LEO COLEMAN

The Ohio State University

Infrastructure and interpretation:

Meters, dams, and state imagination in Scotland and India

A B S T R A C T
The technical infrastructures of modern
life—energy, communications, transport—stand at
the juncture between material orderings of society
and collective meaning. Public utilities are both
material and symbolic, and both aspects require
maintenance—and anthropological understanding.
However, recent anthropological approaches
building from science studies have tended to pursue
“flat” descriptions that replace mystical or
The auld volcanoes rummle ’neath their feet
...
Danders o’ Hell! They feel th’unwelcome heat,
The deltit craturs, and their sauls are slush,
For we ha’e faith in Scotland’s hidden poo’ers,
The present’s theirs, but a’ the past and future’s oors.
—Hugh MacDiarmid, “Gairmscoile”
s my friend Pooja and I made our way through the university

A
hypostatizing concepts of “social forces” with
district of Delhi, India, one afternoon, escaping from her sti-
material associations and have focused on
fling apartment where the electricity had been cut, our auto-
micrological discipline rather than ritual sites where
rickshaw had to navigate around a car stopped halfway up the
collective identity is formed. By contrast, I identify
verge, its door open and its well-fed driver relieving himself
an “aporetic relation” between material ordering and
against the nearest wall. Pooja erupted in anger, grabbing my arm and
symbolic form as the site of ritual, and hermeneutic,
pointing at what was, after all, hardly an unusual sight in the city—“That,
processes by which large-scale political collectives
there,” she said, “that’s why the power in this city never works! People do
are built up—and infrastructures are shaped to serve
whatever they want, use the public space anyhow, no regard for others!”
collective projects. I analyze examples of
Roads, power, and a notion of the public came together in this outburst
contemporary and historical infrastructural politics
and formed an affective moment in which a vision of a different Delhi, a
from India and Scotland to develop insights into
different order of belonging, was evoked.
how collectivities and states are formed,
When the electricity distribution system in Delhi was privatized in
interpreted, and challenged in symbolic contests
2002, the goal was precisely to intervene in the public space of the
over their infrastructures. [infrastructure, state
city and regulate and rationalize comportment—at least comportment
power, nationalism, totemism, Durkheim]
having to do with use of electricity. The “atmosphere of governance”
in Delhi during its power outages was chaotic, and routine theft of
power made the electricity system politically and technically unman-
ageable, according to Jagdish Sagar (2004), the last head of the state-
owned utility.1 Upon privatization, the new distribution companies, or
“discoms,” were set multiple goals for upgrading customers’ connections
and regularizing power, particularly through the agency of new electronic
meters—a material technology that could, it was said, foster improve-
ments at once technical and social, in particular, decreasing transmis-
sion losses, theft, and leakage and increasing the number of metered

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 457–472, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12084
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
customers and improving their reliability in regulating
their own consumption of and payment for power. Me-
ter replacement—providing customers with new, efficient,
electronic meters—quickly became a primary order of busi-
ness for the new discoms, though it took several years to be-
gin installing the new meters.
By the time meter replacement really got underway,
I was researching civic activism in Delhi after the pri-
vatization of electricity distribution, working with groups
called “Residents Welfare Associations” (RWAs), which rep-
resented the interests of middle-class neighborhoods. Peo-
ple’s angry complaints about both poor power conditions
and the general conditions of civic life, as well as their
expressions of pride in being members of the paid-up,
civic-minded minority, figured prominently in my everyday
interactions. The anger was often about the power compa-
nies, their high-handed methods, and, in particular, their
replacement of old electromechanical meters with new
electronic ones, which had resulted in massive increases in
electricity bills for many households. Paradoxically, the new
meters were the tools of the kind of discipline and ordering
of civic relations that Pooja had implied Delhi needed and
that middle-class activists too sought, and yet they became
the flashpoint of a widespread controversy as they linked
more and more citizens to the grid.
There are several ways to explain these cross-cutting
dynamics of political, technological, and social transforma-
tion, with their equally affective and material dimensions,
and why activism focused on metering. Economistic analy-
ses predict, for example, that in conditions of shortage, such
as those that long have beset Delhi’s electricity infrastruc-
ture, whether under state ownership or private manage-
ment, political interest in common utilities will be height-
ened, consensus for a new politics of privatization will be
secure, and new techniques of consumer accountability
and cost recovery can be instituted (Santhakumar 2008).
This is the argument I heard voiced in the spring of 2006,
at a meeting of the World Bank International Development
Fund convened in Delhi to discuss the political prospects
for the then-promised next stages of public-utility privatiza-
tion. In this context, the economistic argument was ironic,
since there was no discernible consensus in Delhi about
the benefits of privatization, precisely because of ongo-
ing power shortages and increased prices. Alternatively, the
new patterns of distribution of power that were emerging,
and the insistence on “cost recovery,” could be seen as the
smooth accession to dominance by bourgeois elites who
have long sought to capture and reform the Indian city, in
its vibrancy and disorder (Chatterjee 2004). But it was pre-
cisely the middle-class elites, proponents of privatization,
who were objecting to meter replacement and challenging
both the government and the new discoms. This sudden ap-
pearance of political activism among the middle class might
458
be a result of the material agency of the technological de-
vice itself, the electricity meter, which conveys power rela-
tions and embeds new forms of individualizing discipline
(see Bennett 2010). But those most active in the meter con-
troversy embraced the promises of privatization and meter-
ing as a collective project of civil society, affirming with their
politics of metering that they were paid-up members of the
polity and responsible users of public utilities. Neither eco-
nomic reflexes nor shared material interests nor the power
of material connections can fully explain how and why the
electronic meter became a problematic object of conscious-
ness and concern.
Any argument about direct connections between the
material conditions of the city, agentive objects, and collec-
tive mobilizations is, of course, just that—an argument and
interpretation, each with its own insight. But as I considered
the range of responses to the use and meaning of electricity
infrastructures in Delhi—those I had already encountered
at citizen’s meetings on privatization and meter replace-
ment and those that emerged in the course of a lawsuit that
meter replacement provoked—the likelihood of material in-
terests and micrological disciplines being directly reflected
in the to and fro of political and collective life seemed, at
best, doubtful. Debates about metering and privatization,
and about the existing distributions of (electric) power in
the city ranged in tone from affective surges and angry out-
bursts to calm reasoning, but all were marked by a doubt
and worry about what the meters, and other devices, meant.
In judicial arguments, for example, meters were said to em-
body the progress of society. One judge wrote that the “ad-
vent of electronic meters has stirred a hornet’s nest” but
that the working of the meter itself should quell all dissent,
for it says to its users “believe me, I am smarter than my
ancestors.”2 For others, electric power problems demanded
more vigorous police intervention: At one public meeting
on meters, a right-wing politician proposed identity cards
be issued to all migrant workers in the city—“who come
and steal our power”—as a solution to the electricity cri-
sis. The worries expressed by civic activists, regulators, and
judges confronted with a new political economy, a new me-
tering regime, and new authorities over public utilities did
not seem to reflect class position or immediate problems
with power prices and quality so much as a more diffuse
concern with order and with relations to others within the
wider political economy of the city as a whole. Further, the
interpretations they offered were less about material condi-
tions of shortage, entrained habitus of consumption, or par-
ticular objects of discipline than about the kind of collective
project and goal for city improvement that something like a
new electricity meter represented.
That is, rather than new material forms of priva-
tizing and individualizing discipline, or the “neoliberal
governmentalization” (Foucault 2008; Wacquant 2012) of

the urban sphere, what struck me as I observed the meter
controversy and listened to the worries of citizens in public
meetings and private neighborhood forums was the way in
which a highly political imagination of collectivity, of com-
mon interest, seemed to be at stake in all this noisy discus-
sion of meters, bills, technical standards, and new author-
ities over local and citywide grids. And, indeed, new social
groupings, political mobilizations, and accounts of the lo-
cation of social power emerged out of the meter contro-
versy, the next stages of privatization were in fact stalled
or deferred, and subsequent years would see a confident
politics of anticorruption take shape out of the RWAs first
mobilized in response to ongoing problems with the pri-
vatized management of electricity distribution in the city.
Even without this outcome, however, the politics of me-
tering in Delhi in the first years of private management
raise compelling questions about the relationship between
material infrastructures or common utilities, on the one
hand, and the sense of belonging, the identities, and the
social formations that can be mobilized around them, on
the other.
