In physical terms, energy circulates everywhere. In economic and political terms, energy repeatedly runs scarce. This course will adjudicate that thorny contradiction between nature and culture – between the abundance of the sun and the scarcity of fuel. The disjuncture persists because of the way in which certain societies – including our own – construct energy as a cultural meaning. At other times and places, people have often associated energy (or cognate terms) with spirits of the natural or supernatural worlds. Students will read of cosmologies – scientific, indigenous, and Christian – that interpret energy in this holistic sense. Students will also trace the narrowing of “energy” into both labor and fuel. Readings ran the gamut from slavery to coal to oil to uranium – fuels with increasing energy density and consequent risk. The final section of the course will consider the consequences of exploiting concentrated forms of energy: a concentration of power known as the “resource curse” as well as immeasurable, multiplex harm (climate change as well as nuclear radiation). We end with a question: what forms of activism are likely to promote an energy transition away from catastrophe and towards sustainability? Texts of substantial length will draw from anthropology, geography, history, natural history, and political criticism.
