Michael Degani - Sister Services: Moral Economies of Electricity Before and Beyond the State in Rural Tanzania

Lecture abstract

The paper will outline the ongoing relations between a convent of African Benedictine Sisters in Southern Tanzania and the neighboring villages to whom they have been providing electricity for over two decades. It shows show how hydroelectricity became embedded in a larger moral economy of service and protection, charity and reciprocity, collective labor and sacrifice. For better and worse, such a moral economy stands at odds with the predominant model of low-carbon rural electrification in Africa—small, commercialized household solar kits—precisely for the way it establishes energy as part of a long-term transactional order. It concludes by discussing how the sisters, as a dedicated community of service, approximated and anticipated the state grid’s own eventual arrival and long-term presence. Ultimately, in imagining a just energy future in Tanzania, anchored by a moralized cadre of technical providers, one may in fact be imagining the (post)socialist state. 

About the lecturer

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 recieved his PhD from Yale University in 2015 and taught in the department of Johns Hopkins University before joining Cambridge in 2023.

His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, HAU, Signs and Society, Afrique Contemporarine, 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 reserarching the role of religious orders in off-grid rural electrification in Tanzania.