Sister Services: Moral Economies of Electricity Before and Beyond the State in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands
Venue
Seminar Room 2Chrystal Macmillan
Description
The Centre of African Studies is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar:
'Sister Services: Moral Economies of Electricity Before and Beyond the State in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands'
Speaker: Dr Michael Degani, Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and Juliet Campbell Fellow in Social Anthropology at Girton College.
Chair: Dr Kevin Donovan, Senior Lecturer, African Studies & International Development, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh
This talk outlines the moral economies of hydroelectricity that developed around the historical establishment of Catholic mission stations in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Tracing sociotechnical relations within and between missions and villages, it shows show how electrification (and its associated water management) became embedded in practices of service and patronage, charity and reciprocity, collective labour and sacrifice. It concludes by discussing the complex ways these sociotechnical configurations were inherited by the post-mission church and metabolized by the arrival of the national grid. Sometimes collaborating and sometimes competing, church and state form an entangled infrastructural substrate—and moral imaginary—of Tanzania’s energy development.
When: Wednesday 1st October 2025 (4pm-5.30pm) GMT
Where: Seminar Room 2, Chrystal Macmillan
Format: In-person only. Please register your attendance via Eventbrite
Speaker biography
Michael Degani is Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and the Juliet Campbell Fellow in Social Anthropology at Girton College, researching energy, infrastructure, and design in Africa and beyond. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2015 and taught in the department of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University before joining Cambridge in 2023. His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, HAU, Signs and Society, Afrique Contemporaine, the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Critical Times, and Social Analysis. He is the author of The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania (2022), an ethnography of a national power grid. He is currently researching the role of religious orders in off-grid rural electrification in Tanzania.
Key speakers
- Dr Michael Degani, University of Cambridge