Waiting for power: Mobile phones off the grid and the ethnographic method

This article examines the methodological consequences of conducting technographic research in low-infrastructure contexts through ethnographic fieldwork on mobile phone use in the Lau Lagoon of Malaita, Solomon Islands. The argument is that infrastructural constraint actively shapes both everyday technological practice and the production of ethnographic knowledge. Drawing on longterm ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis shows how delay, waiting, circulation, and partial functionality are ordinary conditions of mobile phone use, structuring when and how devices are accessed, explained, and observed. Drawing digital anthropology, and science and technology studies into this technography, the article shifts analytic attention from infrastructure as an object of study to infrastructure as a condition of method. It demonstrates how ethnographic engagement with digital technologies often unfolds through absence. The contribution is a methodological recalibration for technographic research, arguing that absence, failure, and waiting are constitutive features of ethnographic practice in digitally uneven worlds.