Wow! eBook
Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies
Author(s): Sarah Strauss (Editor), Stephanie Rupp (Editor), Thomas Love (Editor)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 1 Jan. 2013
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 360 pages
- ISBN-10: 1611321654
- ISBN-13: 9781611321654
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This bracing collection returns anthropology to the topic of energy. Uniting theory with contemporary problems, and both with conversations among anthropologists, local folk and developers, the volume shows how energy sustains our lives and how we hoard, sell and share it. Energy is anthropology’s lodestone for it brings together the discipline’s special perspectives from ecology to health, from the occult to the commons, and from power to culture. To have a livable and sustainable earth, the subject of energy requires anthropology’s touch just as for every reader there are touchstones in this collection.”
–Steve Gudeman, University of Minnesota
About the Author
Thomas Love, Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp
