Mike Degani | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Books by Mike Degani
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Mike Degani
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024
This article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who co... more This article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who congregate across the street from a power utility office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on a rich tradition of urban Africanist ethnography, as well as the work of Roy Wagner and Lars Spuybroek, it argues that their long-running streetcorner bureau is a "turn" that brings together the logics of entrepreneurial accumulation and bureaucratic legitimacy into generative counterpoint. Performed well, the effect of this turn is a kind of grace, characterized by increase and bounty, but also social recognition and dignity. Performed poorly, it is received as a parody of the logics it aims to transfigure. The "taking of turns," in all of its contrapuntal difficulty, characterizes much of the social drama that unfolds daily.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CUSAS Magazine, 2024
https://www.cusas.socanth.cam.ac.uk/michael-degani-dwelling-in-the-climate-emergency/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Critical Times: Interventions in Global Theory, 2022
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the ... more This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the national disposition to endure suffering that it seemed to make evident. It shows that in asking citizens to suffer the near-total breakdown of the power supply in good faith, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Party of the Revolution), drew on a cultural-political orientation developed during the socialist era and sustained through a long period of partial neoliberal reform. While some Tanzanians saw this suffering in good faith as an expression of docility and credulity, the essay suggests that it also speaks to the moral power of socialism's underlying vision of collective interdependence, and might be read as a utopian insistence on that vision in an era of growing oligarchy and inequality.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a telev... more This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Signs and Society, 2021
Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the vi... more Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2020
Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high... more Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high compression strength, buoyancy and thermal insulation. Perhaps most strikingly, its lack of sand aggregate makes it energy efficient compared to concrete. While aircrete is regularly sold by various construction companies, DIY enthusiasts and technicians around the world are cultivating more home-brew, open-source methods. This article follows James, an American ex-security contractor and mining engineer, as he attempts to convert his own embodied legacies of imperial extraction into a pro-social business venture by designing aircrete machines and mixes for urban Africa. His adventures in aircrete typify an energy future in which an array of intriguing experiments and technologies intersect with a broader entrepreneurial effort to capture Africa's growing consumer markets.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2020
The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Afric... more The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Africa’s internal energy frontiers for understanding a global energy realignment marked by experiments in renewable technologies as well as revanchist investments in fossil fuels. It then discusses capture as a concept rooted in both Marxist informed accounts of global energy regimes as well as the political histories and practices of African populations. Finally, it discusses the articles as spanning three economies of capture along Africa’s energy frontier: resurgent extractivism, post-carbon development and consumer renewables.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
The August 2018 issue of Cultural Anthropology included the research article “Shock Humor: Zanine... more The August 2018 issue of Cultural Anthropology included the research article “Shock Humor: Zaniness and the Freedom of Permanent Improvisation in Urban Tanzania,” by Michael Degani, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that contributing editor Scott Ross conducted with Degani about his article’s arguments and their relationship to his broader research agenda.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Afrique Contemporaine, 2017
This article analyzes the ideological role of race in Tanzania's power sector by tracking the deb... more This article analyzes the ideological role of race in Tanzania's power sector by tracking the debates over two privately-owned thermal power companies, Independent Power Tanzania Limited [IPTL]/Pan African Power [PAP] and Richmond Development Corporation. Originally contracted as "emergency power" providers, both companies have become a long-term part of Tanzania's electricity generation mix. Both have also been sites of spectacular rent-seeking collaborations between Asian financiers and African politicians, much to the dismay of Euro-American donors. The ensuing scandals and political rhetoric highlight how postsocialist liberalization revitalized debates over race, creating complex new lines of sociopolitical recrimination, and ambiguous mixtures of official and de facto privatization.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Afrique Contemporaine, 2017
