Description
Book Synopsis Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.
Trade Review “Together, the chapters demonstrate that ‘[e]nergy, is at once, personal, collective and political, an experienced reality and a total social fact’, as Leo Coleman puts it in a brilliant Afterword. Ethnographies of Power is a timely and welcome addition to the growing corpus on energy in the social sciences. It will be of interest to students and scholars in anthropology, science and technology studies, and energy studies.” • Anthropos
“The volume raises important questions as to what new economic disciplines are being cultivated in the name of energy security or climatological necessity and those regions and peoples who are sacrificed in the pursuit of ‘clean’ energy production. Usefully, all the chapters are available through Berghahn’s Open Access collection, and the discussions here would be useful to those interested in the study of energy and society, infrastructure, speculation and the state.” • Anthropology Book Forum
“The strengths of the collection lie primarily in the papers’ rich ethnographic examination of the everyday politics engendered by state-initiated and/or directed energy flows and extractions – on existing, typically rural practices with their own temporality and logics.” • Thomas F. Love, Linfield College
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Politicizing Energy Anthropology
Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie Ortar
Chapter 1. Southern Spectrums: The Raw to the Smooth Edges of Energopower
Raminder Kaur
Chapter 2. Ecuadorian Amazonia amidst Energy Transitions
Chris Hebdon
Chapter 3. ‘Nepal’s Water, the People’s Investment’? Hydropolitical Volumes and Speculative Refrains
Austin Lord and Matthäus Rest
Chapter 4. Energopolitics in Times of Climate Change: Productive and Unproductive Politics of Energy Infrastructures in Poland
Aleksandra Lis
Chapter 5. The Earth is Trembling, and We Are Shaken: Governmentality and Resistance in the Groningen Gas Field
Elisabeth N. Moolenaar
Chapter 6. Delving at the Core of Everyday Life: Between Power Legacies and Political Struggles, the Case of Wood-Burning Stoves in France
Nathalie Ortar
Afterword: People Thinking Energetically
Leo Coleman
Index
