PERSONAL DE ADMINISTRACIÓN Y SERVICIOS

Energy itself is a site where the social, environmental, technical, corporeal, and figurative merge. Energy is that which makes everything happen; neither created nor destroyed, it instead is converted from one material to another, its amount always

remaining the same. These laws of thermodynamics possess anthropological significance, though largely under-explored. My use of the term “energy” derives from these

definitional foundations in physics and natural science and always has the materiality of energy in mind throughout this discussion. From subterranean extractions of carbon to atmospheric harnessing of wind and sun, particular landscapes and infrastructures are required to transform these energy resources into quantifiable gigawatts, enabling humans to do a wide range of work in a variety of settings. Humans’ historical

dependency on the sun, our solar system’s largest star, is part of this understanding. At the same time, however, my use of the term also summons the immaterial – the

connotations of “energy” pertaining to vitality, ebullience, and power. In this sense, as well, “energy development” signals not only the harnessing of natural resources for electrical production, but the development of life and the production of complex social realities in human communities. In this way, my conceptualization of energy bolsters and

resonates with the polyvalent sense of “power” I use in my landscapes of power framework.

There are, in the words of geographer and energy theorist Vaclav Smil, multiple “energies shaping our world, from the Sun to pregnancy, from bread to microchips” (Smil 1999, x). In its most basic definition, energy is “the capacity for doing work,” measured in Newton-meters or joules, but it is also, more elusively, “an abstract concept invented by physical scientists in the nineteenth century to describe quantitatively a wide variety of natural phenomena” (Smil 1999, xiii). Few contemporary, critical

anthropologists have ventured into the interdisciplinary terrain of what Smil terms “Modern Energy Studies,” where geologists, physicists, bioengineers, and others tend to operate in their disciplinary silos, unaware of the work being done by others (Smil 1999, xiii). This dissertation is one modest attempt to bring an anthropological perspective30 to bear on the global concern over energy, particularly as energy is understand as an arena of power and crisis with distinctive socio-cultural dimensions, especially in indigenous territories. Studying sites of contention and production in what is discursively figured as the global “energy crisis”31 illuminate that much more is at stake for mineral-rich communities than technocratic debates on power production, distribution and

30 _{I recognize, of course, possible antecedents of an anthropology of energy in the discipline, such as}

population-centered work by Leslie A. White (1943) and other early cultural ecologists, though their analysis was primarily within a framework of cultural evolution. My concern with a contemporary anthropology of energy is in developing – with Winther, Wilhite and others – a critical approach that decenters the population (or “the tribe” or “the people”) as the object of ethnographic inquiry, shifting instead to see networks of energy development, distribution, and consumption – and their attending power inequities – as the common matter of concern.

31 _{This is, of course, the “energy crisis” of the present conjuncture, informed by but discursively discrete}

from the most recent, previous “energy crisis” of the early 1970’s. In a Foucaultian sense, both moments represent ruptures or discontinuities in which “energy” – formerly taken for granted – became suddenly visible and problematic, politicized and threatened, posing the possibility of new technoscientific and world-political orders.

consumption. It also shows how the emergent objects in question can be productive of a diverse range of effects, including new landscapes of power – both material and

figurative.

Anthropologists working in Norway32 recognize the theoretical and empirical urgency in cultivating an anthropology of energy sensitive to the complex dynamics of human socio-cultural worlds as they interface with non-human ecologies. Early in this anthropological turn (mid-1980’s), research by social anthropologists Richard Wilk and Harold Wilhite used ethnographic approaches to understand why people engage in particular patterns of decision-making concerning energy consumption and weather- stripping at the level of the household(Wilk and Wilhite 1984, 1985). Their work focused on domestic, everyday life energy practices in California communities at a historical moment when public consciousness of household energy conservation was on the rise in the United States.Wilhite went on to develop a dissertation project in Kerala, India, focusing on energy consumption behaviors, their socio-cultural significance and possibilities for influencing sustainable development (Wilhite 2008). Concerning the global problem of energy demands, climate change, and the human and non-human lives affected by these transformations, he argues that, “energy needs anthropology” (Wilhite 2005). I concur with his claim that energy exceeds its presumed physical, engineering, and scientific boundaries, having a “social life” that “requires management” (2005, 1)

32 _{At present, the University of Oslo is a global center for anthropological and ethnographic research on}

energy consumption, rural electrification, and energy sustainability. Harold Wilhite leads a research program at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and Environment entitled “Consumption, Energy and Social Change.”

and, therefore, demands human intervention – with its many complications. Wilhite argues that an anthropological perspective is best positioned to do this critical work:

“The subject of energy use is in dire need of theoretical innovation, and is going nowhere as long as economic and attitude models serve as the centerpiece of research, while other social scientific approaches peck away at the periphery. New ways of thinking are called for, drawing upon the bread and butter of anthropology, for example in understanding the ways in which family relations (kinship), gender, relations of production, meaning and morals are all mutually implicated in the uses of energy” (2005, 2).

Concurrent with Wilhite’s recent work and also based in Oslo, anthropologist Tanja Winther has written a pioneering energy and critical development studies ethnography, investigating peoples’ complex relationships with electricity (Winther 2008). Her research, like Wilhite’s, focuses on the Global South and questions of household consumption and rural electrification. She analyzes the impact of electricity (and the attending developmental meanings of having or not having “light”) when it was recently introduced through new electrical grid infrastructure in rural Zanzibar. Her work looks critically at how electricity transforms a wide range of social practices and

relationships – from human relations with the state to human relations with spirits – focusing in particular on questions of difference (gender, generation, class, and so on). Winther’s work shows clearly how an anthropological perspective on energy distribution and consumption becomes a matter of political ecology; that is, who controls

technological networks and natural resources, how these are distributed, managed, understood, consumed, and imagined is always a political question. Put otherwise, ethnographies of material power immediately usher us into ethnographies of semiotic power.

