Energopolitics

"Dominic Boyer's Energopolitics is a deep immersion in the prosaics and practices of life in the Anthropocene and the prospect of transitions to low-carbon futures. Boyer exposes this transition in all of its messiness, its contradictions, and its potentialities. Contemporary aeolian politics on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec demands what Boyer calls the conceptual minima of capital, biopower, and energopower with the ethnographic maxima of contested history of land tenure, boss politics, and heterogeneous opposition movements; the phantasmatic status of state sovereignty, clientelist networks, and corporatist machinations of the Mexican political parties; a flailing petrostate confronting global climate change; and a vulnerable parastatal electricity utility. Find a chair, settle in, hold on tight, and enjoy." - Michael Watts, Class of 63 Professor, University of California, Berkeley

“Any serious discussion of politics in the Anthropocene must account for the relationship between energy and power. Dominic Boyer's rich ethnography of wind power development in southern Mexico does foundational work in precisely this, not only offering a fine-grained description of the complex and conflicted local politics of renewable energy transformation on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec but also articulating a new conceptual framework for making sense of power. Energopolitics is chastening, revelatory, and essential.” - Roy Scranton, author of We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change

"Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals." - L. L. Johnson, Choice

"Howe and Boyer look back on the past with fresh eyes. . . . Howe and Boyer’s project has many virtues. For one, it articulates the perils of corporate wind economies. For another, it positions Indigenous communities (like the Zapotec) not as outmoded objects for anthropological inquiry, but (á la Gayatri Spivak) as 'active [producers] of culture.' Most importantly, perhaps, is how Wind and Power in the Anthropocene documents alternatives to corporate wind ventures like Mareña. The book highlights, for example, community-based initiatives that also seek to harness the awesome power of istmeño wind—projects that promote communal welfare and environmental justice." - Stacey Balkan, Public Books

"The duograph is an interesting and novel way to approach collaborative writing, which I enjoyed engaging with. . . . Energopolitics elegantly brings together political theory and ethnography. - Anna G. Sveinsdóttir, Journal of Latin American Geography

“In Wind and Power in the Anthropocene, a two-volume ‘duograph,’ Cymene Howe, in Ecologics, and Dominic Boyer, in Energopolitics, explore the development of wind parks during the early twenty-first century on the isthmus of Tehuantepec…. One of the most refreshing components of their collaborative and individual writing is the clarity of their position as researchers in this project as they circulated among politicians, indigenous peoples, and corporate officials. It is a necessary exercise, as they argue, for appreciating the entrenchment of the wind in local political and social relations.”

“Boyer’s book seeks ways around human-centered notions of politics.... More important than his theoretical discussion is his contention that in order to understand aeolian politics in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, one must attend to situated, historical processes with which transitions to renewable energy become intimately entangled.” - Chakad Ojani, Anthropology Book Forum

“[Ecologics and Energopolitics] make strong arguments on political processes in the field of wind energy in Mexico...[and] are important contributions to an anthropology of energy, a still growing field within the discipline.”




  - Oliver D. Liebig, Anthropos