Our Lives with Electric Things

Photo by Jamie Cross.

Our lives with electric things are positively charged with meaning. Our bodies pulse with electrical activity. The electric appliances, devices, and technologies around us bring hope and anxiety, possibility and danger. Some have transformed our possibilities for reproducing, nurturing, and sustaining life. Some mediate human sociality across time and space, while others knit ecological and interspecies relationships together. Still others create possibilities for controlling, managing, exploiting, and ending life. Against this backdrop any anthropology of electricity seems to require electric things. Can we still imagine the possibility of lives without electric things? Can electric things help us to address the possibilities and limits of life with electricity? Can our lives with electricity ever be disentangled from electric things? What are the unique capacities and material politics of electric things in different global contexts? What circuits do they make or break? All the pieces in this series share a commitment to rethinking our lives with things, using electric artifacts and materials to push beyond the taken-for-granted vocabularies of material culture and to generate novel ethnographic insights. Together, we hope they will electrify anthropology, and inspire a generation of anthropologists to think electric.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Our Lives with Electric Things

Introduction: Our Lives with Electric Things

Our lives with electric things are positively charged with meaning. Our bodies are electric: our hearts and minds pulsing with electrical activity. The electr... More

Our Bodies Electric

Our Bodies Electric

Horse, or, Currents of Communication by Roslyn Malcolm... More

Our Electric Afterlives

Our Electric Afterlives

Electric Candles by Hannah Gould... More

Our Electric Air

Our Electric Air

Electric Fan by Michael Degani ... More

Our Electric Backup

Our Electric Backup

Chongdianbao, or, Electricity-Charging Treasure by Gabriele de Seta ... More

Our Electric Biomedicine

Our Electric Biomedicine

An X-Ray Machine in a Congolese Town by Trisha Phippard ... More

Our Electric Controls

Our Electric Controls

Electric Market Cart by Ray Lucas... More

Our Electric Exchanges

Our Electric Exchanges

Bluetooth by Elliott Oakley... More

Our Electric Fictions

Our Electric Fictions

The Greenest Place on Earth: A Data Center Fairytale by Brit Winthereik... More

Our Electric H₂O

Our Electric H₂O

Bâche Spirale, or, A Journey into the Heart of a Hydroelectric Turbine by Barbara Carbon... More

Our Electric Illuminations

Our Electric Illuminations

Accra Beauty Blue by Pauline Destree... More

Our Electric Infrastructures

Our Electric Infrastructures

Circuit Tester by Nick Rahier... More

Our Electric Metals

Our Electric Metals

Aluminum by James Maguire... More

Our Electric Meters

Our Electric Meters

TM-192 Triaxial Magnetic Field Meter by Daniel Wuebben... More

Our Electric Monitors

Our Electric Monitors

Zeleke’s Watch by Michael Crawley... More

Our Electric Sustenance

Our Electric Sustenance

Incubator, or, Sugar and Light: The Preconditions of Fermentation and Culture by Matthäus Rest... More

Our Electric Transitions

Our Electric Transitions

A Burning Platform by Lea Schick... More

Our Electro-Homes

Our Electro-Homes

Satellites, or, The Democratization of Electricity Use in Albania by Arba Bekteshi... More