I situate my work in this nascent anthropology of energy, contributing to this body of work in four distinct ways. First, I contribute a distinct geopolitical emphasis on the

internally colonized spaces of the Global North, greatly understudied in critical development and political ecological ethnographies. Second, I make a methodological intervention, musing on the opportunities, ambiguities, failures and innovations of engaged anthropology and collaborative research on/with environmental movements and their experts, already working on energy politics in a given locale. Third, and perhaps most importantly in an empirical sense, this project focuses on the front-end of the energy development cycle and its controversies, rather than practices of consumption once the distributive work of electrical infrastructure is underway. That is, I approach energy development in its emergent stages, where the consumer is speculative and the

infrastructure is contested. In that sense, mine is an anthropology of energy before it is transformed into kilowatts and passes through the socio-technical systems required to make it consumable as heat, light, or fuel in particular communities. Finally, my

approach to the anthropology of energy concurs with Wilhite and Winther in the need for our ethnographic research to help build better theories and strategies for sustainable development and sustainable energy use as the “new agenda for an anthropology of energy (Winther 2008, 2). However, I also situate my approach to energy within the “colonial difference” (Quijano 1993) that the distinctive – and shifting – identity of “indigenous” signals today (see also de la Cadena and Starn 2007). In this way, my understanding of the broad problem we face is not only a problem of climate change, environmental degradation and its attending human impacts, but (also) of the historically uneven and rapidly changing relations of power between North America’s indigenous people and the overlapping jurisdictions and states in which their often resource-rich homelands are located.

With this understanding of the anthropology of energy in mind, the so-called global “energy crisis” can be seen as not only as a problem of geology, technology, or international politics, but as a deeply socio-cultural problem. “Crisis” is, as Peter Redfield argues, “a perceived state of rupture that invites response,” with rupture itself being “more central to modern order than we frequently choose to remember” (Peter Redfield 2005, 328-329). The “energy crisis” has been (once again) constructed as such: a modern ecological, political, financial, and ethical crisis, bearing on states’ decisions regarding production and markets and on individuals’ decisions regarding consumption. However, the responses invited by this rupture, or perceived state of crisis, are rarely considered at the level of the everyday among communities most impacted at both ends of the energy cycle, from production/extraction-to-consumption.

The rupture that crisis presents thus contains an opening – a possibility for counter practices and knowledges to emerge. Be it humanitarianism in the case of suffering and disaster (as seen in Redfield’s study) or the new technologies advanced by the so-called “green” or renewable energies movement, the idea of crisis inspires

proposals for action and change. As such, exploring the cultural dimensions of the “energy crisis” involves more than an assessment of responses to peak oil and climate change or the pressures of urban growth worldwide. Mine is a polyvalent reading which allows the multiple resonances of “energy” and “crisis” to remain present and reverberate in the discussion that follows. Put directly: for the Navajo Nation, the crisis over power is both material and figurative. Like many rural, Native Nations, the Navajo Nation has historically positioned at the production end of the energy cycle (as producers of raw mineral materials for energy development) while economically marginalized at the

consumption end of the cycle (as consumers of electricity, gasoline, and water).33 In the American Southwest in particular – a place scarce in water yet rich in uranium and coal reserves as well as wind and solar potential – this debate over energy has grown to a crescendo in recent years.

A broader purpose of focusing on the cultural politics of the global energy crisis as it bears on questions of indigeneity is to deepen anthropological understanding of how the “natural” world, while holding ecological properties of its own, is always a domain of human and non-human construction, negotiation, and meaning-making, illuminated by a wide range of ethnographies of “the environment” and its human and non-human dramas (West 2006; Raffles 2002; Tsing 2005; Cruikshank 2005).34 So-called “environmental” issues have garnered increased attention in many indigenous communities in recent years; however, many Native communities – like many African-American communities – reject “environmentalism,” articulating their struggles as centered on “environmental racism” or the broader framework of “environmental justice.” There is an extensive literature and network of social movements concerning environmental justice too broad for review here, but some foundational works in the field as well as critical and feminist political ecologies inform my understanding (Taylor and 2002; Bullard 2000; Cole and Foster 2001; Pezzullo and Sandler 2007; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996; Martínez Alier 2005; Peet and Watts 2004; Escobar 1998).35 Central to the critical

33 _{The U.S. Census Bureau reports that only 19% of American Indian households in the U.S. use electricity}

as their primary source of heating (while the majority use wood).

34 _{These approaches approximate the neorealist approach to nature, as discussed by Arturo Escobar (2008).} 35 _{In addition to these published works, my understanding of environmental justice and its critiques of}

analysis of race, class and (more recently) gender in environmental justice frameworks is a rejection by activists of what Dorothy Holland has described as the “space of the imaginary environmentalist” (Holland 2003). This imaginary encapsulates early critiques of mainstream environmentalism made by civil rights and feminist activists for the movement’s focus on protecting “wilderness” as a nature devoid of humans and

relationships of power, and its central actors being predominantly Anglo, educated males. These debates in environmental justice are significant in their potential to shape wider understandings “energy development” itself as a realm not only of fuel and electrical generation but as a generative site of wider, increasingly anthropological debate.

IV.Overview of the Dissertation