Energy and Cultures : Shifting Human-Nature Perspectives

This open access book situates itself in the growing scholarship on humanity’s shifting relationship with energy in the past, present and the possible future ingrained within cultures. Energy and Cultures presents a noteworthy contribution by elucidating a connection between energy dynamics, local cultures, and shifting human-nature relations, contextualising it within the Global South. The book identifies interstitial spaces and engages in dialogue between the domains of Energy and Environmental Humanities. Energy and Cultures centrally explores the way humans understand energy embedded within their culture, which is intricately connected to the way they perceive and form relations to their environment. It is recognising that climate change and the associated challenges of our high-carbon modern society are essentially a cultural phenomenon, and envisioning a shift to clean energy is situated within this framework. The book seeks out answers to the classical question in cultural studies of how may we imagine the idea of community in relation to energy sources, forms and systems? Or the other way of how do we understand energy in relation to the culture and community that surrounds it? A further line of inquiry follows, how can communal relations with the environment be unveiled through the existing and disappearing socio-cultural practices linked to the energy source? Energy has been a notable absence in cultural studies, and this work offers a space for unravelling layers within local cultural practices and systems.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a standard CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.