Cet article analyse l'importance idéologique de la notion de « race » dans le secteur de l'électr... more Cet article analyse l'importance idéologique de la notion de « race » dans le secteur de l'électricité en Tanzanie, en suivant les débats autour de deux exploitants de centrales thermiques privés, Independent Power Tanzania Limited (IPTL)/Pan African Power (PAP) et Richmond Development Corporation. Engagées à l'origine dans le cadre de contrats de fourniture « d'énergie de secours », les deux sociétés sont devenues des prestataires de longue durée pour la production d'électricité en Tanzanie. Toutes deux ont égale-ment été le théâtre de collaborations entre financeurs asiatiques et hommes politiques africains, cherchant à réaliser d'énormes profits, au grand désarroi des donateurs euro-américains. Les scandales et la rhétorique politique qui en ont résulté soulignent la façon dont la libéralisation postsocialiste a revitalisé les débats sur la race, créant de nouvelles lignes complexes de récriminations sociopolitiques et un mélange ambigu de privatisations officielles et de facto.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a telev... more This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Limn Issue 10: Chokepoints, 2018
In any delivery system, the final leg is often the hardest. Michael Degani takes to the streets o... more In any delivery system, the final leg is often the hardest. Michael Degani takes to the streets of Dar es Salaam to explore the “last-mile problem” of Tanzania’s energy grid.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
"Our Electric Air." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CityScapes Magazine
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
American Ethnologist, 2017
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power-utility workers tolerate some unof... more In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power-utility workers tolerate some unofficial forms of modifiying the electrical network, such as unsanctioned reconnections and extensions. These practices, which can also involve theft, bribery, and other illegal activities, both undermine and sustain an increasingly expensive public infrastructure that is in disrepair and subject to routine bureaucratic neglect. But such modifications also have their tacit limits, and people judge as foolish those who have exceeded them. The limits reveal a modal reasoning at work in the relationship among technical systems, urban ethics, and informal economic arrangements. In each of these domains, people use modal reasoning to simultaneously alter and preserve an emergent future. Such reasoning illustrates how infrastructures constitute wholes that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their constituent parts. [infrastructure, electricity, modality, reasoning, urbanism, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania]
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by Mike Degani
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of African History, 2023
Book review of African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development By Joshua Grace.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024
This article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who co... more This article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who congregate across the street from a power utility office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on a rich tradition of urban Africanist ethnography, as well as the work of Roy Wagner and Lars Spuybroek, it argues that their long-running streetcorner bureau is a "turn" that brings together the logics of entrepreneurial accumulation and bureaucratic legitimacy into generative counterpoint. Performed well, the effect of this turn is a kind of grace, characterized by increase and bounty, but also social recognition and dignity. Performed poorly, it is received as a parody of the logics it aims to transfigure. The "taking of turns," in all of its contrapuntal difficulty, characterizes much of the social drama that unfolds daily.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CUSAS Magazine, 2024
https://www.cusas.socanth.cam.ac.uk/michael-degani-dwelling-in-the-climate-emergency/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Critical Times: Interventions in Global Theory, 2022
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the ... more This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the national disposition to endure suffering that it seemed to make evident. It shows that in asking citizens to suffer the near-total breakdown of the power supply in good faith, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Party of the Revolution), drew on a cultural-political orientation developed during the socialist era and sustained through a long period of partial neoliberal reform. While some Tanzanians saw this suffering in good faith as an expression of docility and credulity, the essay suggests that it also speaks to the moral power of socialism's underlying vision of collective interdependence, and might be read as a utopian insistence on that vision in an era of growing oligarchy and inequality.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a telev... more This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Signs and Society, 2021
Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the vi... more Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2020
Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high... more Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high compression strength, buoyancy and thermal insulation. Perhaps most strikingly, its lack of sand aggregate makes it energy efficient compared to concrete. While aircrete is regularly sold by various construction companies, DIY enthusiasts and technicians around the world are cultivating more home-brew, open-source methods. This article follows James, an American ex-security contractor and mining engineer, as he attempts to convert his own embodied legacies of imperial extraction into a pro-social business venture by designing aircrete machines and mixes for urban Africa. His adventures in aircrete typify an energy future in which an array of intriguing experiments and technologies intersect with a broader entrepreneurial effort to capture Africa's growing consumer markets.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2020