In this article, I examine such relations between infras-
tructures, social consciousness, and the ordering of political
collectivities. The breakdowns, intermittencies, and failures
to which many urban infrastructures are routinely subject
in cities like Delhi can, as I show in the brief descriptions
above, become a zone of cultural intimacy, a topic of rue-
ful joking about the gap between the ambitions of a city or
a nation and the material conditions for their realization.
But failure is not the only occasion on which infrastruc-
tures become collectively problematic, and the actual ma-
terial connections they do or do not achieve are inadequate
to explain their ongoing evocation as a good, a utility, and
a symbol of an urban or national collective. To explore how
political connections are forged across infrastructures and
collectives are formed over time, I describe three cases—
drawn from my research on electrification and local state
formation in Delhi and from my ongoing investigation of
nationalism and energy politics in Scotland—in which in-
frastructures were interpreted as symbolizing a collectivity
or, at least, as revealing a shared and common interest. The
cases include the meter controversy in Delhi that emerged
in late 2005; the politics of infrastructure and development
in the making of independent India, from the 1930s to the
1960s; and the erection of a kind of state within a state
through infrastructure and institution building in Scotland,
from World War II to the 1970s.
The meaning—national, governmental, civic—of the
infrastructures at stake in each of these examples is shaped
and reiterated in ritual performances, especially inaugura-
tions: Poems exclaim at the wonders of a new steel plant
in east-central India; the Queen comes to Scotland to open
a hydropower installation; a new civic group is established
to challenge meter replacement in Delhi. In each case, the
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
interpretation—both local and anthropological—of such
inaugurations helps us understand the fundamental rela-
tion between social, collective consciousness and political
symbols, on the one hand, and the material organization
of society, on the other. This relation is, I argue, following
the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2011), paradig-
matically “aporetic.” As I discuss below, for Agamben rites
of inauguration and pompous installations are not the op-
tional, legitimating “garb” of power but are integral to the
economic ordering of the world. That is, the distribution
of power and potency in apparently fixed and material in-
frastructures itself depends on a ritual, even theurgical,
practice, which creates a zone of indistinction, introduces
doubt, and reiterates and reorganizes both material and
symbolic relations. This argument has implications for how
we approach infrastructures and utilities ethnographically.
Finally, while on this account the ritual evocation
of centers of power and visions of social order helps to
organize particular material patterns of power, in turn
the materiality and extent of actual infrastructures, built
up over many years of modernist investment in de-
velopmentalist programs and the universalist promises
of a social welfare state, give location and form to
particular political visions of the state and its purposes. As I
discuss in a theoretical interlude below, Emile Durkheim’s
notion of “the totem” and its political efficacy provides
one key means of interpreting local resolutions of this
aporetic relation between material infrastructure and col-
lective form. Local forms of state power can be illuminated
by investigation of this relation between political order and
its material devices, as it is resolved in specific instances
to produce, out of technological devices and infrastructural
connections, emblems of power and belonging.
The anthropology of infrastructure and state
imaginations
The anthropology of infrastructure has blossomed recently
as a field in which investigation may access and address,
at once, the necessities of global, mediated urban life,
the material ordering of social relations, and the aspira-
tions and imaginations of global connection and participa-
tion that fuel so much contemporary politics (Anand 2011;
Appadurai 1996; Ferguson 2006; Larkin 2008; Rodgers and
O’Neil 2012). Much of this research has focused on urban-
ism and disconnection in the cities of the global South,
where routine breakdowns, patterns of visible exclusion,
histories of developmentalism, and recent political con-
troversies over privatization, corruption, and (more aca-
demically) resource dependency have made infrastructure
a matter of conscious, repeated, and often vociferous de-
bate.
In parallel with this increased salience of infrastructure
in ethnographic research, the materiality and agency of the
459
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
infrastructures of modern life—vast networks that connect
and separate powers both human and nonhuman—have
come to the fore in a range of recent theoretical, historical,
and philosophical works. Infrastructures on this account
are complexes of material connections, actions, and reac-
tions that only later, and contingently, come to have wider
social meaning (Bennett 2010; Latour 2005; Mukerji 2009).
This latter work in the field of science and technol-
ogy studies and the “new materialisms” has deeply influ-
enced the recent anthropology of infrastructure, and much
attention has accordingly been paid to the “assembly” of
material and political forces, things, and ideas into coher-
ent networks that violently exclude or occlude alternative
connections and forms of association (Appel 2012; Folch
2013). In his recent account of the agency of energy in-
frastructures in shaping transnational political settlements,
Timothy Mitchell has said that explanations of infras-
tructural political powers have no need to “detour into
questions of a shared culture or collective conscious-
ness” (2011:21). Moments of action—making connections
or stopping flows of energy and power—that shape exten-
sive technoindustrial energetic networks are, for Mitchell,
more important for understanding contemporary distribu-
tions of power than collective aspirations, ideologies of dis-
tribution, or ideals of participation. Indeed, this anthropo-
logical, historical, and philosophical turn to material con-
nections, agencies, and powers bears an elective affinity
with the longer-term critical project of analyzing states and
nations not as totalizing and centralizing structures, and
least of all as “cultures,” but as “effects” of disaggregated and
besetting disciplines that are most present in the everyday
and at marginal sites (e.g., Bennett and Joyce 2010; Mitchell
1999).
The now-standard ethnographic response to totaliz-
ing theories of culture, society, or belonging, Tim Choy has
said, is to repudiate the notion “that there can be ‘whole
relations’ in the first place. Such abstractions kill, this re-
sponse goes, doing violence to particular human lives . . .
and such lives are accessible only through empirical work”
(2011:144). Yet, as Choy argues, to capture the orienting and
motivating force of the commitments that holistic visions
still attract, and the actions that they license, empirical work
must include those figurations of connection and coher-
ence that refer beyond the immediate present and the given
context of association, for people do orient their action by
imaginative as much as material connections to centers of
power and are guided by the symbolic forms of these con-
nections in their construction of a social context for their
own action.
To counterbalance the recent theoretical emphasis on
the micrological, material distribution of power through
infrastructures—including its failures and gaps—I focus my
attention here on moments in which infrastructures are
moralized and made socially problematic and in which—
460
I argue—they come to signify and convey a certain con-
sciousness of community and collectivity in terms be-
yond their actual material organization. As Brian Larkin
(2008:63) has argued, infrastructures are always, in their
circulation of the goods of modernity and overdetermi-
nation of the means of connection to centers of so-
cial power, “representational events” that convey politi-
cal meaning. Moreover, Larkin specifically identifies rit-
uals of inauguration and colonial impositions of new
technologies as sites of particular importance for ethno-
graphic interpretation of the “tactile and symbolic ef-
fort to make technology mean” (2008:42), through which
material objects become instruments of a state imagi-
nation. Accordingly, I describe here occasions in which
infrastructures—specifically, large-scale urban and na-
tional infrastructures for the production and distribu-
tion of electricity—were imagined anew, became visible,
and overran the material sedimentation of their connec-
tions to become meaningful symbols and signs of political
community.
My goal here is not to overturn or repudiate anthro-
pological attention to materiality and the kinds of complex
associations that can pertain between matter and mean-
ing (Miller 2005). Indeed, I draw heavily from recent ac-
counts of how the fetishistic and magical deployment of
technological goods and material resources within colo-
nial and other contexts can foster a distorted worldview,
an ambivalent politics of technological spectacle, and fix-
ation on imaginary sites of power (Coleman in press; see
Apter 2005; Larkin 2008; Mrazek 2002). My critical foil here,
rather, is Actor-Network Theory, with its emphasis on con-
tingent assemblages and its rigorous rejection of “social”
totalities. Ethnographically and through theoretical work,
I highlight alternative resources long available in the arts
of ethnographic interpretation for understanding, “in the
round,” the complex relation between materiality and col-
lective meaning as something more, and more social, than
simple association or proximity.3
In their recent survey of and intervention in anthropo-
logical studies of infrastructure, Dennis Rodgers and Bruce
O’Neill (2012:406) have usefully pointed out that all infras-
tructures are, in one way or another, “collectively held” (no
matter what specific property arrangements are involved)
and hence can become the metonymic sites for wider so-
cial discussions of participation and responsibility—that is,
can become meaningful for the very definition of a col-
lective. I argue that such a focus on its “collective” na-
ture is an essential step in grasping infrastructure’s impor-
tance and potency in present politics but also that the very
collectiveness of infrastructures that makes them political
resources is itself a historical product of the sort of in-
auguratory, ritual, and imaginative—and national—politics
that have surrounded them throughout the long, transna-
tional, 20th-century project of building states by building

infrastructures and organizing productive work (see, e.g.,
Gupta 1998). At least as important as the material associ-
ations that infrastructures enable, perhaps, or what their
connections obscure, is their very collective crafting in the
imagination as emblematic of the state and the political
community itself—a common aspect of developmentalist
and social-welfare states alike, which assert their legitimacy
by delivering, or promising to deliver, infrastructural goods.
This collective valence and socially symbolic use of in-
frastructures, before their material imposition as a frame of
exclusion or participation, requires a mode of inquiry com-
mensurate with the problems that ethnography—amidst
political change—reveals and one that can also trace the
historicity of these problems in the legacy of the social in-
vestments that make infrastructural politics such an impor-
tant element of contemporary state formation. As Stephen
Collier puts it, a historical ethnography of infrastructures
should not only trace the development of their material
connections but should also aim to trace “their relation-
ship to broader fields of significance and historical con-
ditions of intelligibility that are themselves temporally cir-
cumscribed, and whose identification is a critical moment
of inquiry” (2011:28). Such attention to the historical and
discursive conditions for collective meaning, and—I would
add—to the ritual performances in which such significance
is ratified and replicated, reveals the limits of the rigorous
micrologism that is held as a primary methodological value
in Bruno Latour’s (2005) sociology of associations.
Latour famously rejects the claims of Durkheimian so-
ciology, and the very concepts of “total social facts” and
“collective consciousness” are excluded from his theoret-
ical repertoire. By contrast, I aim to show the utility of
Durkheim’s thoughts about totemism, “emblematization,”
and the cultivation of collective consciousness for the inter-
pretation of the specific ethnographic and historical con-
texts I describe in detail below. In India and Scotland—and
elsewhere—collective, social forms and material connec-
tions were, in fact, thought together in the interpretation
of infrastructure, and technological connections were made
political and linked to certain visions of collective freedom.
This effort may seem to require specifying program-
matically what relations might pertain between matter and
idea and even staking a claim to an idealist or materialist
interpretation of historical agency. Such a move is, however,
problematic, for the relation at stake is itself a site of con-
flicting interpretations, of aporia and doubt, within modern
political thought.
The aporetic relation
Agamben (2011) has recently intervened in arguments that
distinguish between a primary material efficacy of eco-
nomic and governmental powers to dispose objects and
bodies, on the one hand, and, on the other, the cultural
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
force of rituals, signs, and symbols to ornament and com-
municate the legitimacy of such ordering action. He iden-
tifies the relation between meaning and order, instead, as a
permanent aporia in European political thought—a “zone
of indistinction” where meanings are plural and polar op-
positions are subverted (Agamben 2011:188). He traces this
aporetic relation between transcendent meaning and im-
manent order back to a specifically Christian theological
problem—the problem of what relations obtain between
the sovereign power (the Father), who reigns over the world
at a magisterial remove and with omniscience, and di-
vine government or ordering (operated by the Angels and
Christ), which works within it on the messy terrain of free
will. While this secularized theological aporia is resolved in
favor of material action and order in much recent work on
“governmentality,” Agamben insists on the importance of
“glory” and state ritual as another, indispensible, half of a
modern politics that has the more material, mundane, or-
dering arts of administration and government as its other
half.
Working to move beyond the account of power con-
tained in theories of governmentality and discipline,
Agamben aims to establish that “profane acclamations are
not an ornament of political power, but found and justify
it” (2011:230). This goal echoes an earlier set of debates
between materialist and symbolic approaches in political
anthropology around what we might call the “Wittfogel–
Geertz polarity,” which were, as it happens, focused on
the interpretation of infrastructures and power (see Geertz
1980:20).4 More specifically, however, in his account of the
construction and maintenance of the “governmental ma-
chine,” Agamben encourages us to ask how, mythologically
and in fact, a given political order is inaugurated and how
such acts of institution continue to operate in mundane and
banausic administration. He diagnoses a perpetual “con-
flict between being and acting, ontology and economy” and
a movement between (not a transition from–to) the the-
ological paradigm of sovereign power and the economic
paradigm of governmental power; between a ceremonious,
ordering, inaugurating power and a practical, instituting,
organizing, and ceaseless action; “between a being that is
in itself unable to act and an action without being: what is
at stake between these two is the idea of freedom” (Agamben
2011:59, emphasis added).5
Thus, Agamben returns to a classic anthropological
concern with the ways in which ritual and symbol work
within human praxis to rank, order, and classify the world
for material appropriation and how the performativity of
ritual relates to the mundane practicalities of the world
(Moore and Myerhoff 1977; Sahlins 1976). Indeed, in seek-
ing to rethink the ways contemporary states appropriate
and organize subjects and powers, Agamben (2011:224–
227) himself turns to Marcel Mauss’s and Durkheim’s con-
siderations of prayer and propitiation as collective action
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
and finds in these classic anthropological inquiries into the
power of words and formulae a means of understanding
how local combinations of material power and stately
meaning are, in fact, operated to produce the forms of
politics with which we are familiar. For anthropologists con-
cerned with state power and its extension in material in-
frastructure, following Agamben’s lead back to the anthro-
pology of ritual, symbol, and collective propitiation, and
attending again to the discipline’s founding claims about
the role of collective representations in organizing even the
most material of solidary connections between people and
groups, might provide a way to rethink the sociotechnical
“assemblages” of the modern world. Agamben’s account of
the construction and maintenance of the “governmental
machine,” in particular, directs attention to the common—
ethnographically observable—propitiatory and theurgical
use of insignia, rites, and performances of power as part of a
wider politics of material organization and ordering, espe-
cially as such pomp surrounds the mundane infrastructures
of daily urban life (see Rademacher 2011).
The task of the interpretations that follow, then, is to
explore the theoretical and interpretive utility of paying
close attention to the social, meaningful, collective regis-
ter of proclamation, inauguration, and symbolization that
surrounds infrastructures as they are built, installed, and
debated and as people struggle for access to them. In par-
ticular, I aim to describe moments when the relation be-
tween a material connection and a political community was
intensely and openly in question and when the aporias of
being and acting, belonging and participating, and infras-
tructural order and its collective meaning became starkly
important for particular social actors—and, further, to as-
sess how they resolved these relations in particular ways,
staking a claim on freedom in relation to real problems of
participation and provision of the goods of life.
New agencies of progress in Delhi
In October 2005, a set of Delhi citizens, representatives
of RWAs from both affluent and more humble neighbor-
hoods, met to form a citywide federation, aiming to capital-
ize on the previous summer’s successful campaign against
increases in power prices. In an auditorium in the heart of
New Delhi, under the aegis of one of the liberalizing civic
NGOs, representatives were gathered who were accredited,
in their own eyes at least, as the spokespersons for particu-
lar residential colonies and housing associations—most of
them held offices in their local associations. The name pro-
posed for this umbrella group, not incidentally, was “United
Residents’ Joint Action,” forming the acronym URJA, which
means “energy” in Hindi.6 This bilingual pun was not en-
tirely gratuitous, and the connection between the force of
the group’s collective political action and the electric power
462
that was the object of its activism was underscored in the
speeches that opened the meeting.
The main subject of the meeting was to have been the
problem of high electricity bills; indeed, the privatized dis-
tribution companies were at the time publishing advertise-
ments and placing leaflets in customers’ bills to educate
consumers about regulating costs by monitoring their own
consumption, and power prices were on the citywide po-
litical agenda. But, from the first, the recent drive to in-
stall “improved” electronic meters and the problems people
were having with these meters emerged as the center of in-
terest and concern. Indeed, when I was chatting with atten-
dees before the meeting even started, I was peppered with
questions about meters and metering in my own country.
In an auditorium filled mostly with older and appar-
ently retired men and a few similarly aged women, speakers
began testifying about their recent problems with meters
and billing. The testimonials and accusations grew fiercer
as the morning ran on: A stack of photocopied bills—some
running to tens of thousands of rupees—collected from just
one “colony,” or neighborhood, were presented by an RWA
president. What could possibly explain this explosion of
vastly inflated bills? Uniformly, the answer was “electronic
meters.” One speaker accused the Delhi regulator of collud-
ing with the discoms and licensing fraudulent meters with
margins of error greater than the 3 percent allowed by law.7
Someone pointed out that the new meters were manufac-
tured in China—as if this represented an insult to India’s
sovereignty.
