Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611321662 ISBN 13: 9781611321661

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Synopsis

Cultures of Energy This path-breaking, comparative volume explores cultures of energy, the underlying but under-appreciated dimensions of both crisis and innovation in resource use around the globe. Full description

About this title

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

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:

<strong>Sarah Strauss</strong> (Ph.D. 1997, University of Pennsylvania; M.P.H., 1987, San Jose State University) is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. She has conducted historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in India, Switzerland, and the US Rocky Mountain region on the intersections between health, environment, and the “good life,” however defined, and has been engaged in research on water, climate change, and energy issues since 1993. She is the editor, with Ben Orlove, of the ground breaking volume <em>Weather, Climate, Culture </em> (Oxford: Berg 2003) as well author of <em>Positioning Yoga</em> (Oxford: Berg 2004).<br><br> <strong>Stephanie Rupp</strong> (Ph.D. 2001, Yale University) is assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College, City University of New York. She comes to the field of energy anthropology having conducted in-depth, ethnographic research in the Congo River basin, where forest communities were actively questioning technologies such as electricity, radios, the internet, and satellites—technologies that they had become aware of, but realised they had no access to. Dr. Rupp has conducted work on environmental issues of forest conservation in the Congo River basin, relations between African nations and China as they focus on resource extraction, and is currently undertaking anthropological research and writing on energy. She is the author of <em>Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin</em> (University of Washington Press, 2011). <br><br> <strong>Thomas Love</strong> (Ph.D. 1983 University of California, Davis) is professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon, where he has taught since 1983. He is actively engaged in energy issues, including organising several recent conference sessions on cultural implications of the peaking of world oil production and ethnographic research on rural electrification using small-scale renewable technologies. He has published on a variety of topics related to human ecology in such scholarly journals as <em>American Ethnologist, Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, Human Ecology Review</em>, and the <em>Journal of Sustainable Forestry</em>. He is co-editor with B.S. Orlove, B.S. and M. Foley, of <em>State, Capital and Rural Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes</em> (Westview, 1989).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1611321662
• ISBN 13: 9781611321661
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Strauss Sarah, Rupp Stephanie, Love Thomas