Living along infrastructural lines: Following electricity in Hunza

This chapter demonstrates the value of Tim Ingold’s work on lines for anthropological studies of ‘infrastructure’. It focuses on Ingold’s notions of lines and corresponding materials. The chapter explains how approaching phenomena like electricity with Ingold’s writings might widen our understanding of life along infrastructure. Electricity infrastructure means not generating but organising and channelling energy. The production of hydro energy and its unequal distribution in Hunza shows how infrastructure is enmeshed in social and material worlds. Taking Tim Ingold’s ideas into account enables the ethnographer to observe the “energetic entanglements” around infrastructural lines, instead of being preoccupied with single entities containing ‘agency’, direct materialised political connections, or spectacular symbolic constructions. Seeing infrastructure as a loose knot in the lines of continuously flowing materials, sometimes halting energies, everyday practices and feelings might help us to better understand how life is lived.