A Moral Technology

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.

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

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.