The Symbolic Life of Energy
Why paying close attention to popular and political stories matters
Dear folks,
today I’ll be talking about the power of ideas. The west (i.e. the planet) will not be won (i.e. saved) with money alone – ideas can rally people and determine where money can be made. A sustainable future is notoriously hard to conceive of though – climate change is just too damn big to fathom and anyway it’s already ‘too late’. A little help please. Hey Science, is there anything we can learn about how narratives perform their symbolic and thus their rallying work?
There is this one insight from the classical symbolical anthropologists: the margins are symbolically potent.
OK!
To understand this insight, we need a little context. It’s the 1950s and 60s and the reign of the structural functionalist paradigm is slowly coming to an end. As you might remember from a few weeks back, one problem with that paradigm was its emphasis of system over change, of logic over incongruity, law over action. This problem had already become apparent. Second gen writers were also ready to address them, but they were still working within the categories this paradigm offered. The script had yet to be flipped (that is to say, the paradigm had yet to shift).
Boundary-making in the making
Instead, change, incongruity and action became part of the system: Max Gluckman discovered faux rebellions that didn’t change anything (they were merely “ritual”, not for realsies) and Edmund Leach postulated cyclical reversals of political systems in the Burmese highlands. Fredrik Barth, meanwhile, made longer-lasting contributions by giving up on the analytical premise of cultural wholes and instead shifted attention to people’s own attempts at erecting boundaries around their societies.
Boundary work was central for ‘symbolic anthropologists’ like Mary Douglas and Victor Turner as well. Douglas is most famous for her work on our human obsession with purity and the danger of it getting contaminated with ‘dirt’. (2015) People create order by classifying (OST), but, alas: no order is ever complete (a little meta-theoretical humour there). Funnily enough, whatever doesn’t ‘fit’ becomes extremely interesting and object of special attention and regulation. (Probably most famous is her re-reading of the dietary rules in Leviticus (a.k.a. Vayikra) in light of the order of God’s creation. Animals that didn’t fit the cosmic order as laid out in Genesis got the ban.)
Mary Douglas swinging that eternal swing up above (from the National Portrait Gallery)
For Victor Turner, whatever falls outside of the system is a (potential) source of creativity. Thus, his most famous contribution to the anthropological lexicon is “liminality”, which he used for a temporary ritual phase during which the ritual participants’ identities – and accompanying expectations – are dissolved. They are therefore forced to reconsider themselves afresh, and a philosophical space opens up. Mostly, participants are re-integrated into society in expected orderly fashion, but still: these liminal space-times do encourage creativity and imagination – and just maybe open up some space for change.
Helpful image from our friends over at AZ Quotes.
So let’s take the bait. What can borders, boundaries and margins show us about the symbolic importance of energy?
Hydroelectric sovereignty
Let’s start our exploration in Paraguay. Something like 80% of Paraguay’s electricity comes from two dams, one built on the border river with Argentina and the other – the biggest in the world by output – on the border river with Brazil. The dams were built (in the 80s) and are managed jointly with these countries. Now, Paraguay fought and traumatically lost against these nations in the 1860s and never really recovered. It was therefore not in a position to strike a favourable deal for itself about how to divvy up the rents and how to set the electricity rates.
The Itaipú dam, probably busy setting its world record of 103,098,366 megawatt hours (MWh).
Fast a few decades forward and that uneven balance becomes central to the electoral campaign for Fernando Lugo’s (ultimately short-lived) presidency in 2007. Lugo and his campaign claimed that the water that flowed through the turbines belonged to the Paraguayan nation, which meant that the wealth contained in that water should devolve back to the nation. Right now, it was being siphoned off to the neighbouring countries. A “fair price”, by contrast, would allow the country to set off on a course for real and rapid development.
Christine Folch (2015) tracked this moment of symbolic conversion “of nature and nation”:
Paraguay is neither an agricultural nor a poor nation, sayeth Lugo, but a hydroelectric and (potentially) wealthy nation!
Its nature (i.e., its water) is hydroelectric power.
As a consequence, politics is the task of reclaiming (and redistributing) this wealth. Its cause? Hydroelectric sovereignty: “the right of the national community to determine how the physics of the national territory ought to be used” (253).
The boundaries of the nation served as a catalyst here: because of the dams’ situation at the border with Brazil and Argentina (and the mutual coordination it implies), hydroelectric power has been susceptible to its redefinition as a matter of ‘sovereignty liable to violation’. It is a place, in other words, where energy becomes symbolically focused, and as a consequence, where political innovation was able to take place.
Redefinition can entail new energy politics. In this example, it was part of the ‘leftward turn’ in Latin-America. The call for self-determination was couched in an anti-imperial (and anti-authoritarian) discourse. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is something inherently ‘progressive’ about renewable energy though. Its defence can be easily tied to conservative politics, as it was when Lugo was ousted from office in 2012, and the leftward nations of Argentina and Brazil were recast as Paraguay’s enemies. Folch talks about this a little more in this great podcast series called “Cultures of Energy”. (Her point would also be my word of caution to the decentralized grid enthusiasts – their progressive aims can easily be perverted by regressive political-economic conditions.)
The value of wasteland
As Turner-inspired scholar Barbara Babcock (1975) observed, marginality is a curious thing. The edge may symbolically turn out to be in the centre. Jaume Franquesa (2018) researched precisely this dynamic in relation to a nuclear plant and a wind energy development project in Southern Catalonian. I’ll focus on the wind energy case here.
