Not Yet Connected

This article demonstrates how infrastructures generate anxiety as a socially constituted experience in a context of infrastructural development and unreliability. Based on the case of a newly electrified trading centre in northern Uganda, I reflect on the anxiety expressed by a man who had not yet connected his house to the grid. Strikingly, the danger posed by a “weak” infrastructure and the uncertainty that those who had been connected to the grid faced seemed less important in generating anxieties. What mattered was the feeling of being left out of the development associated with grid connection. This points to the strong symbolic value that people attach to infrastructures even when they do not work as they are supposed to. I argue that infrastructural anxieties are grounded in such values to the extent that people internalize them.