Anthropology Of Energy Research Articles

Lithium scale-making and extractivist counter-futurities in Bolivia

This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates – in anthropology and beyond – about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia’s state-controlled lithium project but which resist the various pressures to reorient social and productive worlds around arguably the most important ‘critical’ mineral for climate policy-making. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these localized counter-futurities, one in which the image of scale-making takes on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. An anthropology of energy, climate justice, and resource imaginaries that is critically attuned to these inter-scalar frictions is one that must also be able to project itself through the kaleidoscope of competing energy narratives as a form of both demystification and ethnographic truth-telling.

Introduction: Contesting the moral worlds, scales, and epistemics of energy transitions

The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of ‘transition’ itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.

Politics, ecology, and the new anthropology of energy: exploring the emerging frontiers of hydraulic fracking

This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are vital to recognizing the shared structural conditions produced by the oil and gas industry's expansion, through examining the roles played by the oil field services industry, the sequestration of information and agnotology (the deliberate production of ignorance), divide and conquer tactics, and shared experiences of risk and embodied effects. Summarizing the contributions of the five articles included in the Special Section, we offer recommendations for further inquiry. We examine how social science studies of hydraulic fracking are producing new and innovative methodologies for developing participatory academic and community research projects.Key words: digital media, embodiment, energy, hydraulic fracturing, oil field services industry, shale gas

Reflections on Teaching an “Anthropology of Energy”

Reflections on Teaching an “Anthropology of Energy”

Energopolitics and the Anthropology of Energy

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, environment, anthropology of energy, energy transition, political anthropology]

Ethnographies of Wind and Power

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, wind power, wind energy, anthropology of energy, renewable energy source]

Oilpacity: Secrets of History in the Coup against Hugo Chávez

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, anthropology of energy, Venezuelan coup, oil industry, Chavez, nationalization]

Oil into Culture: Energopolitics in the Russian Urals

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, anthropology of energy, petrostate, Lukoil, Perm, Russian oil]

The Global Perspective

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, anthropology of energy, nuclear power, energy policy, wind energy, renewable energy source]

Logics of the Wind: Development Desires over Oaxaca

Abstract:[energy, energopolitics, anthropology of energy, oil production, wind farm, wind energy, sustainability]