscribed with meanings found in this new archive. This is the process of translating travelling technology. Each translation transforms the technology to be appropriated by a local context and to contribute to a problem of planetary proportions. While the spread of technology leads to global technicisation, it also allows for the emergence of zones of decolonial translation. These zones are vulnerable, easily hijacked and abused. They must be constantly challenged, defended, recreated and fostered. To strengthen them, we must gain a much better understanding of how the translation of a travelling technology works as a creative adaptation. With this introductory essay, we suggest that future research needs to focus on how technicisation can be decoupled from the modernist quest for infinite progress and growth. We hope to stimulate debate and experimentation, and to encourage many more praxiographic studies on the subject
Abstract
This chapter problematises the nexus of marketisation and infrastructuring by focusing on the current deployment of PAYGo water dispensers throughout the Global South. PAYGo water dispensers are advertised as technical solutions for the infrastructural problem of water supply. By replacing the manual system of human water kiosk attendants, they promise efficiency, transparency, minimum wastage, and effective revenue collection. Drawing on fieldwork in Kenya and following Hans Blumenberg, we want to divide the question of infrastructuring into two sets of inquiry. First, does the machine, after its displacement and material reassembly, function properly and effectively? Second, has the suspension of meaning (Sinnverzicht) successfully survived translations into novel settings? We empirically investigate circumstances in which the “inside” and the “outside” of objects are not well matched (Akrich 1992). Highlighting moments of misunderstandings, disputes, and confusion, we argue that the assumed behavioural deficiency of a human kiosk attendant—who occasionally offers water for free—is replaced by standardised market rationality that is morally capable of denying water to a person dying of thirst. The technicisation of the lifeworld is dominated by the rule of impersonal rationality, calculability, and accountability. This form of marketised infrastructuring is however embedded within the moral underpinnings of humanitarianism and philanthrocapitalism. By developing description as an empirical approach, we demonstrate that the everyday infrastructuring of life via PAYGo dispensers is not about water provision, but it is about the marketisation of society.
Abstract
In this chapter, I draw on Hans Blumenberg’s notion of technicisation to discuss the expansion of mass HIV treatment programmes in Uganda. Specifically, I ask how Blumenberg’s notion of technicisation helps us to critically examine the acceleration of time in global health. In contrast to the increasing speed of global health interventions, which anthropologists have been criticising, the acceleration of time is experienced as a gap between time that can be measured and quantified (e.g., minutes, hours, or years) as opposed to lived experience of time (e.g., spending time as a form of caring for others). This gap is relentlessly amplified by the technicisation of work and the most common account of it is the shortage of time. This chapter suggests that Blumenberg’s intervention is useful for shifting the critique of speed towards an exploration of the acceleration of time in the expansion of global health. This shift recognises that speed in HIV treatment is crucial to save as many lives as possible. At the same time, as Blumenberg’s notion of technicisation suggests, we also need to explore how speed is achieved through indicators, standardisations, and technologies of measurement, which inevitably increase the gap between what I call project time and world time—analogous to Blumenberg’s notion of world time and lifetime. This gap can be construed as an erasure of insight. In this chapter, insight refers to a form of understanding in which knowing what global health is about cannot be separated from knowing how it is done. Insights, as my interlocutors aptly pointed out, require extra time, which is in short supply in the field of global health interventions. Consequently, we may ask to what extent global health is not only lacking money, resources, or knowledge but—crucially—extra time for producing insight.