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E-book Ethnographies of Power: A Political Anthropology of Energy
A political anthropology of energy starts from the position that en-ergetic infrastructures are pivots for sociopolitical inquiry. They fa-cilitate the contours of the state and local communities, both in their material existence and in their projection of imaginaries into the fu-ture and into a global environment. Not only is energy at the core of many economic interests, geopolitical struggles and international relations, but energy technologies are also central to modernist ide-ologies and neoliberal narratives. A political anthropology approach is one that can begin to unpack such tightly knitted sociomaterial and sociotechnical forms, tracing the links between material forms, concepts and ideologies and elaborating the forms of power that are thereby enabled or inhibited.Ethnographies of Power compiles topical case studies and analysis of contemporary entanglements of energy materialities and political power. Based on original contributions with a strong ethnographic sensibility, it revisits some of the classic anthropological notions of power by questioning the role of energetic infrastructures and their current transformations in the consolidation, extension or subversion of modern political regimes. The choice of an ethnographic approach follows the intention to move away from large abstract explanatory theories and conceptual generalizations by attending to the contex-tual particularities of ‘energopolitical regimes’ (Rogers 2014). In do-ing so, we also seek to emphasize subaltern or alternative voices that are often overshadowed in energy debates by hegemonic discourses based on expert knowledge, technocentric thinking and other forms of authority. The cases presented here unravel the arrangements of technological infrastructures, institutions and discourses of truth on which ‘energopolitical’ regimes are built, showing how energy im-plicates citizens and subjects in multiple relations of power that af-fect their political identity, sense of belonging, territorial anchorage, collective emotions, knowledge, conceptions of the future, and their access to states and to human rights.
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