Generally, Franquesa’s interlocutors from a village called Fatarella viewed the wind farm as deeply problematic. You see, Fatarella is mostly agricultural, but the soil yields its crops only reticently. It takes hard work and is hard to live off. Those turbines and the cables that connect them to the grid would only further disrupt their agricultural activity. What is therefore acutely felt by people, is the implication that the land has lost the value that made it valuable for them. Instead, it has become a wasteland. Precisely as ‘otherwise wasted’ land, it has become attractive to the wind farm developers.
Fatarella (from its muncipal website)
Franquesa (building on the work of Vinay Gidwani) goes on to explain this double relation of value and waste. In one way, waste is the ‘dirt’, à la Douglas, of a capitalist system. The capitalist logic can only operate in terms of value. Waste is what has no value. However, waste can also be seen as ‘what has not been made use of’. In that sense, waste has a potential value, which can be realized with the proper redirection and redevelopment. That is the precisely the potential that the wind energy company saw in the ‘wasteland’ of southern Catalonia.
Fatarella’s land […] is attractive not only because of the untapped potential that traverses it (wind), but also because it has been conceived of as disposable and is therefore cheap. (205)
Its inhabitants clearly sensed their contamination by this wasteland – wasted spaces beget wasted lives.
To these landowners, wind energy companies devalued the labor accumulated in the land—a labor that has made the land and its inhabitants what they are. (216)
The Alta Terra ‘parc eolic’ near Fatarella
The companies did offer compensation money for the use of their land to plant turbines and to tunnel for cables. But compensation money cannot recreate the conditions for what they consider a dignified life: to be able to provide for one’s own needs and to participate in the village’s generalized exchange of farm labour and produce. Accepting compensation money, and thus basically abandoning one’s land, was therefore “far more damning than [the energy companies] treating Fatarella as a wasteland”. People giving up on the land and thus village sociality “suggested that perhaps it was a wasteland” (221).
In Grand Conclusion then
Franquesa’s research reveals the deeply meaningful resonances of losing one’s land and one’s way of life. This can become compounded with a loss of autonomy, when people feel they cannot participate properly in the decision-making process (as was the case here; see 201f.) Then it becomes insult upon injury. The ensuing resistance used to be dismissed as NIMBYism, but maybe we need to take such sense of loss more seriously still. Feelings of loss are endemic to the relentless churn of capitalist modernity, but perhaps there is also something specific to the contemporary moment of western modernity, after peak social democracy. That feeling that things are going to get worse is now being mobilized against climate action.
I think that development helps builds the case for putting our collective weight behind the Green New Deals: their conception of a sustainable future follows from linking clean energy to progressive goals like democratization and greater equality. They are putting the margins at the centre.
Interested in thinking about narratives that can help spur action in a way that is sensitive to the lived reality of climate change? Maybe you want to check out Eric Holthaus’ “Producing Dystopia” project at the recently launched “collaborative” journalism platform The Correspondent.
This was Issue #5 of the ongoing series of What Can We Learn from the History of Anthropology for Rapid and Fair Energy Transitions? I hope you’re all having a pleasant week. Till next time!
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Sources
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. 1975. ""A Tolerated Margin of Mess": The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered". Journal of the Folklore Institute. 11 (3): 147. https://doi.org/10.2307/3813932
Douglas, Mary. 2015 [1966]. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.
Folch, Christine. 2015. "The Cause of All Paraguayans? Defining and Defending Hydroelectric Sovereignty". Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. 20 (2): 242-263. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12147
If you liked this article, consider taking a look at this too:
Breglia, Lisa. 2016. “Energy Politics on the “Other” U.S.-Mexico Border”. In: Strauss, Sarah, Thomas F. Love, and Stephanie Rupp. Cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies. London: Routledge.
Much like Folch, she looks at the symbolic importance of an energy source – Gulf oil, in this case – for Mexico’s sense of sovereignty and (cultural) patrimony, also against a history of war with a particularly dominant neighbour. While Lugo’s innovation was to reclassify hydro-electrons as the nation’s property, in Mexico hydrocarbon is actually constitutionally protected as national property. So then the question becomes: with rapidly increasing drilling operations by the US in that same Gulf, how do we make sure this property doesn’t get siphoned off to the US? Do we turn over that national property to private companies willing and able to make the substantial necessary investments?
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles. Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Franquesa also has a nice complementary reading form that same edited volume:
Chapman, Chelsea. 2016. “Multinatural Resources: Ontologies of Energy and the Politics of Inevitability in Alaska”. In: Strauss, Sarah, Thomas F. Love, and Stephanie Rupp. Cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies. London: Routledge.
Cultural construction of the land is central to her analysis as well. In this case it comes from a face-off between Alaska Native tribal communities living in part on Native land, on the one hand, and attempts to swap a natural reserve for an oil field and to capitalize on woody biomass on the other. There is also a spectre of wasted resources here too – both oil and biomass presented as ‘trapped’ by energy companies. In contradistinction, tribal communities and their environmental allies present a view of nature as part of social life in and of “energy [a]s a manifestation of moral relations among animals, people and land”.
PS: If you do not have the appropriate credentials to cross the paywall to these articles, maybe you can check out https://sci-hub.tw (just copy paste in the doi number), or if you are uncomfortable with that, send me a message and I’ll lend you a copy. I can also provide you with a copy of the book chapters.