Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute最新文献

Household biogas is an off-grid energy technology that converts human, animal, and agricultural waste into fuel. This article analyses the emergence and use of household biogas technologies in Tanzania to theorize energy ethics in a postcolonial world. It engages Jane Bennett's theorization of the ‘energetics’ and aestheticization of ethics to ask how people assert and think through their own notions of good energy in postcolonial Africa. It documents two distinct registers people use to evaluate the ethics of biogas. The ‘circle of life’ register mobilizes popular environmental aesthetics of circle, cycle, and reuse as well as neoliberal and socialist political aesthetics of self-containment and self-reliance to enchant biogas with an ethical aura. The ‘excremental ambivalence’ register, alternately, disenchants biogas through referencing the polyvalent semiotics of shit and the sedimentation of racial and economic inequalities that condition the propagation of biogas. People engage both registers in the context of specific political economic and ecological conditions that also affect biogas uptake or refusal. The article thus argues that political economy, materiality, and aestheticization all play a role in people's ethical orientation to biogas and that ambivalence is a defining feature of energy transition in the Global South.

This article explores uncertainty as an onto-epistemological concept that reveals integrative capacities of Indigenous and scientific knowledge. Looking at official scientific approaches to climate change in Russia, it traces how Indigenous peoples in Siberia navigate their lives as they continue to witness anthropogenic causes of climatic degradation intertwined with forceful denial of Indigenous needs and sociopolitical turbulence. By focusing on two ethnographic accounts involving Indigenous Eveny and Nanai, the article explores how uncertainty, and in particular environmental uncertainty, can be dealt with, acted upon, and deployed productively while broadening our understandings of vulnerability, agency, and resilience. Drawing on discrete Indigenous strategies of hariok among Nanai and nyamnin among Eveny, the analysis reveals a pathway to think about adaptive potentialities of uncertainty as a mode of responding to rapidly shifting environmental and sociopolitical conditions.

In the public and private spaces of Malaysia's capitalist cities, Malay women abide by a stricter Islamic dress code than they do in rural areas. Hence, in this local context, spatial public/private and ‘placial’ rural/urban order are of importance for gender identifications and practices. These orders imply influences on gendered forms of embodiment in the form of dress codes. This research examines the sociocultural constitutions of space and place in Malaysia regarding their relatedness to one another. The central argument states (1) that public space in Muslim contexts is defined as a social space in which men and women who are eligible to marry (non-mahram) encounter each other; and (2) that these relations are perceived and practised differently in urban and rural public and private spaces. This implies that the public-private divide is based significantly on gendered kinship relations: that is, concepts of family.

In forest-fringe areas of India's Sundarbans, young men at the intersection of low caste and class become invested in electrical repair and maintenance work – as a gendering practice that enacts a specific logic of care. This work takes embodied knowledge (tongue), thoughtful improvisation (tape), and lifelong commitment (time) to fragile things and people in need. Tongue, tape, and time make the difference between good and bad care – between good, honourable men and men who do not or cannot care. In a place of changing aspirations but lasting deprivations, the costs of caring are expensive for men of limited means, and yet the costs of not caring cause the same men to suffer from unanticipated forms of gendered vulnerability. In this article, electrical workers’ caring masculinities are analysed in their political, economic, and moral dimensions to reveal ongoing tensions in the social constitution of (gendered) personhood: as care both obviates and causes ruination, these tensions must be constantly smoothed out for care to maintain its generative potential. Informed by fifteen months of fieldwork on an island of India's Sundarbans, the article seeks to trouble repair and maintenance work as care work – for care both does and undoes both men and things.

In the twenty-first century, blackouts have settled into a familiar sequence of events in the fully electrified world. After jolting publics into a sudden awareness of energy assemblages, they gradually disappear from public memory. This article is an exercise in dwelling on blackouts that have already begun to recede from public memory so as to better conceptualize ‘energy security’ as an object of anthropological critique. Examining expert reports and retrospective verbal accounts, I focus on the 2021 blackout of Texas and the 2015 nationwide blackout of Turkey. Drawing on my long-term ethnographic work with the US electric grid, I punctuate these failures with an uneventful day at a high-security operation building in New England. I show that the desire for security suffuses electricity assemblages, from secure buildings of operation, to governments securing passage for the electric current, to publics demanding uninterrupted electricity access. I argue that in grid experts’ imagination, energy futures hinge on securing high-risk nodes while continually expanding grids so that potential failures might be better absorbed. This imagination, however, produces a false sense of security when contemporary threats to transmission are too wide-ranging to isolate and will only be amplified by larger grids.