To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field

Few concerns are as important in contemporary politics as energy, that vital force. Janus-faced, energy animates modern life while seeming simultaneously to ensure its undoing. It is a notion haunted in equal measure by promise and doom. In anthropology, the potential for energetic relations to alter worlds was of intense disciplinary importance well before the current interest in energy production as technoscientific endeavor. More specifically, an expanded history of the subdiscipline shows how contemporary understandings of energy as an extractable and (unevenly) deployed resource link to a more immaterial, indeed magical, theorizing of influence and power. Energy thus conceptualized stands in excess of thermodynamics, and it continues to provide anthropologists with a fruitful means of moving between things, scales, materials, communities, ideas, and even disciplines. As such, anthropologists rarely, if ever, study energy itself; instead, they use it to provide a new angle into classic concerns and, equally, as a sharp-toothed vehicle for the analysis of contemporary political and economic systems as much as energetic ones.