Ethnographies of Power

Tristan Loloum is Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, HES-SO Valais-Wallis. His research on energy and society explores the role of culture and politics on the public understanding of power infrastructure and climate change.

“Together, the chapters demonstrate that ‘[e]nergy, is at once, personal, collective and political, an experienced reality and a total social fact’, as Leo Coleman puts it in a brilliant Afterword. Ethnographies of Power is a timely and welcome addition to the growing corpus on energy in the social sciences. It will be of interest to students and scholars in anthropology, science and technology studies, and energy studies.” • Anthropos“The volume raises important questions as to what new economic disciplines are being cultivated in the name of energy security or climatological necessity and those regions and peoples who are sacrificed in the pursuit of ‘clean’ energy production. Usefully, all the chapters are available through Berghahn’s Open Access collection, and the discussions here would be useful to those interested in the study of energy and society, infrastructure, speculation and the state.” • Anthropology Book Forum“The strengths of the collection lie primarily in the papers’ rich ethnographic examination of the everyday politics engendered by state-initiated and/or directed energy flows and extractions – on existing, typically rural practices with their own temporality and logics.” • Thomas F. Love, Linfield College

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Politicizing Energy AnthropologyTristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie OrtarChapter 1. Southern Spectrums: The Raw to the Smooth Edges of EnergopowerRaminder KaurChapter 2. Ecuadorian Amazonia amidst Energy TransitionsChris HebdonChapter 3. ‘Nepal’s Water, the People’s Investment’? Hydropolitical Volumes and Speculative RefrainsAustin Lord and Matthäus RestChapter 4. Energopolitics in Times of Climate Change: Productive and Unproductive Politics of Energy Infrastructures in PolandAleksandra LisChapter 5. The Earth is Trembling, and We Are Shaken: Governmentality and Resistance in the Groningen Gas FieldElisabeth N. MoolenaarChapter 6. Delving at the Core of Everyday Life: Between Power Legacies and Political Struggles, the Case of Wood-Burning Stoves in FranceNathalie OrtarAfterword: People Thinking EnergeticallyLeo ColemanIndex