The meters were not the only concern, of course,
and theft of power was also a major theme of the
presentations—but the main question was whose meter
was recording these thefts. “Look around you,” one speaker
urged, “look in your own colony—who is stealing power? In
my colony even the mandir [temple] is ‘hooking’ power [il-
legally connecting to the overhead wires], and the shops in
the marketplace have electric lights strung up everywhere!”
Whose meter, he asked darkly, might be connected to those
public displays?
As it turned out, the new meters themselves were, in
fact, at fault, though not because they were defective. Many
affluent neighborhoods in Delhi had previously been wired
in such a way that multiple houses shared a “neutral” line,
because the electromechanical meters of the old public
utility only registered the power flowing into each house
(through the “phase” line, in the local technical argot). The
new electronic meters, however, were designed to measure
the power flowing both into (phase) and out of (neutral)
each house; to circumvent fraud, the higher of the two mea-
surements would be the basis for billing. For those who
shared a neutral line with many other houses (or with a tem-
ple or marketplace or other urban institution that had ille-
gally tapped into the grid), their new meter would register
not only their actual consumption but also the aggregate

neutral load of every electricity user “upstream” from their
meter. Combined with the existing infrastructure and new
billing practices, then, new electronic meters in Delhi re-
vealed an interdependence within neighborhoods that had
previously not been recognized, and grappling with this
interdependence was the self-appointed mission of the
newly mobilized RWAs.
The meters became, in this process, the center of con-
cern, and the issue on which neighborhood representatives
focused their efforts. One leader of a neighborhood pres-
sure group complained to the Hindu newspaper (2005):
“Why was the consumer not informed that shared neutral
can result in fictitious billing? Why should the consumers
shell out large sums to rewire their houses as a safeguard
against fraudulent meters? Why were the discoms allowed
to extort extra money on the pretext of checking [stopping]
power theft?” All these concerns about possible fraud and
even geopolitical threat—expressed in the comments about
the Chinese manufacture of the meters—were mobilized in
the teeth of a real material alteration in the terms of con-
nection to the grid; by focusing on the meters, and the cor-
ruption they potentially represented, RWA members were
able to give collective voice to the newly revealed individual
costs of privatization.
In the thick of this public mobilization, one citizen sued
his distribution company, claiming that it had violated his
privacy and his property rights by replacing his old meter
with a new one. The Delhi High Court judge who heard this
case ruled in favor of the discom, arguing that meter re-
placement was really a progressive substitution of modern
technological relations for the old economy of power and
privilege in the city and, hence, represented a social ad-
vance. In his decision, the electromechanical meters were
said to be unreliable and vulnerable to tampering, and their
misuse represented an old economy of privilege in which
some people were able to exploit technical and systemic
weaknesses to their own benefit (there was no evidence that
the old meters were unreliable, but the effectiveness of his
argument relied on the presumption that they were). For the
judge, that is, this new visibility of previously obscured con-
nections was a real advance in social knowledge, and the
meter was granted a decisive agency insofar as it worked
to reorganize individual connections toward an improved
public utility. The discoms’ right to choose more advanced
metering technology trumped the concerns about property
and propriety raised by the homeowner. As the judge him-
self wrote, meters occupy “very little space in our homes.
But the advent of electronic meters in Delhi has stirred a
hornet’s nest. [Their] accuracy, credibility and if I may say, in
the eyes of some, even [their] integrity is in doubt.” There is,
however, no reason for such doubt, he concluded, for “the
electronic meter proclaims: believe me, I am smarter than
my ancestors” (Jindal vs. BSES Rajdhani, 126 [2006] DLT 49,
paragraph 19).
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
This case was appealed, ultimately, all the way to the
Supreme Court of India. In its decision, again in favor of the
discom, the Supreme Court likewise vested great agency in
the meter itself, if not going so far as to actually credit it with
the power of speech. The court narrowed the question at
law to one of property rights and who controlled the meters,
affirming that the privatized distribution companies had an
undisputed power to replace one meter by another. Along
the way, this court too insisted that these new meters were
material agents in the progress of society, read technolog-
ically, writing that an affirmative decision about the pro-
priety of meter replacement was necessary to give “effect
to the benefits of new technological development” (Jindal
vs. BSES Rajdhani [2008] 1 SCC 341, paragraph 43). These
judicial interpretations, at both levels of the case’s journey
through the courts, personify the meter and flatten the so-
cial problem that the meters provoked, precisely to detour
around the problem at hand and address instead a ques-
tion of purely technological connections and their improve-
ment.
Read one way, this is a classic case of “black-boxing”
the sociotechnical hybrid of the meter and depoliticizing
the question at hand by making it a matter of technolog-
ical improvement. Alternatively, we might ask if the inner
workings of the meter, and its status as a technological op-
erator of wider interdependencies, were not less important
than when and how it became the site of collective concern
in the first place and how a collective formed itself around
it, turning to it as the site and source of political problems.
The agency attributed to the meter was not a property of
the meter itself. It was an effect, rather, of the attention paid
to the meter, the doubtfulness that was produced around it
by the ways parties on both sides of the dispute organized
their collective thinking by reference to it. The meter em-
blematized, in diverse ways, the wider disposition of pow-
ers in the new private power economy and provided a site
for questioning, or affirming, its legitimacy.
The middle-class mobilization that was, in part,
sparked by new electronic electricity meters in Delhi, and
that was inaugurated at the initial meeting of URJA, was
routinely disparaged by my academic interlocutors in Delhi
and by sections of the politically left-leaning, and right-
thinking, English-language press as “merely” consumer pol-
itics, a vulgar expression of discontent with high prices,
and not rising to the level of a mass movement or even
a politically interesting one (see Sethi 2005). Yet the ire
I witnessed in meetings, the passion that meter replace-
ment provoked, and the rhetoric of objectified progress
with which that discontent was met by the courts seemed
impossible to reconcile with notions of simple resistance,
bourgeois withdrawal and disdain for the problems of the
city, or reflex reactions to high prices. Neither was the is-
sue simply a matter of meters and their technological effi-
cacy; rather, what was important here was what the meter
463
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
revealed, and signified, about local residents’ interdepen-
dence. The meter controversy encodes a contemporary, and
bloodless, symbolics of technocratic managerialism that
nevertheless works, through such alternatively technophilic
and technophobic symbolizations, to create a body politic,
if an imprecisely bounded one. As William Mazzarella says,
the now-frequent moments in Indian public life in which a
demand for transparency and technocratic regularity meets
a collective anger or mobilization are “as much a matter
of [impersonal] affective surges as of carefully calibrated
canalization” (2006:497) of costs and benefits.
The “new” Indian middle classes have invested deeply
in ideas of transparency, regularity, and civic order, em-
ploying the power of the judiciary (through a jurisdictional
novelty called Public Interest Litigation, or PIL) to com-
pel the state to enforce planning codes and spurring mo-
bilizations around urban beautification, rights to informa-
tion, and anticorruption—most notably, the protests led in
2011 by Anna Hazare (Harriss 2011; Webb 2012).8 Far be-
yond the immediate context of electricity consumption, po-
litical subjectivity is newly linked to regulated, even “me-
tered,” use of common urban infrastructures, and new
forms of sumptuary and aesthetic dominance have devel-
oped within the urban political culture (Ghertner 2010). The
meter controversy and its judicial resolution—which came
in a private suit, not through PIL—represents a rare defeat
for these new forces of order, but precisely for that reason it
revealed something of the collective energy that drives and
organizes their micropolitics of urban space and how coun-
tervailing investment in such technological objects, and the
improvements they herald, grants these groups some real-
ity as social formations. Although other factors cultivated
the participation of “residents” in civic governance—itself
an exclusionary category, since it only refers to those who
have legal domicile in a formal, organized colony or housing
association—including government recognition of RWAs
as a site of civic participation through a program called
Bhagidari (Srivastava 2009), the meter controversy provided
an object and a context for mutual recognition of cross-
class interests, for people to see one another not only as
consumers but also as participants in a newly transformed
economy of civic ordering. The meter, as it became a focus
of controversy, also came to symbolize a collective partici-
pation in a sphere of public utilities under the sign of con-
sumption, helped form a symbolic identity for “residents”
who shared problems and interests with others, and mobi-
lized this new social formation toward political action.
Theoretical interlude: Emblems of participation
and belonging
Although they were motivated by the problems presented
by the comparative religion of the late 19th century, Emile
Durkheim’s (1995) investigations of the solidarizing force
464
attributed to material things by totemic thought, and his
speculations about the ways that elementary forms of social
cohesion are instrumented and organized by this thought,
still provide an important theoretical resource for under-
standing symbolic investments in and interpretations of
material and technological relations, such as those we en-
counter in the debate that unspooled in Delhi over meters
and who and what they connect.
In Durkheim’s account of religion, ritual practices are
not about mystical, animistic, and untrue beliefs but, rather,
are fundamentally veridical insofar as they stage and per-
form in the sensible world an otherwise ungraspable re-
ality: namely, the fundamental dependence of all people
on the collective, on society. “It is true with a truth eter-
nal,” Durkheim writes, restating his most important so-
ciological axiom, “that there exists outside us something
greater than we and with which we commune. That is why
we can be certain that acts of worship, whatever they may
be, are something other than paralyzed force, gesture with-
out motion” (1995:227). The social group that concretizes
and materializes this more general apperception of so-
cial force is, in turn, “possible only on condition of being
imaginable” (Durkheim 1995:235), and material emblems
of identity help to foster, and reproduce, the imagination
of specific collectivity out of the general apperception of
society.
“Nowhere can a collective feeling [un sentiment col-
lectif ] become consciousness of itself,” Durkheim writes,
“without fixing upon a tangible object.”9 The reciprocal
point is just as important: “By that very fact, it [un senti-
ment collectif ] participates in the nature of that object, and
vice versa” (Durkheim 1995:238). Importantly, the collective
form is not only anchored in things but things also take on
their collective representation and become “emblems,” and
their power to forge connections between separated sub-
jects and objects is not intrinsic to them but is, instead,
their social aspect, that which they derive from their use and
circulation in particular social, and ritual, contexts and by
which they “become consciousness.”
This forging of a collective body (and individual,
sensual bodies) out of things that represent—with a
difference—social relations is linked, by Durkheim, to a
greater freedom or malleability in this realm of “ensocialed”
things than in the world of pure materiality. This point
is worth attending to, for it poses precisely the interpre-
tive problem raised by the rigorous micrologism of Actor-
Network Theory. As Durkheim puts it,
The world of representations in which social life un-
folds is added to its material substrate, far indeed from
originating there. The determinism that reigns in the
world of representations is thus far more supple than
the determinism that is rooted in our flesh-and-blood
constitution, and it leaves the agent with a justified

impression of greater liberty. . . . The only means we
have of liberating ourselves from physical forces is to
oppose them with collective forces. [1995:274; also see
1912:389]
Durkheim opens, with this sociological principle, a
political possibility we might wish to retain. Importantly,
he does not insist that there is a real reality—a material
substratum—that motivates the abstraction of society, nor
does he imply that symbols and objects of collective ven-
eration can be disassembled into more elementary compo-
nent parts. By the same token, then, the emblem of the so-
cial group is not a mystification or a misrepresentation. The
emblem, or totem, is, rather, the material site where real,
but invisible, collective forces gather and are made accessi-
ble as representations and—more importantly—where rela-
tions between material exigency (the truth of dependency)
and collective organization (the possibility of politics) are
instrumented and operated.
This account of “totemic” relations to things, things
that organize and instrument fundamental relations, ori-
ents us toward the phenomenon of infrastructural politics
quite differently from any approach, such as that pursued
methodologically in Actor-Network Theory, that would fo-
cus on reconstructing the process by which a sociotechnical
relation is made concrete or on disassembling the compo-
nents of which it is made to reveal their contingent, or dis-
torted, associations. Thus, Chandra Mukerji’s (2009) elegant
account of the construction of the Canal du Midi in abso-
lutist France, like Mitchell’s (2011) argument about the pri-
macy of material infrastructures in the shaping of transna-
tional power structures, rests on the principle that we must
not be blinded by the great symbols of state power, which
pretend to organize, but only subsist on, organizations of
energy that are prior, material, and embedded in contexts
of local agency.
Through such a critical approach, the determinism that
is attributed to concentrated centers of social power is chal-
lenged by tracing out the multiple sites of material effort
and agency that, in fact, effectively produce those cen-
ters of power. Yet Mukerji ends her account with the ret-
rospective garbing of the canal’s material infrastructures in
architectural symbols of absolutist power, which she ac-
knowledges have guided its interpretation ever since. If we
abjure the task of exploring the meaning that such infras-
tructures have come to bear and how that meaning is sym-
bolized in those very infrastructures—beyond their struc-
turing as material networks, and through the relations by
which they are known and grasped for collective purposes—
we may end up attributing to meters, say, or windmills,
the very qualities that exist only in our collective repre-
sentations, such as progress and transparency or, alterna-
tively, dark and dominating powers, and hence tilt against
the wrong object entirely. As Durkheim consistently argued,
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
the work of representing and thus reproducing society can-
not only be a matter of contingent, ends-oriented produc-
tive work in common; it must also pose and answer ques-
tions about the source and value of life-in-common, and
the only way it can do that is through emblems, which
present society to its subjects and allow it to be known and
addressed.
This returns us to the larger significance of Agamben’s
interest in “glory,” or, more properly, practices of “glorifi-
cation” as a necessary, if often baleful, ingredient in polit-
ical action. In a late turn to anthropological comparisons,
Agamben (2011:224–227) draws on Mauss’s discussion of
prayer and Durkheim’s interest in the words that surround
sacred objects to underscore his argument about the fun-
damental and weighty role played in even the most mun-
dane politics by practices of glorification, acclamation, and
other ascriptions of power to an absent or mystical total-
ity. For him, glory and glorification—the practices of praise
and acclaim—are themselves the very site of a displace-
ment that sets the power of government in motion, for it is
through glorification that the fundamentally human prop-
erty of “inoperativity,” the “sabbatism” that is the kernel of
any truly human freedom, is expropriated by the state and
made the special attribute—the glory—of the sovereign.
Thus, Agamben identifies in the relation between material
organization and its glorification the site and source of the
“glory-economy apparatus”: in his terms, a “continuous ac-
tivity of government of the world, one that implies a fracture
between being and praxis and, at the same time, tries to heal
it” (2011:89).
Agamben’s attention to this aporia in the relation be-
tween material power and its meaning leads to a radical
reinterpretation of the forces that organize political and
economic order. In this reworking, social power cannot
be reduced to its material organization of mundane pow-
ers alone but, instead, involves symbolic action and mag-
ical relations in even its most banausic-seeming moments
(as when a new, improved metering system is installed).
Read further with Durkheim’s attention to the ways par-
ticular objects are shaped by, and then reshape, collec-
tive sentiments, Agamben’s account may help us under-
stand the work done by official scripts and justifications,
formulae of power, and laborious attributions of political
meaning to even the most mundane devices of collective
organization.
But interpretation here has to operate in the aporia that
exists, practically, between new productive energies and the
social purposes to which they may be put, the zone of doubt
and uncertainty where, for a time, the action and meaning
of meters or infrastructures is up for grabs when they are—
as sometimes happens—made objects of interpretive effort,
often enough in inauguratory rites but always in contexts
where collective meaning is ascribed to them. As Durkheim
reminds us, there is more freedom in the domain of
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
collective representations than in that of material necessity,
but the former is also the arena of sedimented meanings
and settled distributions of power, by which the individual
is appropriated into the reproduction of society.
To further explore how inauguratory rites and pro-
cesses of symbolization operate within and on the mate-
rial infrastructures of modernist production and distribu-
tion of energy, to grant them durable meaning and shape
a collective across them, I turn now to two historical cases
that demonstrate how deeply motivated certain collective
readings of infrastructure have been in modern states. Just
as the electronic meter came to serve new mobilizations of
collective affect in Delhi and sutured together disparate so-
cial actors into a group of “residents” united in their oppo-
sition to meter replacement (identity formation on a small
scale), so too in the historical Indian and Scottish contexts
of state- and nation-building, infrastructures were bound
and shaped by practices that made them symbolize and
serve the life of the nation and its collective progress (iden-
tity formation on a somewhat larger scale).
Material dreams in postindependence India
The first half of the 20th century was marked, globally, by
a novel conception of infrastructure—energy, communica-
tions, and transport, but especially electricity supply and
the devices and media it supported—as the means and
medium of political connection and, indeed, as the basic
condition for any robust participation in the life of society
(Mrazek 2002; Tobey 1996).
