Reflections on Teaching an 'Anthropology of Energy'

摘要

If "energy needs anthropology," as Harold Wilhite (2005) argues, the discipline is rising to meet this challenge with a small but growing surge of ethnographic research attending to questions of power and difference in patterns of energy extraction, distribution, and consumption. For many anthropologists working in this vein—in particular, those of us influenced by science and technology studies—energy infrastructure, existing and imagined, demands attention as a mediating device for emerging cultural politics surrounding questions of sustainable development (SD), justice, and what constitutes a good life (see, e.g., Hess 2007; Johnston 2007; Masco 2006; Nader 2010; Paladino and Simonelli 2012; Strauss etal. 2013; Winther 2008). Indeed, ethnographic attention to energy development, from coal to solar, has the power to illuminate the diverse stakes behind the stakes: that is, the ethical commitments, political visions, desires, and identities that are invested in, and worked out through, materialtransformations of landscapes and their constitutive, human-to-nonhuman engagements.