As the world is wowed by ambitious technological wonders promising peace, prosperity, and economic growth, anthropologist Kristin Doughty's research shows how this vision of progress can be manipulated by those in power-and who bears those costs.
In 2015, the story of Lake Kivu had the makings of a classic technological triumph: a terrifying threat-and an ingenious solution. Media outlets including Nature and MIT Technology Review reported on potentially catastrophic levels of dissolved methane in the deep waters of the massive lake along the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the worst-case scenario, a massive gas explosion could threaten millions of people living nearby. One article described it as a "ticking time bomb." Then came KivuWatt. The $200 million project, backed by American companies, used a novel technology to extract methane from the lake. The process would both reduce the danger of the lake and turn the gas into much-needed electricity for Rwanda.
It was the kind of story the modern world-and Western media-loves: a daunting problem, a technological breakthrough, and the promise of a safer, more prosperous future. But to Kristin Doughty, an associate professor of anthropology who had spent nearly 15 years studying and working in Rwanda, the story seemed almost too tidy. She wanted to know what the feel-good narrative left out.
So Doughty began looking beyond the executives and government officials celebrating the project. She talked not only to scientists but also to fishermen whose catches had plummeted after they were barred from familiar waters, families that were displaced to make way for infrastructure, and communities that lost gathering places as the project expanded.
What she found complicated the story of technological progress considerably. Her new book, Threats to Power: Methane Extraction on Lake Kivu, Rwanda (MIT Press), examines how a project designed to protect people and improve their lives could also be used by an authoritarian government to justify surveillance, exclusion, and dispossession.
The book is also a deeply researched effort to show the KivuWatt story from the perspectives of those most affected by it-the hallmark of ambitious ethnographic research. Seeing beyond the headlines and the hype to tell a more nuanced truth demands a rigorous, deeply human process. Here's what that looks like.