Debates about the political ordering of productive in-
frastructures took on a particular coloring in colonized so-
cieties because of the close connection between liberal
justifications of empire and the material affordances of “civ-
ilization.” In India, the bridges, canals, ports, and railroads
that were a material ordering of the colony were consis-
tently treated as metonyms of colonial power in its “improv-
ing” mood (Metcalf 1995). But by the early 20th century, In-
dian nationalist intellectuals were able to reshape the terms
of the debate, arguing that colonial infrastructures were in-
sufficient for the development of India’s own civilization.
From the late 19th century onward, colonial infrastruc-
tures were seen by Indian intellectuals as unmodern and
already antiquated, remnants of an era of technology that
was already waning, that only fostered an export-oriented
expropriation of Indian productive capacities and, hence,
stood as evidence of India’s decline—not its progress—at
the hands of the colonial state.
For Indian nationalists (of all stripes), achieving
India’s political freedom would involve investing in those
technological infrastructures that would, through their
material renovation and political reappropriation, pro-
duce both freedom and power (Zachariah 2005). Even
Gandhians “found a place in their development strate-
466
gies for selected large-scale industrial facilities, particularly
those that would supply electrical power” (Adas 2006:273).
The real institutions that reproduced and extended this
dream of infrastructural transformation were vast, with po-
litical effects that by no means necessarily accorded with
their avowed intention of social inclusion and progressive
material improvement for all of India’s citizens, as Partha
Chatterjee (1998) has long been at pains to show in his
studies of the antipolitical and expropriative effects of eco-
nomic planning and large-scale development. The sharp
edge of Chatterjee’s critique is that postcolonial states took
into themselves a historical agency and freedom of action
that more properly belonged to the people. But his account
stints the very modernist, state-led rituals of emblemati-
zation and glorification that garbed productive infrastruc-
tures in significance for all of society and granted them
a national meaning, fixing certain relations between na-
tion, people, and progress in ways that are perhaps bet-
ter grasped, in Agamben’s terms, as the appropriation of
“inoperativity” through glory than as the direct disposses-
sion of popular powers (which may not ever have existed
as such). Be that as it may, the dreams of social and po-
litical transformation were real, constantly propagandized,
and involved a hortatory call to “the people” to partic-
ipate in the great historical project of building a “New
India” by adopting and embracing new technologies—
especially “modern” habits of intensive energy use (Roy
2007:111).
As the journalist Ved Mehta records in an excellent vi-
gnette about the opening of the major state-funded steel
plant built with Soviet support in Bhilai in the 1950s, this
historical project of state and infrastructure building in-
volved not only mobilization of people, materials, natural
forces, and formal political propaganda but also elicitation
of popular poetry and songs of praise to ornament the new
infrastructures of modernity. “One afternoon in February of
1959,” Mehta writes, “several hundred administrators, engi-
neers, designers, and laborers who had been working on the
construction of a new steel plant in Bhilai . . . gathered by
the blast furnace, with their wives and children, to witness
the smelting of the first iron” (1970:285). The initial smelt-
ing of iron ore was successful, and the promise of that first
“birth of liquid gold” was some years later memorialized in
a volume of poetry, a collection of songs of praise (written by
the workers themselves, in their various languages) to the
steel plant and the infrastructural powers it promised for
India. Mehta offers extracts from the poems: “Let this gar-
land [of molten ore] glitter around the neck of our mother
country,” one poet writes. Another provides the following
couplet:
Lo! The Blast Furnace is alight
Pouring molten iron, oh, WHAT delight. [Mehta
1970:299]

Mehta comments that “the poetic wealth lies not so
much in the craftsmanship of the poets, who are, after all,
amateurs, as in the quality of their emotional response to
the steel plant” (1970:288). Ultimately, Mehta treats the lit-
tle volume as evidence of the “exaggerated response that
the advent of technology can evoke in a poor country”
(1970:300).
More recent ethnographic work in Bhilai by Jonathan
Parry (1999), however, indicates that the dream has not
died, that decades of critique of planning and heavy indus-
try have not dinted the popular associations between heavy
industry, state power, political belonging, and freedom that
organize collective aspirations and vest them in the state.
The crucial, instant point is that the associations that Mehta
sees as naive, popular responses to the absolute novelty
of the steel plant were long prepared by the symbolic la-
bor of creating a technological vision of independent India,
which took shape within the very institutions dedicated to
rational planning and material organization of the produc-
tive forces of the country. Many years earlier, before inde-
pendence, the Indian planning committee—a body of the
National Congress Party—had set out to survey the electri-
cal needs of the country. It spoke of its mission, prospec-
tively, in much the same terms as the poets who limned
the beauties of the steel plant. “The part played by elec-
tric power in developing the country’s industries, trans-
portation, and national life in general, is simply colos-
sal,” the Planning Committee wrote in one report (Shah
1949:25, emphasis added). “Electrical energy is something
more than a commodity; it is the very life blood of the indus-
trial nation which must flow abundantly and without inter-
ruption if the nation’s strength and well-being are to be pre-
served” (Shah 1949:71, emphasis added).
This paean to electricity and its immaterial agency in
producing the progress of the country is, like the poetry that
celebrates the steel plant, the characteristic response to in-
frastructural projects of a certain colonial nationalism, pre-
pared by the “colonial sublime” of great technological dis-
plays that once projected the suzerainty of Europe (Larkin
2008). That is, more than just a materialist project of pure
instrumentalities, an antipolitics of planning and subordi-
nation to imperatives of both technocracy and capital, plan-
ning and developmentalism also linked technology and in-
frastructure to belonging and national historicity through
an arduous symbolic politics in which the future and mean-
ing of society, as a free society, were indissolubly linked to its
technological, infrastructural constitution as a nation.
As Gyan Prakash has argued, the colonial state had
knit together the territory of India as a unitary space for
the working of state power through technical means and
constituted the landscape and people of India as a “stand-
ing reserve” in Heideggerian terms through the construc-
tion of an artificial totality of irrigation networks, bridges,
dams, telegraphs, and railways. Nationalists subsequently
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
were faced with the problem of taking over the unitary
India thus constituted and recasting that artificial body “as
the expression of the nation; . . . rescripting the rationality
of colonial governance as the logic of the nation.” The na-
tionalists were “obliged . . . to visualize that the [colonial]
order of rational artifice fulfilled the coming into existence
of a people” (Prakash 1999:160). That is, material infrastruc-
tures shaped and organized the colonized people in relation
to their productive capacities, but the nation then had to
be imagined within these material conditions and had to
be mobilized itself—immaterially, as a people—to extend
and reproduce them. The period of the arc thus sketched
from material agencies to symbolic mobilization and back
again traces the temporality of the nation itself, oscillating
between its archaic past and its dreams of great transforma-
tions.
Government by infrastructures in midcentury
Scotland
Such connections between technical infrastructures in their
visible materiality, the forces of production they symbol-
ize, and the ritual mobilization of collective meaning can be
traced equally well in the case of Scottish politics in the mid-
20th century. The infrastructural projects of the UK state in
Scotland can, like the projects of the colonial state in India,
be interpreted as a form of material discipline and techno-
logical framing of land and people as at once resources and
a governable unit. But, much as in India in Scotland both
material infrastructures and institutions of rational govern-
ment became sites for extension and routing of collective
aspirations and for the canalization of “affective surges”
(Mazzarella’s term, see above) toward the formation of a
self-conscious and political collective.
Scotland is, paradigmatically, a “stateless nation”—a
community that lacks “its own” state—yet it has hardly
been untouched by state administration in its history. The
modern sociological consensus—from all sides of the ideo-
logical spectrum—is that in the absence of an autonomous
state, the institutions of the church, law, and education
(Hearn 1999:129–132), and particularly those of collective
provision, provided the material site for the formation of
Scottish national identity (McCrone 1992; Paterson 1994).
Two recent critics of this legacy write that “‘Scottishness’
as a collective identity has been imprinted by social policy”
and welfare institutions (Law and Mooney 2012:163).
Indeed, it was on this terrain of autonomous admin-
istration and good government that Scotland’s first mod-
ern movements for political self-rule, in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, were formed, making practical calls
for better government as much as for self-government.
Early Scottish campaigns for home rule were, contemporary
historian Reginald Coupland comments drily, motivated
“only by a dry and practical question—the machinery of
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
government” (1954:281). This phrasing, of course, begs the
question of what counts as a merely utilitarian and what
as a symbolic object of politics. While any form of home
rule for Scotland was deferred throughout the 20th century,
governing still required the creation of material infrastruc-
tures that spurred collective aspirations and became sites of
ritualization and affective integration. The growth of sepa-
rate administrative and productive infrastructures was not,
as Coupland seems to think, a mere sop to sentimental af-
filiations, with the word Scottish being added to any num-
ber of governmental departments and parliamentary bills.
