Square Inch Anthropology

Posted on an electricity transformer box at the main intersection of an industrial suburb of Chengdu are warnings on how to use electricity in a safe manner (or, more poetically phrased: "Dissemination of General Knowledge about Safely Using Electricity"), along with the varied consequences of failing to do so. Several frames feature people doing their own construction, while others (the "divided" frames) display actual repercussions of either disassembling electrical equipment (presumably to sell) and "rolling back" one's electricity meter. Each prominently features handcuffs, the boys in blue, and, that strongest of emotions, shame (yet it remains open for interpretation whether it is implying that it is only illegal if one is caught, or if it is framing the state as omniscient). Whether the creator's attempt to frame undesirable behaviors and their consequences as an "If A, then B" is successful is indeed open to interpretation - how many would view this warning and think "Hmm, disassembling the hardware on an electrical pole/rolling back my meter - now there's a fine idea to make some money." The use of red "lightning bolts" is also a risk for the implication that something both potentially dangerous and otherwise invisible is actually "observable" - "Just look for the red lightning bolts radiating out of those black cables, if you can't see them then you should be fine." How best to indicate a "live" wire, though? 

Think about the relative degree of contact you have with your local electrical infrastructure, and what influences the level and dynamics of that contact - the degree of protection/sequestering of said infrastructure? A greater availability of professionals around to deal with the management of said electrical infrastructure (along with the resources to afford paying for them)? Threat of stronger legal sanction and a greater ability to enforce said laws? Stronger education about electricity, or simply exposure to electricity for a longer period of time? If one experiences an electrical problem in your context, would the prevailing instinct be to fix it oneself?

For each modernization, the "price of progress" varies by context. Consider what a comparable set of warnings would look like where you are - the behaviors they would target, the examples they would employ (and their implied threats and emotions they would hope to evoke), what media they would use, where they would be positioned (if they occupied a physical space, that is), and perhaps most importantly by whose authority/in whose interest they would be posted.

As I get into the swing of things here in the Middle Kingdom, I aspire to get back on the wagon with more routine longer-form updates on my research (as opposed to the tidal wave of Instagrams to which I’ve recently been subjecting everyone). In the meantime, as I make my apartment here in Chongqing more inhabitable I was reminded of an incident following a move-in from the past:

A faint knock on the door turned what would have been a drizzly evening spent at home into something more memorable. In the midst of moving into a new apartment in Yangon, I had forgotten that I’d scheduled a large vinyl poster to be delivered that night. As the trio of workers kicked off their flip-flops and filed into my apartment, weighed down with timber and tools, I realized their plan for getting a seven-foot wide poster across downtown Yangon consisted of simply carrying the frame and poster over in separate pieces and assembling it on site. It just so happened that, in this case, “on site” was my living room.

The supervisor had a bolt of insight: Grabbing the plug at the end of the power cord, he produced a razor and neatly sliced that end of the wire off, tossing aside the plug and cutting away at the vinyl coating around the pair of exposed wires. Handing the two exposed wires to his assistant, the supervisor grabbed the drill and directed his assistant to plug the wires into the two available holes of the nearest outlet while he stood upon an adjacent chair to drill the holes.

It was at this point that I distinctly remember regretting delaying my decision to purchase a fire extinguisher. 

Amazingly, the drill functioned as normal, and nobody ended up cooked. Still, the supervisor would likely not have elected to cut the end off of his drill if he had had the choice. It was the lack of compatible outlets that drove him to sacrifice the functionality of his drill - although one could argue that, were a wire-holding assistant always available, he had just created a universally compatible power drill.

The plugs in Yangon are a seemingly random combination of all possible options, and a given outlet may feature interfaces for multiple plug types. A place's “standard” plug conveys that context's particular history, as the most common type of plug may ends up being from the country that once occupied/colonized a place, or from whom electrical goods were first imported for use there. Think of places like Myanmar that lack a standard, or, depending upon how you frame it, has many “standards” – how has their past dictated their present in these terms? Will a "standard" emerge in Myanmar's future based upon what happens in the present?

Zooming out, how are we all progressing towards a common standard? Here, I don’t mean a world of only one type of plug and one voltage – I mean a world without any plugs or concepts of "voltage" whatsoever. Considering recent technological advances, how far off is universal wireless charging? After that, how far off are we from forgetting what plugs and wires ever were? From a colorful past of many plugs and multiple voltages, how far off is convergence upon a true “standard”? Why is/n’t this “good”?

A 20-liter water bottle has been repurposed to feed a constant supply of water into a generator. For institutions with high electrical demand, such as movie theaters or, in this case, a hotel, insuring generators are operating smoothly can be a full-time job during the blackout-prone dry season. Overemployment in such large institutions also helps, sometimes making it several people's jobs to insure the generators turn on when they need to (and diffusing other employees' collective rage across multiple individuals when they inevitably sometimes fail to do so).

This particular task was reserved for the late evening because of both its relative quiet compared to the noisier stages of construction, and also its reliance upon electricity as opposed to more manual (and noisy) processes of hammering, hand-sawing, etc . With electricity access revolving by neighborhood throughout the day, this late-night welding within a soon-to-be religious structure in downtown Yangon is just one of the many impacts the dry season's electricity rationing has upon economic life of Myanmar's largest city.

This sidewalk-based key & lock guy repurposes his space by hanging keys, doorknobs, and other trade items from the window behind him (along with his sign, claiming he fixes any and all kinds of locks and also repairs, buys, and sells safes). Consider how the space for an informal sidewalk-based business is valued, and the factors that affect that space's value. Like other, more formal businesses across the world, such space is partially judged by more widely recognized metrics such as visibility to pedestrians, amount of usable space available, and so on.