Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Dominic Boyer, and: Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Cymene Howe (review)

We live in troubling times. Our climate is changing rapidly. A sixth great extinction is well underway. We are approaching—or have already surpassed—countless critical ecological thresholds (if you still need convincing, see Steffen et al. 2015). Alongside other conscientious scholars, anthropologists are searching for constructive ways to contribute to an uncertain new world in which humans play a dominant (and largely destructive) role in influencing global climate, landforms, and ecosystems (Crutzen 2002). Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe are among those who have stepped up to chart an innovative and inspiring course. Their Wind and Power in the Anthropocene duograph revolves around a central paradox of the Anthropocene epoch. Arguing from distinct but complementary theoretical perspectives, Boyer and Howe examine how it is that something we hoped could solve our most pressing problems can fail to achieve any significant transformation. Specifically, these books are about how wind power—a renewable, non-carbon energy source—can reproduce the inequitable and unsustainable structures of the neoliberal extractive economy.

Boyer and Howe take readers to the towns and terrains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where they conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Here, air moving from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean passes through a gap in the Sierra Madre mountains, making southeastern Oaxaca the windiest place in Mexico as well as one of the windiest in the world. Identified by developers as an ideal location to harness the wind, “power” in this case refers not only to generated electricity, but also to the political struggles invoked by efforts to convert moving air into a commoditized resource. This conjoined pair of books invites readers to enter emerging conversations about wind power and extractivism, climate change and post-millennial precarity, natural resource developments and disputes, and anthropology’s potential roles in navigating the complex realities that await.

In their co-authored preface, Boyer and Howe tentatively define a duograph as a “conversation between researchers that materializes in two texts, which do not require analytic synthesis or consensus” (viii). By adopting an experimental ethnographic form that demands readers’ active engagement, the authors aim to reveal “the multiplicity of stakes and attentions existing within the practice of research collaboration” (viii). While Wind and Power in the Anthropocene draws on long-term participant-observation, hundreds of interviews, and a door-to-door survey conducted as a team, it thus consists of two separate books that are intended to be read in tandem.¹ Boyer and Howe worked together to obtain a comprehensive understanding of wind power in Oaxaca, taking the views and actions of multiple stakeholders throughout the region into account. However, the authors engage with separate theoretical frameworks and deploy different textual structures in their quest to advance their overlapping arguments.

Dominic Boyer’s book, Energopolitics, takes impetus from theories of capital, biopower, and energopower—a neologism he proposed and defined in an earlier review as “a genealogy of modern power that rethinks political power through the twin analytics of electricity and fuel” (2014:325)—with the goal of generating “an anthropological theory of political power for use in the Anthropocene” (xi). Boyer correctly maintains that making sense of contemporary contestations over wind power in Oaxaca requires tracing the region’s history of land tenure, labor, sovereignty, and colonial imposition. He takes up the challenge of reforming anthropolitics (an inevitably human-centered understanding of political practice) in a way that facilitates addressing the unique conditions and challenges evoked by the Anthropocene context (1). Thus, while his examination of energy inevitably expands into the environmental realm of the more-than-human, his central focus is deeply and explicitly political. Following a richly theoretical introduction, Boyer opts to show rather than tell, demonstrating what an anthropology of Anthropocene power can look like through a detailed ethnographic account that only occasionally...