Biography
I am an anthropologist of infrastructure and energy in Africa and beyond. I received my PhD from Yale University in 2015 and prior to coming to the University of Cambridge taught in the department of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Since 2009 I have been conducting long-term ethnographic research in Tanzania, supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies.
Research
At its core, my research concerns the way infrastructures and the vital flows they channel animate or call into question social orders. What happens when cash, current, carbon, or rainfall fails to arrive at its destination, or arrive as intended? How do social relations shift when such flows are waylaid or otherwise diverted?
My first book, The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania (Duke University Press, 2022) is an ethnography of a national power grid. Since the 2000s, mobile phones, televisions, and refrigerators have flooded the city of Dar es Salaam, but a mixture of drought, corruption, and market reform has made the electricity required to power them more expensive and less reliable. Residents respond by surreptitiously repairing, extending, or tapping into the state network, often with the assistance of freelance electricians or moonlighting utility employees. Based on two years of ethnographic research, I show how electricity and its economies of infrastructural piracy have become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. In the wake of a morally charged African socialism, they reason out thoughtful distinctions between tolerable and insensible forms of rent-seeking, power theft, load shedding, and meter debt.
Conceptually, this work has led me to develop a “modal anthropology” that attends to the arts and ethics of modification, to how people (and other animals) sense and test the possibility space of a shared world. Michel Serres’s figure of the parasite, a kind of uninvited guest that must be accommodated, has been a key inspiration. A series of related articles explore the aesthetics of improvisation, Piercean semiotics and exchange theory, and the anthropology of capture.
I am currently pursuing two new projects on energy and infrastructure in an era of climate change. “The Sisters Electric” explores the growing number of small hydroelectric dams owned and operated by religious sisterhoods in Tanzania, some of whom are building out minigrids and selling power to surrounding villages. I aim to trace how this decentralized model of energy provision builds on historical patterns of political authority in rural areas, and becomes folded into “Catholic Social” practices of charity and community that both align with and challenge the current trajectories of Africa’s energy futures. I am also interested in East African hydroelectricity, with its seasonal rhythms of rain and drought, as a site of encounter between Christian religiosity and ecological ethics.
My second, multi-sited project looks at the technics and politics of embodied carbon in the built environment. The construction industry is at the center of our climate emergency, accounting for a significant percentage of total greenhouse emissions worldwide. A range of experimental alternatives to glass, steel, and concrete—mycelium or algae-based bricks, cross-laminated timber, “natural buildings” of straw bale or cob—attempt to turn structures into net “carbon capture devices” and reimagine dwelling in the Anthropocene. I conceive of this project as an “ethnography of design” that tracks the cultural-political genealogies of such experiments, but also as a “design ethnography” that amplifies them, particularly through my work as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective.
Research Interests:
African studies, environmental anthropology, energy and infrastructure, socialism and postsocialism, anthropology of the state, social theory, design, dwelling and embodiment, materials.
Publications
Books
2022. The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania. Duke University Press.
Peer-Reviewed articles
2024. “Towards a Modal Anthropology.” Social Analysis, 68 no. 3: 60-84. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2024.680304
2024. “Nun of the River: The Material and Spiritual Economies of Small Hydropower in Rural Tanzania.”Critique of Anthropology, 44 (3): 321 – 430. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X241269615
2024. “Invention and Grace: Taking Turns in a Streetcorner Bureaucracy.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 14 (1): 205–219. https://doi.org/10.1086/730136
2022. “The Flickering Torch: Power and Loss After Socialism.” Critical Times, 5 no. 2: 370–398. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-9799722
2021. "Cutting Without Cutting Connection: The Semiotics of Power Patrols in Urban Tanzania." Signs and Society, 9 no. 2: 176–203. https://doi.org/10.1086/714856
2020. “Air in Unexpected Places: Metabolism, Design, and the Making of an ‘African’ Aircrete.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 38 no. 2: 125–145. ttps://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380209
2020. “Fuelling Capture: Africa's Energy Frontiers." Co-authored with Brenda Chalfin and Jamie Cross. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 38 no. 2: 1–18. ttps://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380202
2018. “Shock Humor: Zaniness and the Freedom of Permanent Improvisation in Urban Tanzania.” Cultural Anthropology, 33 no. 3: 473–498. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.08
2017. “La Véranda, le Climatiseur et la Centrale Électrique.” Afrique Contemporaine, no. 261-262: 103–121. https://doi.org/10.3917/afco.261.0103
2017. “Modal Reasoning in Dar es Salaam’s Power Network.” American Ethnologist, 44 no. 2: 300–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12480
Other Writings
2026. “Seasons as World Shifters.” Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata: Confronting Histories of Environmental Anthropology. Fieldsights. Cultural Anthropology. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/seasons-as-world-shifters
2025. Comment on Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace by Timothy P.A Cooper. History and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2025.2502388
2025. “The Guyer Line.” Forum in Celebration of Jane Guyer. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 15 (2): 535-538. https://doi.org/10.1086/736289
2025. Biographical Memoir of Jane I. Guyer. National Academy of Sciences. https://www.nasonline.org/directory-entry/jane-i-guyer-ps6ys9/
2024. Review of Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres. American Anthropologist, https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1111/aman.28035
2024. Review of Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Justice in National Development by Anto Mohsin. H-Net. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60274
2024. Comment on “The Problem with Solutions: Apolitical Optimism in the Sustainable Energy Industry.” Current Anthropology 65 (26). https://doi.org/10.1086/731293
2024. “Anthro Abuzz: Fuel, Electricity, and Ethnography in the Era of Global Boiling.” Review Essay. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14169
2024. Dwelling in the Climate Emergency. Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society (CUSAS) Magazine. https://www.cusas.socanth.cam.ac.uk/michael-degani-dwelling-in-the-climate-emergency/
2023. “Understanding Growth.” Anthropology and Degrowth: Where to Next? Undisciplined Environments Website. Written with participants of the Anthropology and Degrowth Workshop, London School of Economics, June 2023. https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2023/10/26/anthropology-and-degrowth-where-to-next/
2023. “Degrowth is a Planned Reduction of Useless Stuff.” Ecological Design Collective Website, https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/degrowth-is-a-planned-reduction-of-useless-stuff/
2023. Review of African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development by Joshua Grace. The Journal of African History 1-2, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000051
2022. Review of Gone to Ground: A History of Environment and Infrastructure by Emily Brownell. Technology and Culture, 63 no. 2: 542–544. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2022.0064
2019. Review of Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City by Caroline Melly. Anthropology Quarterly, 92 no. 1: 259–262. 10.1353/anq.2019.0009
2018. "Disservice Lines." Limn. Issue 10: Chokepoints. https://limn.it/articles/disservice-lines/
2018. “Becoming Infrastructural: An Interview with Michael Degani." With Scott Ross, Cultural Anthropology Website, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/becoming-infrastructural-an-interview-with-michael-degani
2017. “The Electric Fan.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology website. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1264-our-electric-air
2017. “Race and Electricity in Post-Socialist Tanzania.” The Corridor, Cityscapes Magazine. https://cityscapesmagazine.com/projects-articles/race-and-electricity-in-post-socialist-tanzania
2013. “Emergency Power: Time, Ethics, and Electricity in Postsocialist Tanzania.” In Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp and Thomas Love, eds. Left Coast Press. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315430850-20/emergency-power-time-ethics-electricity-postsocialist-tanzania-sarah-strauss-stephanie-rupp-thomas-love