The behemothian new buildings and literal machineries
that served the growth of the UK state in Scotland, para-
doxically, provided the very sites and centers of a national
self-recognition, granting distant governmental power a
Scottish habitation and a name (Finlay 2004:224–234).
The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NSHEB)
provides a particularly clear example of an infrastruc-
tural institution intertwining with and transforming po-
litical consciousness. The NSHEB was one of a number
of institutions founded or reorganized during the years of
World War II by the Labour politician, socialist, and proudly
Scottish secretary of state for Scotland Thomas Johnston.
Exploitation of Scotland’s hydropower resources was cen-
tral to Johnston’s developmentalist vision of social advance.
By 1948, 12 large dam and power-generation schemes were
underway, and about fifty of various sizes would be com-
pleted by the late 1960s; by 1971, nearly all farms and 90
percent of crofts (smallholdings, usually tenancies) in the
Highlands and Islands were electrified (Payne 1988:201).
The daily life of large swaths of Scotland was transformed,
and new centers were created where the power and benef-
icence of the state, and Scotland’s own powers, could be
clearly seen. And seen they were: The NSHEB’s “dams,
power stations, and other installations,” according to one
pamphlet issued by the board, “which during their con-
struction aroused world-wide technical interest, are now at-
tracting an increasing number of tourists” (NSHEB 1955).
Through stately inaugurations, the infrastructural
projects of the NSHEB were further enriched by meaning
and connected with the highest symbols of collective life.
The Queen (later the Queen Mother) opened the Loch Sloy
dam and power works with great pomp in 1950; her daugh-
ter, by then Queen Elizabeth II, traveled north in 1955 to
open the Cruachan Scheme. That event, as it transpired,
was scheduled in advance of the completion of the project,
and the tunnels that would link the dynamos to the hydro-
logical works were still incomplete. To ensure the full effect
of the inauguration, a motor was rigged up to drive the tur-
bines upon the Queen’s ceremonial action of opening, and
lights were installed to give the impression of water rushing
through the distant tunnels (Miller 2002:236). This antici-
patory inauguration, with all its theatrical effects, indicates
indeed that the material form of infrastructures was, if not
468
less important than, at least temporarily subservient to the
maintenance and renewal of symbolic connections to con-
stituted and consecrated centers of social power.
One final example, to conclude. In the 1970s, the
NSHEB built an oil-fired power plant at Peterhead, near
Aberdeen and the North Sea oil fields that were once again
fueling a Scottish imagination of independence under the
motto “It’s Scotland’s Oil!” By this time, the aim and tenor
of stately inaugurations had begun to change, and there
was no royal visit. Instead, the NSHEB commissioned the
artist Ian Hamilton Finlay to propose a visitors’ center and
landscape program for the environs of the plant. Finlay in-
cluded in his plans one of his characteristic inscribed boul-
ders, on which he proposed to set the motto “It’s Scotland’s
Oil,” but with the word oil crossed out (but still visible) and
supplemented by the word Atlantis. This new motto, “It’s
Scotland’s Atlantis,” was meant to invoke the real resource
of the nearby sea. Finlay (1978) said that this emendation
would keep the motto, and the intention of the design, rele-
vant long after the oil rigs had gone.
Finlay’s proposal underscores the historical mutabil-
ity of infrastructural imaginations and their ceremonial in-
teguments. At the same time, by tying the new source of
energy—oil—to stereotypically Scottish tropes of stone, sea,
and fishing, it links the power plant at Peterhead to the
land and to collective sovereignty in ways earlier achieved
by royal visits and picture-book images of highland glens
transformed by rugged dams and power installations. Con-
fronted with such vigorous propaganda, the material suc-
cess or failure of the NSHEB as an institution of develop-
ment is not a matter of great relevance—the meaning of its
installations can be measured neither by whether it brought
industry and prosperity to the glens (it did not) nor by
whether a large state institution, burdened with social re-
quirements and charged with massive landscape transfor-
mations, was a “rational” way to invest in social and techno-
logical transformation, either economically or ecologically.
As the author of the official history of “the Hydro” is at pains
to point out, all “narrow accountings” of the NSHEB’s per-
formance are “guilty of ignoring those unquantifiable fac-
tors that were so real to Thomas Johnston” (Payne 1988:102)
as way of measuring the success of this institution of infras-
tructural provision.
Hidden powers
It might even be said that the logic of these immaterial,
unquantifiable, and ritual distributions of sovereignty and
power within and across infrastructure is finally coming to
historical fruition in today’s properly political movement for
collective self-determination and continued development
of national resources. The Scottish National Party (SNP),
who advocate Scottish independence, secured an unprece-
dented majority in the Scottish parliamentary elections in

2011, and they have pinned their pennant to the idea of
independence for Scotland—an independence to be sus-
tained by its hydro- and wind-power resources, its oil, and
the energies of all the people who live there. The SNP have
set the country on a road, if not ultimately to independence,
at least to a larger role for the devolved parliament, and a
referendum is scheduled for September 2014, to pose the
question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”
In his New Year’s address in 2011, the SNP first minister,
Alex Salmond, cited a phrase from a poem by the Scottish
writer and nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid:10
For we ha’e faith in Scotland’s hidden poo’ers,
The present’s theirs, but a’ the past and future’s oors
[1967:59]
Salmond went on to herald Scotland as a “country of
innovation” and to celebrate the achievements of his ad-
ministration in fostering energy and medical research and
generally promoting investments in education and infras-
tructures to develop Scotland’s hidden powers and shape a
more modern, prosperous life for all Scots. There is nothing
particularly distinguished about this speech or Salmond’s
rhetoric—in this regard, it is perhaps ironic that in the poem
Salmond quotes from, MacDiarmid himself was referring
to Scots language and linguistic creativity as the engine of
a Scottish poetic revival. That aside, Salmond’s invocation
of Scotland’s “hidden poo’ers” at the same moment that
he talked of collective advance and infrastructural invest-
ment indicates that the aporetic relation between symbols
of identity and the material bases of belonging and life-in-
common continues to be a powerful site of cultural work in
contemporary Scotland, in ways that cannot be reduced to
either material foundations or the power of ideas alone.
Conclusion: Moral forces
“It can be done,” Sally Falk Moore wrote in introducing a
collection of papers on “Moralizing States” in 1993: Projects
of dominance and hierarchy, and also pallid bureaucratic
hopes of order and consistency, can be made orienting
realities for entire groups of people and can take on the
character of a moral and personal necessity, whatever their
support in the brute realities of material existence (Moore
1993:1). “Attributing moral significance to political ideas is
one way to sacralize them and remove them from the cate-
gory of the debatable,” she said, but if “the attempt probably
fails as often as it succeeds” (1993:1), it is still worth paying
attention to the official scripts and scenes of political com-
mitment through which the effort of moralizing what are of-
ten simply material exigencies is, in fact, made. For through
such official scripts and public performances symbols are
forged as emblems, rich with traces of a sedimented social
past, and material signs are charged with meaning for be-
longing.
Infrastructure and interpretation  American Ethnologist
Electricity meters and the connections they reveal may
become the site of a social mobilization; the productive in-
frastructures of modern life may come to symbolize a col-
lective political future. Of course, one lesson to take here,
especially from the meter controversy, is that people do
not always put the symbols and material forms invested
with such meaning to their intended purpose—indeed,
one could say that, left to their own devices, they almost
never would. More broadly, however, the material connec-
tions that constitute people’s social and political relations
to things and to each other are summarized and condensed
in devices and emblems that cannot, anthropologically, be
reduced to simple associations, to form without content. In-
frastructure, of course, is one of the more visible, material,
and powerful aspects of the state in modern times, but it
is also a site in which the material orderings of society and
collective meanings meet, exchange properties, and are re-
newed in an endless dance of aporetic relation.
I have described this relation, first, in the local context
of the meter controversy in Delhi and sought it also in the
larger-scale historical projects of national formation and
infrastructural development, examining at different levels
how modern technologies of electricity production and dis-
tribution have been interpreted and ritualized to link mod-
ern publics together and have served as a site where peo-
ple collectively find both a material locus of becoming and
an interpretive context for claims of community, belong-
ing, and collective sovereignty. The content of each collec-
tive consciousness—Delhi resident, Indian, Briton, Scot—
is, of course, distinctive, varying with the particularities of
cultural belonging, form of state power, and historical mo-
ment; it also varies with the infrastructural form available
to it—great installations or the micrological disciplines of
metering—and, as I have argued, with the vicissitudes of rit-
ual and symbolic formations that make those abstractions
knowable and workable in a politics of belonging. What
remains constant over these cases is the moral effort to
make the material conditions of life-in-common matter, to
seize on infrastructures of connection as part of a collective
project—indeed, as the very stuff of collectivity.
