In his recent ethnography Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria, PSTC anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith investigates how Nigerians have adapted to mitigate everyday failures of infrastructure amidst a lack of government provided services. The book, published in 2022, seeks to illuminate the resilience of Nigerian households coping with these infrastructural inadequacies, as well as the complex interdependent relationship between citizens and their government more broadly. 

The recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, Smith began his research process after witnessing how Nigerians have coped with the failures of state-provided infrastructure throughout his career. “I was struck by the degree of improvisation, the wide scope of entrepreneurial efforts to find solutions, and the sheer hustle required – even as people found the whole situation incredibly frustrating,” he says. “Every household is its own local government” is a popular saying in contemporary Nigeria that signals people’s awareness of the failure of the government to deliver basic infrastructure and social services.”

With support from the fellowship, Smith was able to conduct ethnographic research to provide a comprehensive overview of the breadth of these failures while also relying on the expertise of six local Nigerian research assistants, each focused on different infrastructural domains, including water, electricity, transportation, communication, education, and security. 

Smith further explores the paradoxically interdependent relationship between household self-reliance and state power, finding that there are still banal ways that entrepreneurs interact with state authorities. “I realized that despite the fact that all of these entrepreneurial efforts appeared to be evidence for the absence or failure of the state, in their everyday efforts to cobble together basic infrastructure and services Nigerians regularly encountered the government,” he explains.  

Moving forward, Smith is embarking on a new project that examines how large-scale social transformations in Nigeria over the past thirty years, such as the growing predominance of capitalism and globalization, affect family life. “I continue to be interested in how societal transformations unfold and have their impact in the most everyday kinds of contexts,” he says. “I am specifically interested in the consequences for intimate sociality, especially in relation to family, marriage, gender, parenthood, and kinship more broadly.”