Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Ethiopia by Daniel Mains (review)

The basic argument of this finely crafted ethnographic study is that "construction" in a developing country—in this case Ethiopia—is a multidimensional phenomenon of both a material and symbolic nature, and fraught with both progress or infrastructural improvements as well as disruption and destruction. Daniel Mains has highlighted these two poles in their interactive entanglements in the daily lives of ordinary Ethiopians in urban settings. He specifically approaches construction as a "site for exploring everyday encounters between citizens, the state, and infrastructural technologies" (2). Under Construction is based on in-depth fieldwork in Ethiopia, a self-designated "developmental" state and a country going through a major phase of political, economic, and social reconstruction, not to say upheaval. Indeed, the country's government over the past two decades has been obsessed with development in a quantitative sense: more roads, more power lines, more buildings, more concrete as prime measurement of progress (with one Minister some time ago boasting about the "developmental achievement" of a record m³ of concrete poured out during the preceding budget year).

Mains's work has a relevant but light theoretical touch, inspired by neo-Marxism and postmodern political studies of governance, and connects to a recent but rapidly growing scholarly tradition of infrastructural studies: of technologies, roads, monumental buildings/projects, or transport systems. Much attention is (rightly) paid to "productive inequalities" (the dynamics of which are best described in the chapter on the Bajaj, the motorcycle taxi, see below), and to the interaction of people, labor, state officers, and the material elements of change—the stones, asphalt, concrete, dust, machines, water in stagnant or flowing form, fuel, and mud. Throughout the book, the analysis of "temporalities" is key, referring to the rhythms, expectations, and practices of change, produced by the interaction of state construction activities with people's engagements and responses to them in their own lives. Mains convincingly demonstrates that focusing on "construction" provides an ideal framework to understand such temporal changes.

One of the strengths of this book is indeed the fine-grained exploration of how such infrastructural works, planned and executed (though not always completed) by a dirigiste (ambitious) state are interpreted and responded to by citizens—i.e. how they "navigate" the challenges and disruptive effects in their quotidian routines and their livelihood strategies. "Construction" often comes as part of a wider—political—package that attempts to build or reconstruct "legitimacy" for the state, as Mains demonstrates most clearly in his first chapter on the building of the mammoth Blue Nile hydro-electricity dam in Ethiopia (the "Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam," or GERD), started under the autocratic first prime minister of federal Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi (in power in 1991–2012). In his analysis, Mains connects to some core themes, often made in the literature, on state legitimacy building, problematic planning in the face of strategies of subversion and "adaptation," and people's covert resistance, but his case material is good and original and analyzed in a perceptive and phenomenological style. He illustrates his account with a number of sometimes pretty dismal photographs of blocked, torn-up roads and mud pools, and of propagandistic state posters of grand projects, but also of nice finished traffic lanes, and of people working on the cobblestone roads. Unfortunately, the chapter on the Bajaj has no pictures.

The book has five core chapters—which were also published earlier as journal articles, but are well-connected—that share a focus on innovative, indeed transformative, developmental technologies: the large GERD hydro-electric dam (still under construction); urban asphalt road building and its impact on individual lives and communities; the "affective" dimensions of urban development, in that the state evokes attachment or rejection of citizens; the three-wheel motorcycle taxis (the Bajaj) and their attempted "governance" by city authorities in Hawassa; and the massive cobblestone road building enterprise. The arena of all five cases is urban (the cities of Jimma and Hawassa); the methods and the reporting are qualitative.

The main interpretive argument...