Cultures of Energy—power, practices, technologies

This path-breaking volume explores cultures of energy, the underlying but under-appreciated dimensions of both crisis and innovation in resource use around the globe. Theoretical chapters situate pressing energy issues in larger conceptual frames, and ethnographic case studies reveal energy as it is imagined, used, and contested in a variety of cultural contexts. Contributors address issues including the connection between resource flows and social relationships in energy systems; cultural transformation and notions of progress and collapse; the blurring of technology and magic; social tensions that accompany energy contraction; and sociocultural changes required in affluent societies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Each of five thematic sections concludes with an integrative and provocative conversation among the authors. The volume is an ideal tool for teaching unique, contemporary, and comparative perspectives on social theories of science and technology in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Sarah Strauss (Ph.D. 1997, University of Pennsylvania; M.P.H., 1987, San Jose State University) is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. She has conducted historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in India, Switzerland, and the US Rocky Mountain region on the intersections between health, environment, and the “good life,” however defined, and has been engaged in research on water, climate change, and energy issues since 1993. She is the editor, with Ben Orlove, of the groundbreaking volume Weather, Climate, Culture (Oxford: Berg 2003) as well author of Positioning Yoga (Oxford: Berg 2004).

Stephanie Rupp (Ph.D. 2001, Yale University) is assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College, City University of New York. She comes to the field of energy anthropology having conducted in-depth, ethnographic research in the Congo River basin, where forest communities were actively questioning technologies such as electricity, radios, the internet, and satellites—technologies that they had become aware of, but realized they had no access to. Dr. Rupp has conducted work on environmental issues of forest conservation in the Congo River basin, relations between African nations and China as they focus on resource extraction, and is currently undertaking anthropological research and writing on energy. She is the author of Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin (University of Washington Press, 2011).

Thomas Love (Ph.D. 1983 University of California, Davis) is professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon, where he has taught since 1983. He is actively engaged in energy issues, including organizing several recent conference sessions on cultural implications of the peaking of world oil production and ethnographic research on rural electrification using small-scale renewable technologies. He has published on a variety of topics related to human ecology in such scholarly journals as American Ethnologist, Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, Human Ecology Review, and the Journal of Sustainable Forestry. He is co-editor with B.S. Orlove, B.S. and M. Foley, of State, Capital and Rural Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes (Westview, 1989).