The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Afric... more The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Africa’s internal energy frontiers for understanding a global energy realignment marked by experiments in renewable technologies as well as revanchist investments in fossil fuels. It then discusses capture as a concept rooted in both Marxist informed accounts of global energy regimes as well as the political histories and practices of African populations. Finally, it discusses the articles as spanning three economies of capture along Africa’s energy frontier: resurgent extractivism, post-carbon development and consumer renewables.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
The August 2018 issue of Cultural Anthropology included the research article “Shock Humor: Zanine... more The August 2018 issue of Cultural Anthropology included the research article “Shock Humor: Zaniness and the Freedom of Permanent Improvisation in Urban Tanzania,” by Michael Degani, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that contributing editor Scott Ross conducted with Degani about his article’s arguments and their relationship to his broader research agenda.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Afrique Contemporaine, 2017
This article analyzes the ideological role of race in Tanzania's power sector by tracking the deb... more This article analyzes the ideological role of race in Tanzania's power sector by tracking the debates over two privately-owned thermal power companies, Independent Power Tanzania Limited [IPTL]/Pan African Power [PAP] and Richmond Development Corporation. Originally contracted as "emergency power" providers, both companies have become a long-term part of Tanzania's electricity generation mix. Both have also been sites of spectacular rent-seeking collaborations between Asian financiers and African politicians, much to the dismay of Euro-American donors. The ensuing scandals and political rhetoric highlight how postsocialist liberalization revitalized debates over race, creating complex new lines of sociopolitical recrimination, and ambiguous mixtures of official and de facto privatization.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Afrique Contemporaine, 2017
Cet article analyse l'importance idéologique de la notion de « race » dans le secteur de l'électr... more Cet article analyse l'importance idéologique de la notion de « race » dans le secteur de l'électricité en Tanzanie, en suivant les débats autour de deux exploitants de centrales thermiques privés, Independent Power Tanzania Limited (IPTL)/Pan African Power (PAP) et Richmond Development Corporation. Engagées à l'origine dans le cadre de contrats de fourniture « d'énergie de secours », les deux sociétés sont devenues des prestataires de longue durée pour la production d'électricité en Tanzanie. Toutes deux ont égale-ment été le théâtre de collaborations entre financeurs asiatiques et hommes politiques africains, cherchant à réaliser d'énormes profits, au grand désarroi des donateurs euro-américains. Les scandales et la rhétorique politique qui en ont résulté soulignent la façon dont la libéralisation postsocialiste a revitalisé les débats sur la race, créant de nouvelles lignes complexes de récriminations sociopolitiques et un mélange ambigu de privatisations officielles et de facto.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a telev... more This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Limn Issue 10: Chokepoints, 2018
In any delivery system, the final leg is often the hardest. Michael Degani takes to the streets o... more In any delivery system, the final leg is often the hardest. Michael Degani takes to the streets of Dar es Salaam to explore the “last-mile problem” of Tanzania’s energy grid.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
"Our Electric Air." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CityScapes Magazine
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
American Ethnologist, 2017
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power-utility workers tolerate some unof... more In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power-utility workers tolerate some unofficial forms of modifiying the electrical network, such as unsanctioned reconnections and extensions. These practices, which can also involve theft, bribery, and other illegal activities, both undermine and sustain an increasingly expensive public infrastructure that is in disrepair and subject to routine bureaucratic neglect. But such modifications also have their tacit limits, and people judge as foolish those who have exceeded them. The limits reveal a modal reasoning at work in the relationship among technical systems, urban ethics, and informal economic arrangements. In each of these domains, people use modal reasoning to simultaneously alter and preserve an emergent future. Such reasoning illustrates how infrastructures constitute wholes that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their constituent parts. [infrastructure, electricity, modality, reasoning, urbanism, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania]
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of African History, 2023
Book review of African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development By Joshua Grace.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Technology and Culture, 2022
Book review of Gone to Ground: A History of Environment and Infrastructure in Dar es Salaam by Em... more Book review of Gone to Ground: A History of Environment and Infrastructure in Dar es Salaam by Emily Brownell
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropological Quarterly, 2019
Book Review - Caroline Melly, Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact