Energy Anthropology Scholarship, Practice, and Advocacy
Authors: Clarke Mari 
Published: July 2023

Although anthropologists have described, analyzed, and theorized about energy and culture for decades, in the 21st century there has been a tremendous increase in ethnographic research and public engagement on a wide range of energy issues. Human-induced global climate threats along with activist calls for action are increasingly challenging anthropologists around the globe to rethink their roles, methods, and paradigms. Anthropologists are engaging in energy research, public debates, and action on energy policies, extraction processes, offshore oil, nuclear waste and power plant meltdowns, energy consumption, failing electrical grids, renewable energy, and the people and environments they impact. Emerging from this growing engagement is an international, globalized anthropology of energy, with diverse, interdisciplinary branches linking to the humanities, information sciences, semiotics, public policy, climate sciences, energy institutes, environmental health, geospatial sciences, engineering, science and technology, and other disciplines.

Energy anthropology has spawned primary energy source–specific anthropologies of energy for coal, oil, and gas (a subset of which is the anthropology of fracking); nuclear energy, hydropower; bioenergy; solar energy; wind energy; and geothermal energy as well the electricity generated from many of these primary sources. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic research, policy analysis, advocacy, and activism for these various anthropologies of energy have employed a wide range of theoretical frameworks and constructs. A few examples include social practice theory, critical global ecologies, environmental justice, political ecology, feminist political ecology, institutional economics, game theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and settler colonialism. At the same time, there is a trend away from grand, abstract, explanatory theories to focus on contextual details in power relationships, differing conceptualizations of energy, and specific impacts of the various energy regimes on communities and their environments. Concepts that have emerged in energy anthropology analyses, such as extractivism, petrocultures, energyscapes, energopower, energopolitics, hydrosocial territories, cultural flows, aeolian politics, radiogenic communities, nuclearity, and nuclear colonialism, are explained in the sections highlighting the range of issues and approaches in specific anthropologies of energy.

A number of common issues of concern cross-cut anthropological work on the different primary energy sources and electricity. The links between energy and political and economic power are the focus of a significant amount of energy anthropology. This focus ranges from intercountry power dynamics such as those between Paraguay and Brazil, over energy generated by the Itaipu Dam, to state deployment of electricity to extend territorial control within Turkey. It includes state-foreign company collusion to push Indigenous and minority people from lands wanted for hydropower dams, wind farms, solar farms, geothermal power plants, or tar sands oil extraction in many countries. A number of the analyses examine colonial, postcolonial, and settler colonialism exploiting resources and people and expropriating their lands.

Also of concern are inequalities based on race, gender, caste, minority, or ethnic status that are caused or exacerbated by energy production and distribution. For example, high-caste elites in India deny electricity access to low-caste households; women have more limited access than men to the grid in Kenya; and electricity powers the mines in Zambia but not the homes of the minority people displaced by the construction of the dam that powers the mines, or the communities disrupted and displaced by the mining operations. Energy anthropologists also have focused on the exploitation of Indigenous and minority groups for uranium mining and milling in Africa and the US Southwest with no protection from radiation. They have shed light on the human impacts of nuclear testing over many Pacific Islands and biomedical research that was conducted to investigate the impacts of these tests without the consent of the impacted people. They also have examined the impacts of the mechanization of mining that has left miners without livelihoods in many countries. Other issues explored in energy anthropology include the impact of energy extraction and production on the health of people and the environment; differing conceptions of and discourse about various types of energy and their uses; the impact of electricity on social, economic, cultural, and political life; and community resistance to various forms of exergy extraction.

Energy anthropologists work in universities and associated energy research centers, energy think tanks, government agencies and congressional offices dealing with energy policy, international multilateral and bilateral agencies with energy and climate change programs, national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and energy industries. They engage in energy ethnography; critical analysis of energy practices and programs; energy policymaking and policy analysis; energy program assessment, design, implementation, and evaluation; energy product design; energy advocacy; and energy activism.