Theorizing Energy and Culture

The two chapters in this first section set the stage for the remainder of the volume by presenting a pair of broader theoretical frameworks that might be useful in considering how energy and culture are mutually constituted at two key anthropological scales: Hal Wilhite’s individual to household level practice, and Alf Hornborg’s wide-angle historical and spatial analysis of the general incompatibility between modern social institutions and the law of entropy. Hornborg argues that the “social arrangements and aspirations that are most fundamentally at odds with the second law of thermodynamics are general-purpose money and beliefs in economic growth and technological progress.” Since energy flows from the sun have made possible both life on Earth and its transformations through culture, we need to understand the ways that access to and control over solar energy have come to be synonymous with power in its various manifestations. Energy, of course, is the ability to do work; Hornborg takes this concept a step further, to see money as “fictive energy” that mystifies purchasing power as the vital essence of society. On a related front, but very different order of magnitude, Wilhite uses social practice theory to consider our everyday habits as they relate to energy consumption and the problem of sustainability. For both of these theorists, then, anthropologists must engage the fundamental problem of inequality in relation to power in all its meanings, including, most importantly, the ability to do work, as it is manifest through both the variety of energy resources exploited by human populations over the course of our history and the second-order implementation of power through human agency. In pursuing some of these themes in conversation, one really resonated with both of these scholars, as well as other contributors: what is the relationship between slavery, technology, and energy? This topic moves us from the internal energetic connections between individual consumption and production, as well as the relationship between human and animal labor and the use of extrasomatic fossil fuels. In addition, the concept of mystification further contributes to our understanding of how hidden these relationships often are, and how frameworks for transportation, power transmission, and other infrastructural elements further distance consumers from the sources of their energy; without greater transparency, it is hard to motivate people to shift their energy-related behaviors to more sustainable patterns, but this is precisely the challenge, as these authors note, that we need to address. Tom Love

Thanks for raising the comparison with ancient slavery. I find the concept of “energy slaves” useful in bringing home our utter dependence, as industrial humans, on prodigious amounts of extrasomatic energy. In a recent article by Richard Douthwaite in the Energy Bulletin (November 2011), we learn that a reasonably fit man has a total energy output of about three kilowatt-hours per forty-hour work week, while a liter of gasoline yields nearly nine kilowatt-hours, or the rough equivalent of three weeks of manual labor. There are 150 liters of oil in a barrel, so even $100 (and up) per barrel is very little to pay for 450 weeks of human work—a very cheap slave indeed! Unlike in classical antiquity, though, our slaves are invisible to us. The cultural implications are enormous. One would seem to be our unwarranted belief in our prowess, our demigod sense of self, our indifference toward “stuff” that all seems to just magically be replaceable, our usually unexamined, axiomatic expectation of what Anna Tsing called “the inevitability of global newness.”

Alf Hornborg

Yes, and precisely this invisibility of our energy slaves—the way our lifestyles are subsidized by global, unequal exchange of embodied labor and resources—is fundamental to the specific way in which power is mystified in our fossil-fueled civilization. And the invisibility is made possible by the increasing spatial separation of extraction, production, and consumption, which relies on the massive combustion of fossil fuels for transport energy. So the global scale of economic interdependencies is part and parcel of the mystification of power.

Mike Degani

I do think there is a part of us that inherits the arrogance of the Greek aristocrat, especially in the unreflective habits of day-to-day life. But doesn’t that come paired—like the slave owner’s occasional paranoia about revolt—with anxious flashes of our own vulnerability? And in these anxious moments, when we become aware of our “slaves,” don’t they suddenly seem more like demigods who have grown unstable and capricious? It’s almost as if electric cars or recycled shopping bags (beyond being status symbols) are talismans to appease forces we sense but can’t directly see, like peak oil or climate change. More generally I think you could trace this vein of cultural anxiety about energy from the nuclear horror of “I am become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds” to Akira to Hollywood disaster movies and so forth.

