Toward an Anthropology of Energy: Ontologies and Ecologies in the Yukon Flats
8 Pages Posted: 2 Apr 2010
Date Written: March 28, 2010
Abstract
Despite its significance in everyday practices like powering a laptop or, writ large, in the workings of global geocapital, energy remains relatively invisible to anthropology. Perhaps guided by cultural ecology’s concern with energy as caloric ability, social scientists have so far attended to the ‘human aspects’ - or consumption - of fossil energy. They also document local environmental outcomes of carbon energy dependency and climate change. But the production of expertise and knowledge about energy remain under-examined, shrouded in what Laura Nader calls inevitability talk. In this paper, I suggest the potential for a critical ethnographic approach to energy by untangling some of the ontological and political conceptions that underpin intense local conflict over natural gas development in Alaska’s Yukon Flats Refuge. I ask, how does one study energy as an ethnographer? Theories of materiality have gained traction among scholars seeking to move beyond constructivist accounts of the nonhuman. Yet materiality doesn’t lend itself easily to a methodological approach. Tracing theories of materiality back to studies of the more-than-human ontology of aboriginal North American hunters provides me a practical starting point, suggesting that skill and experience in energy work also rests on ontologically significant ways of knowing energy. Knowledge about energy in the Yukon Flats reflects workers’ and activists’ everyday practices of producing natural gas as a physical substance and as a site of environmental protest. I argue that energy is conceptualized in culturally distinctive ways and that these conceptions are vigorously contested in the present conflict.
Keywords: Energy, Anthropology, Materiality, Alaska, Natural Gas, Posthumanism
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