Mains, Daniel. Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2019, 240 pages

In anthropology, infrastructure as a site of inquiry or as an analytical framework has led to the steady production of ethnographical works around the world. Daniel Mains’s book on infrastructural systems in urban Ethiopia represents a seminal contribution to the growing literature on infrastructure within the discipline. Looking at different infrastructural projects such as dams, roads, and three-wheel motorcycles in two medium-sized cities of Ethiopia, Jimma and Hawassa, the author focuses on the mere process of construction as “a site for exploring everyday encounters between citizens, the state, and infrastructural technologies” (4). In the course of global structural adjustments of deregulation, and a revolution which put an end to the military dictatorship (1974–91), the Ethiopian state, and so many more states in Africa and beyond, retreated from many areas of economic life. Notwithstanding and due to its central role in the country’s development, the state is still a key actor in the processes of construction. Rapid economic growth between 2007 and 2017 and a new political agenda paved the way for state-led infrastructural projects in Ethiopia. Meser Limat, the term used in Ethiopia’s national language Amharic, to refer to infrastructure literally translates to “the foundation of development” and encapsulates the narratives of progress and renaissance employed by the leading and ruling party EPRDF (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front). Mains has been conducting fieldwork in Ethiopia since the early 2000’s and has previously published several papers as well as a monograph on urban youth and unemployment (2011). Building on this longstanding experience, his book benefits from the rich ethnographic material gathered in conversation with “workers, engineers, resident of rapidly changing neighborhoods, government administrators, and taxi drivers” (7) involved directly or indirectly in the phenomenon of construction. Furthermore, his theoretical approach draws from vital and historical materialism, as well as from the study of affects, everyday improvisation, and state practices, and enables him to analyze this ongoing phenomenon of development through construction in the Global South. The book is structured in five chapters, each examining a particular form of urban infrastructure at different scales. Chapter 3 is the only exception, since this chapter addresses the affective politics of infrastructural development in the city of Jimma. The first chapter explores the representations, state practices, critiques, and political consequences stemming from the construction of hydroelectric dams, especially the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and Gibe III. These last two represent the largest hydroelectric projects in the region and a crucial (material, social, and political) intervention of the Ethiopian developmental state and a legitimation strategy of the ruling EPRDF. Grounded on discourses of economic growth, a unified nation, and renaissance, the official narrative around these mega projects veils, according to Mains, the longstanding ethnic and regional inequalities within the country. The Gibe III project, for instance, is located in the South Omo Valley (a marginal lowland periphery) and could destroy the livelihoods of 500,000 pastoralists and fishers. Moreover, the construction of the dams does not exclusively envision the production of high amounts of electricity, but the irrigation of large-scale monocrop plantations to produce rice, sugar, and palm oil, deepening the historical inequalities between the highlands—characterized by sedentary agriculture—with the lowlands—inhabited mostly by mobile pastoralists. Dams, the author concludes, generate “high levels of conflict because they bring together competing temporal and spatial narratives” (55). In examining the construction of asphalt roads in the cities of Jimma and Hawassa, the second chapter addresses a myriad of social, political, and material entanglements emerging from these particular infrastructural projects. Mains’s primary focus is on the improvisation and flexibility necessary in the contingency of construction: “Soil type, weather, corruption, …