I have drawn attention, in my descriptions, to the mor-
alizing, collective, interpretive work that shapes the deploy-
ment of infrastructures and grants them collective mean-
ing. This focus on the moral distinguishes my ethnographic
and historical accounts from what I see as an overrational
emphasis elsewhere on the material force and instrumental
logic of infrastructures. This is not to deny the importance
of the patient labor of tracing out material connections. For
their part, Latour (2005) and Mitchell (2011)—to treat them,
finally, as exemplary of a certain recent approach to in-
frastructure and technological devices—make great strides
in challenging the fixed associations, both symbolic and
material, that confine accounts of infrastructural politics
and powers to artificially bounded territories and that can-
not see beyond achieved and concretized assemblages.
469
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
Meanwhile, the utility of Actor-Network Theory has been
shown repeatedly in studies that specify the expert, rhetori-
cal, and technical procedures by which certain problematic
connections are elided and real proximities are obscured
(Appel 2012). Additionally, the work of following networks
of connections and showing how they are bundled, linked,
and made up, which Latour takes as his methodological
credo, does provide a critical brake against what he calls
the “acceleration” of analysis into the misty realms of social
forces.
However, both Actor-Network Theory and material-
ist descriptions of the micrological efficacy of infrastruc-
tures have to presume as their analytic privilege that the
connections and interdependencies of a material infras-
tructure can ultimately be exhaustively accounted for and
described (see Latour 2005:25). This premise entails ne-
glecting the reality and the force of the representational—
and represented—collective, and social appropriations to
which material assemblages are subject, and through which
they take form.
In practical fact, the connections, interdependencies,
and encounters of an electricity or water system are never
totally surveyable and require constant checking and main-
tenance, in an “iterative process that needs repetition, re-
newal work, and revalidation” (Anand 2011:559). This pro-
cess happens materially, to be sure, but each connection
is also assessed with reference to aspects of social iden-
tity and its differentiae, which can only be captured in a
symbolic and collective register. Hence, in minor rituals of
maintenance and in great inaugurations, material connec-
tions are linked to collective identity—to caste or religious
identity, as Nikhil Anand (2011) shows in his study of the
social assessment of connections to the water infrastruc-
ture in Mumbai, or to class and national identity, as in my
rather differently scaled examples. Meanwhile, each con-
nection in its material form can come to emblematize such
an identity—though this result is by no means certain. Read
symbolically, that is, the work of material maintenance is
also a process that involves constantly checking the mean-
ing of the connections as they are made, reinforcing their
discrimination of belonging, and marking possibilities for
renewed participation. In sum, the productive connections
that are extended across infrastructures and the forces that
emerge from them cannot all be materially catalogued and
assessed, since they create magical arcs across distance, fuel
imaginative leaps and shape solidarities, and remain indis-
soluble, as meaningful resources for later reinterpretations.
These meaningful elements of infrastructural utilities
also provide hidden potential—they are the poet’s “auld vol-
canoes” that “rummle” beneath our feet. The moralizing
work of state power more often, perhaps, places infrastruc-
tural utilities in a domain of unquestionable necessity or
operates as if material constraints compel certain political
choices. But the power and the glory that remain in the re-
peated ritual performances of promises now forgotten, lost,
470
or in abeyance, demand our attention and offer unique re-
sources for further interpretation.
Finally, Agamben’s (2011) investigation of the aporetic
relation between transcendent meaning and immanent or-
der helps us see that the mutual conversions between imag-
inative connection and material relation, between dreams
and matter, that are achieved in infrastructure operate at
the economic or “ordering” core of political life. And we
have found there, in this aporetic relation between mean-
ing and material connections, the very site of symbolic
production, with its fostering of differentiae. This relation,
with its aporias and its possible resolutions, is integral to
any infrastructure—to the ways it distributes, regulates, and
meters the solidarities and separations of a wider economy
of power. Insofar as there is doubt about how and for whom
the matter that connects itself matters, this aporetic rela-
tion also provides a site for reinterpretation and mobiliza-
tion of new collectivities. The collective representation that
infrastructure comes, historically, to bear thus supplements
its always doubtful efficacy and the ever-insufficient mate-
rial connections it in fact effects, and this may, in the end,
be the most important thing about it.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article is based on research conducted
in Delhi in 2003 and 2005–06 supported by Princeton University
and an Individual Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion, and ethnographic and archival research in Edinburgh (2012)
that was supported by a grant from the Ohio State University Mer-
shon Center for International Security Studies. I am grateful for
the support of these institutions. My thanks to Carol Greenhouse,
John Janusek, Roy Dilley, and Philip Armstrong, and to the gradu-
ate students in Comparative Studies at Ohio State, particularly Puja
Batra-Wells and Matthew O’Malley, for conversations that helped
me navigate both my own ethnographic interpretations and rele-
vant literatures (with the usual reservations about my sole respon-
sibility for all facts and interpretations and for any errors of com-
mission or omission). The comments of two anonymous readers
for American Ethnologist and editor Angelique Haugerud provided
great help in focusing these arguments and were essential in shap-
ing the final form of this article.
1. This, at least, was the official justification for privatization—
at the same time, privatization was feasible in Delhi precisely be-
cause the city had the highest number of metered connections of
any state utility in India.
2. The case was Suresh Jindal vs. BSES Rajdhani. These quotes
come from the Delhi High Court judgment in the case, 126 [2006]
DLT 49 (see Indian Kanoon n.d.). The relevant passages are at para-
graph 19.
3. I draw here, implicitly, on Marshall Sahlins’s long “confronta-
tion” with materialisms, and, in particular, I build from his de-
fense of “infrastructuralism” as a method of anthropological inter-
pretation. By “infrastructuralism,” Sahlins (2010) does not mean
to refer to actual technological infrastructures of the sort I dis-
cuss here but, rather, aims to trace the transformation of mate-
rial relations into “cosmic utilities” and vice versa, and he situates
anthropology’s vocation as offering an account of such fundamen-
tal relations, whether they are material or symbolic.

4. The conflict between materialist or utilitarian and symbolic or
“culturalist” approaches in anthropology really is not a new one—
perhaps the best review of the theoretical alternatives, stretching
back to Lewis Henry Morgan and Franz Boas, is Sahlins 1976:55–
125.
5. To the extent that Agamben is concerned with the “economic”
question of how a world of people, things, and powers is assem-
bled, the assembly that matters is that which convokes a people
in and through this aporetic relation between being and acting. It
is not therefore, accidental that Agamben (2011:257) reserves his
strongest criticisms for Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a postconsti-
tutional world of communication without a subject and insists, in-
stead, that symbolic communication allocates agency and orga-
nizes power, and thus that it always refers to a political subject and
a bounded collective body.
6. Despite its initially open, democratic, and public appearance
and its appeal to the effervescence of the people, URJA quickly, as is
often the case with such “civil society” initiatives, professionalized
and retreated from direct public accessibility and accountability as
it became more prominent in the news.
7. The 3 percent maximum is specified by provisions that have
not changed since the Indian Electricity Act of 1910. The RWA ac-
tivist’s knowledge of and use of legally established standards in his
complaint is characteristic of the groups’ “civil” appeals to law and
order.
8. The much-discussed anticorruption mobilizations (which led
to the electoral success of the Aam Aadmi party in Delhi in 2013)
drew form and energy from some of the very associational prac-
tices that emerged in the aftermath of power privatization, spurred
by new regimes of citizen participation and self-representation that
are the ideological cousin of privatization. The politics of these re-
cent mobilizations is ambivalent with regard to the powers of the
state and their allocation among private actors, seizing delegated
or privatized powers as often as challenging the propriety of such
reforms.
9. “Un sentiment collectif ne peut prendre conscience de soi
qu’en se fixant sur un objet matériel.” In Karen Fields’s transla-
tion, the somewhat awkward phrasing “become consciousness”
precisely emphasizes that it is a shared consciousness of society as
something alien and irreducible to the individual that is at stake in
this passage.
10. A summary of Salmond’s speech and a link to video are avail-
able at Scottish Government 2011.
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Leo Coleman
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451 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210
coleman.514@osu.edu