A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi

by Leo C. Coleman

Overview

In India over the past century, electrification has meant many things: it has been a colonial gift of modern technology, a tool of national integration and political communication, and a means of gauging the country's participation in globalization. Electric lights have marked out places of power, and massive infrastructures have been installed in hopes of realizing political promises. In A Moral Technology, the grids and wires of an urban public utility are revealed to be not only material goods but also objects of intense moral concern. Leo Coleman offers a distinctive anthropological approach to electrification in New Delhi as more than just an economic or industrial process, or a "gridding" of social and political relations. It may be understood instead as a ritual action that has formed modern urban communities and people’s sense of citizenship, and structured debates over state power and political legitimacy.Coleman explores three historical and ethnographic case studies from the founding of New Delhi as an imperial capital city, to its reshaping as a national capital for post-independence India, up to its recent emergence as a contemporary global city. These case studies closely describe technological politics, rituals, and legal reforms at key moments of political change in India, and together they support Coleman’s argument that ritual performances, moral judgments, and technological installations combine to shape modern state power, civic life, and political community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501707919
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Leo Coleman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Electricity ActsPart I. Imperial Installations1. The Machinery of Government2. Ritual Center and Divided CityPart II. National Grids3. The Lifeblood of the Nation4. Broadcast MantrasPart III. Urban Transformations5. The Life of Property6. A Model Colony Conclusion: The Art of a Free Society

What People are Saying About This

Ritika Prasad

Developing nuanced and valuable readings of critical moments in the story of electrification in Delhi/New Delhi, Leo Coleman suggests that electricity far exceeds its formal role as infrastructure. He persuasively argues that the ideological burden and meaning of electricity informs its physical distribution (from where it is introduced and who gets it first to how the grid is controlled or the ownership of electric meters understood), while demonstrating how political associations, relationships, and networks are imagined, cast, and reconfigured through the distribution of electricity.

Editorial Reviews

"Developing nuanced and valuable readings of critical moments in the story of electrification in Delhi/New Delhi, Leo Coleman suggests that electricity far exceeds its formal role as infrastructure. He persuasively argues that the ideological burden and meaning of electricity informs its physical distribution (from where it is introduced and who gets it first to how the grid is controlled or the ownership of electric meters understood), while demonstrating how political associations, relationships, and networks are imagined, cast, and reconfigured through the distribution of electricity."

--Ritika Prasad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, author of Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India

From the Publisher

"Developing nuanced and valuable readings of critical moments in the story of electrification in Delhi/New Delhi, Leo Coleman suggests that electricity far exceeds its formal role as infrastructure. He persuasively argues that the ideological burden and meaning of electricity informs its physical distribution (from where it is introduced and who gets it first to how the grid is controlled or the ownership of electric meters understood), while demonstrating how political associations, relationships, and networks are imagined, cast, and reconfigured through the distribution of electricity."

Ritika Prasad