Paper Short Abstract:

Engaging with the selling of solar in Kenya, the relational forms emerging in this field as well as to questions of how solar infrastructures come to sit squarely within capitalist relations. I ask: how much can the anthropology of infrastructures attentively and legitimately ‘think together’?

Paper Abstract:

From the perspective of an ongoing research project concerned with the coming into being of solar off-grid infrastructures in Kenya, the paper reflects critically on the centrality of the ‘infrastructure lens’ for understanding how present-day infrastructure figures in efforts to stabilize capitalist formations. Solar companies have featured as key players in the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ terrain, committed towards delivering a social, environmental and economic good while at the same time creating consumer subjects and markets that go ‘far beyond solar’. Door-to-door solar sales agents are crafted into an emergent class of ‘development entrepreneurs’, instructed to conjure to the solar customers a future in which “previously unim¬aginable consumption becomes conceivable” (Dolan 2012: 7). The efforts of solar entrepreneurs in building renewable energy infrastructures become saturated with market-centered messages and logics. Solar customers, with limited access to formal financial services, come to buy products on pay-as-you-go mobile money loans – in turn being classified as ‘creditworthy’ or ‘non-creditworthy’ payers. All these point to infrastructures of data and scoring, and more generally to how digital, financial and business infrastructures are converging with the former. The paper suggests, drawing on this empirical example, that anthropology might currently be witnessing a splintering into different infrastructure approaches (as have partly been delineated by Buier 2023) and efforts to perhaps coalesce in ever more ‘subfields of the subfield’. Yet a more hopeful future for infrastructure studies appears to demand that they still be legitimately and attentively thought together without falling into the trap of open-ended assemblages.