Tom Love

It is deeply important for us to analyze the mystification that so often accompanies people’s understanding and use of energy. Alf alerts us to ways fossil fuels have temporarily severed the synonymy of land and energy that prevailed in all preindustrial social formations, dependent as they (and we, if we could see/theorize appropriately) were/are on the sun’s radiation. Animated by invisible energy (fossil sunlight or, more recently, nuclear energy), apparently disconnected from the daily flux of the sun’s energy, technology and the goods they produce become both magical and yet mere things—fetishized objects divorced from the social contexts and ultimately solar-powered energy flows of which they are an inextricable part. Hal complements this angle by examining how practices are both agentive and social. He illuminates how such magical/mystical things and processes are always already domesticated, used, and understood. Through an anthropological lens, we see people, not technology, return to center stage; the social circuitry and shared meanings of people in community shape the flow of energy in terms of substance, scale, and rate of consumption. Though our volume is not intended to bear directly on policy, the policy implications of such robust anthropological theorizing are enormous and compelling.

Hal Wilhite

These observations on “energy slavery” open an interesting debate. The permeation of life everywhere with new energy-using technologies does lead to a replacement of labor with mechanical power, making the execution of some of the simplest chores (cleaning, washing, cooking) technology dependent. However, this substitution is not all negative. The use of energy technologies has reduced drudgery and saved time. For example, washing clothes by hand involves the soaking, rinsing, and repeated beating of clothing. Women in South India use up to two hours a day for this. Washing machines lead to a drastic reduction in clothes-washing time and drudgery. As has the electric iron, which saves time and energy associated with gathering fuel and heating up the iron. Also, the manual grinding of herbs and spices for food preparation is monotonous and time-consuming. The advent of the electric mixer has reduced daily time used in food preparation enormously. However, in affluent societies everywhere, the permeation of energy appliances has led to a form of alienation. Technology mediates between ecosystems and use to the extent that people lose touch with the interrelationship between consumption practices and consequences. Also, if technologies break down, either at the infrastructural level or in the home, most people are helpless to do anything about it. In other words, know-how associated with the most banal of practices is externalized. In this sense, people are slaves to the machines and the technology experts.

Alf Hornborg

Yes, the way new energy-using technologies facilitate life for the poor in the periphery remains an essential component in the ideology of “development.” True, mechanization is no longer, as in the nineteenth century, as obviously a case of displacing work efforts (redistributing human time)—for instance, to the cotton slaves or to British coal miners—but technology and energy consumption continue to mystify unequal global flows of embodied labor, land, and energy. It suffices to scrutinize how we are fooled by our own use of cars: some have estimated that the real speed of our cars (if we divide distances traveled by all the time spent caring for them, looking for parking lots, and so on) is about the same as biking. Even John Stuart Mill suggested that there was never a time-saving machine that had saved a minute of human time.… Technologies tend to become symbols of modernity and development, but do they actually liberate human time and creativity, or do they fetter us in new constraining habits and dependencies?

Hal Wilhite

The truth is that technologies are both liberating and constraining. I doubt that any of us would propose that the way out of the energy dilemmas put forward in this volume is a total de-technologization of everyday life. The point is that we need to think about how to reinvent and reconfigure technological regimes in ways that reinstate human agency, demystify the relationship between everyday practices and its consequences, and drastically reduce the energy and other resources needed to operate them. This will only be accomplished through a radically different vision of both what it means to be developed and what it means to be modern.

Mike Degani

It’s interesting that an anthropology of energy puts the idea of demystification back on the theoretical agenda. Clearly the dynamics that allow us not to know or to ignore the consequences of our actions are of enormous power, and the image of a world system built on energy slaves is an arresting, revelatory one. How everyday cultures will eventually relate to that macro-level understanding is a rich ethnographic question. Too much focus on technocratic fixes and their habit-generating scripts and we are somewhere near a Skinner behaviorism; too much focus on rituals and subjectivities that surround energy and we risk mistaking phenomena that are interpretively rich with ones that are socially significant (cf. Graeber 2006). As we shudder out of the era of cheap, asymmetric energy, the relevance of “demystified” concepts and technologies will surely only increase.